Customer Success Story: Milka Coffee Roasters

Machine: San Franciscan SF-6
Capacity: 6 lbs
Weekly Volume: 70 lbs
Location: Sacramento, California, United States
Started: 2019

Milka Coffee Roasters is located in Downtown Sacramento, inside a classic two-story Victorian house that dates back to 1861. Photo Credit: Milka Coffee Roasters

Like many coffee roasters, his roasting journey began with roasting his own coffee in a popcorn popper. As his passion grew, he quickly transitioned to a small air roaster and fell deeper in love with roasting. After several years working as a barista and roaster at specialty coffee companies in New York, Samir returned to his hometown with a vision of opening his own coffee shop and roastery. He wanted to bring his vision to Sacramento by educating the community and creating a space for people to enjoy specialty coffee. Samir wanted to create a safe place where people would feel welcomed to connect and learn more about everything that goes into a cup of coffee. 

The Goal: Deliver consistent specialty coffee with the ideal roast profile and unique cup quality while sourcing responsibly.

With these big goals in mind, Samir had to solve many small business problems. Starting with finding a location, designing the space, hiring staff, navigating the local coffee culture, pricing, marketing their vision, payroll and much more. Additionally, he was doing it in a place where people were already familiar with great coffee. In order to stand out, he had to make sure his coffee tasted exceptional. Fortunately, he knew the tools he would need to deliver exceptional, consistent coffee.

Photo Credit: Milka Coffee Roasters

The Tool: Roasting Intelligence 

Samir was familiar with Cropster from CoRo, a collaborative coffee roasting facility in Berkeley, California. He recognized Cropster would improve productivity and streamline production in his new business. In his own words, “I was blown away by the look and feel of Roasting Intelligence. The automatic start and end detection is super nice to have and easy to use.”

After a quick review of our website and a phone call with our Sacramento office, Samir began with a free trial of Cropster and started using Roasting Intelligence on his San Franciscan SF-6. 

“It just makes my life easier. Every day when I turn Cropster on, it’s ready. I just pull up whatever profile I’m roasting and I have my reference curves already created.” Roasting Intelligence helps Samir capture and repeat successful roasts by helping him focus on consistency and highlighting what works and what can be improved.

“One of the coolest things with the reference curve is that it has made me realize how repeatable we can be and what we need to do on a day-to-day basis to get that consistency, especially when it comes to warming up the roaster.”

Along with using features like profiles and reference curves daily, Samir also takes advantage of the roast compare report, green inventory management and cupping to help him track and understand his coffee production. “I am constantly looking at Cropster’s calculations for when I’m running out of coffee. We’re always tracking the coffee super closely on a weekly basis. I cross-reference that with Cropster.”
 

Samir using RI 4 at the roastery. Photo Credit: Milka Coffee Roasters

The Result: Roasting Intelligence made it easier to roast consistent coffee, improve their quality and bring transparency to the customer.

Cropster also helps Milka achieve its vision by providing a platform that helps them roast great coffee and discuss coffee roasting with their customers. As they are roasting directly in their coffee shop location, it provides an opportunity for their customers to ask questions and learn more about origins, profile development and their vision.

It’s nice to have these metrics from Cropster, to continue to build on our data. Because we are such a new company, we don’t have a lot of data, noted Samir. He calls getting Cropster a no brainer adding, Cropster helps us with the most important part of our business, roasting coffee.”

Looking into the future, Samir is excited about growing his business this year and is hoping to start opening wholesale accounts. When that time comes, he knows he can trust Cropster. “We’re looking forward to your wholesale feature, Order to Roast. Honestly, just knowing that is available for our growth makes me feel more comfortable making a bigger push towards figuring out what we want to do this year.”

Photo Credit: Milka Coffee Roasters