[Video Transcript] Ask Timely: Is Your Coffee Roasted Fresh to Order?

[Video Transcript] Ask Timely: Is Your Coffee Roasted Fresh to Order?

Seb Prosser: Hello and welcome to this timely. My name is Seb. I'm one of the co-founders here. And this is a video series that we use to answer all of your questions, big or small, about coffee and about Timely and about how we approach different things at Timely and about the coffees that we're sending out to you as Timely coffee drinkers. So this is a question that comes from Matt and Joel. Matt and Joel ask, is your coffee roasted fresh to order? So there's a few ways to think about coffee freshness and about how our history approaches the ideas of coffee freshness, and also for us as consumers, how we value the idea of freshness as well. So to answer it in a little bit of a bit of a longer way. When we think about coffee freshness, we're kind of going back to the beginnings of what we really see now as the specialty coffee movement. And so this can go back, you know, ten, 15, 20 years of file, you want to go back. But really, it starts when coffee bars and cafes were serving coffee. That was sometimes up to a year or two years after roasting. So this meant that pretty much all the coffee that was being served was by definition well beyond the stable. And once, you know, cafes and coffee servers and also coffee consumers started to become more quality focused. One of the things I looked for was coffee, freshness, freshly roasted coffee. It was a way for people to differentiate that their coffee was of a better quality than maybe other coffees that were out there, because it meant that they were paying enough attention or close enough attention to what they were buying and selling, that it could say to the consumer, We really care about what we're doing. Seb Prosser: So that meant at the time, coffee freshness was maybe within, you know, 1 to 2 weeks, three weeks, four weeks. Every kind of cafe and server would have their kind of their own standard. And then we kind of come to what we are now is a specialty coffee kind of industry. And a lot of the time people want their coffee roaster essentially as fresh as possible. There is some people that think that once the coffee is roasted, you need to drink it within three days to really get the most out of that coffee. Or sometimes it's been in seven days or 14 days. There's no real hard and fast rule and everyone is going to have their own their own idea of freshness. So there's two things that are happening here. Firstly, it's that, you know, where we're kind of bringing this idea of freshness to a point where it's it's almost unsustainable for a coffee roasting business, but also unsustainable for you as a consumer and also for the industry at large. So what happens is that if we feel like we have to have our coffee roasted within seven days of sending it out, we roast all of our coffee, we send out as much as we can, and then we reach seven days and then we essentially have to throw that coffee in the bin.

Seb Prosser: So this means that our waste is really, really high and we have to really consider, why are we throwing out that coffee? Is it because, you know, there's really something wrong with the coffee? Is it because it's not good to serve or not good to consume? And really, it's just because of the standards that we as an industry put on ourselves. There's no one out there saying that seven day old coffee is better or worse than three day old coffee. And we believe here timely that once you drinking a coffee, that coffee is going to change pretty much every day as it ages anyway. So the coffee that you have, if it's been roasted three days ago, well, seven days ago is going to be completely different to the coffee once it's ten days and 15 days and 20 days. You know, we've drunk our coffee up to 60 days before. It's been really, really delicious and totally different. But the point is that when we demand freshness from coffee roasters, then what we're really asking for is higher waste. And also this idea that roasters keep pushing themselves towards coffee must be roasted the day that it sent out or coffee must be roasted to days. And it's totally unsustainable for us as a roastery to use the consumer because it puts this expectation out there that this is actually achievable. And also as an industry, it's just bad for everyone because it increases waste.

Seb Prosser: And you know, the idea that someone on the other side of the world is picking this coffee by hand and processing it with such care, and then it's arriving to us in the roastery and we're roasting it. And then three days later, we're deciding it's too old and just throwing it in the bin. It's just not fair to anyone. So timely. No, not everything is worse at all if we don't have enough to fulfill your order. Of course we work to do it. But if we have coffee, that is usually our rule is within ten days. If the coffee is roasted within ten days of your order, then we'll pack it and we'll send it. This means that maybe the copy you're receiving from us is maybe a little bit older than other oysters, and we believe that that's actually a good thing. So I hope that answers your question a little bit about kind of our approach to freshness and about kind of what you can expect as a consumer in the industry. But it just goes to show you that sometimes all these things that we assume to be true maybe just need a little bit more consideration when we're offering these things and other coffee professionals. So that's all we've got for us. Timely this week, but we'll have another video coming out very soon on the Turning Point, Ask Timely or the Weekly. So make sure you check in for any more updates and enjoy your coffee.

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