If you run a coffee roastery, here's a question: Do you know exactly where everything is on your floor right now?
Not roughly. Not "somewhere near the back." Exactly.
If the answer is hesitant, you're not alone, and you're not without a solution.
This is the first in a five-part series on Lean Roasting, a way of bringing industrial workflows into your specialty coffee roastery. Each part covers one step of a system called 5S, borrowed from Lean Manufacturing and applied directly to your roastery floor. The five steps are Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain. They build on each other, and together they quietly transform how your operation runs.
We're starting with Sort > the foundation everything else depends on. By the end of this article, you'll understand why a roll of tape might be the best investment you make this year.
5S is a workplace organization system developed in Japanese car manufacturing. The five steps are designed to eliminate waste, reduce errors, and create environments where good work happens naturally rather than accidentally.
It sounds industrial. It is industrial. Industrial means efficient production. And that's exactly why it works in a roastery. You want an efficient production.
This is the core idea behind Lean Roasting: the roastery is a production floor. You have raw materials in your green coffee, a transformation process through roasting, color sorting, and packing, and a finished product that goes out the door. You have equipment, labor, timing, and quality standards. The same problems that slow down a factory floor slow down your roastery too:
wasted motion
misplaced items
time spent searching instead of producing
Lean Roasting takes the tools that solved those problems in large-scale manufacturing and puts them to work between your roaster and your packing station. We're just quieter about it in the coffee world. But the losses are just as real. Let's get lean.
The first step of 5S is Sort, and its core question is simple: does this item need to be here?
Walk your roastery floor and look at everything with fresh eyes. The empty burlap sacks piling up near behind the roaster. The spare parts left over from a repair a few weeks ago. The sample trays, loose samples, and random boxes with pitchers or T-shirts drifted into the roasting area because they had nowhere else to go.
Sort asks you to make a deliberate decision about every item in your workspace. Keep it, relocate it, or remove it entirely. Nothing stays by default.
In a roastery, a Sort pass might look like this: you create a clear, dedicated area for green coffee waiting to be roasted, separate from roasted coffee waiting to be packed. You remove empty bins and bags from the production floor to reduce visual noise and physical obstacles. You move anything non-essential; toolboxes, paperwork, personal items, that 26x 100g sample bags you ordered four years ago from an importer you never opened, out of the immediate roasting space so your team can move and think clearly.
The goal isn't minimalism for minimalist's sake. It's signal-to-noise ratio. When your floor only holds what belongs there, your team can read the space at a glance and act without hesitation. In a busy (and dangerous!!) production environment, that clarity is worth more than it sounds.
Here's where the math gets uncomfortable.
A disorganized roastery doesn't feel expensive. The losses are easy to dismiss — not hours of downtime, just seconds of friction. Thirty seconds spent looking for the right bin. Twenty seconds navigating around a pallet that migrated to the wrong spot. A minute of confusion at the start of a batch because the previous shift left the notebook somewhere else.
Thirty seconds of wasted motion per hour doesn't sound like much. But across an eight-hour shift, that's four minutes. Across a five-day week, twenty minutes. Over a full year, that's around 17 hours of lost labor per employee, paid time spent searching instead of producing.
At $25 per hour, that's $425 per employee, per year, quietly leaking out of your business. With a team of five, you're looking at over $2,100 annually — eliminated by tape, a marker, and a single focused afternoon. And let's be real, it's more than 30sec/hr for most of us.
You can reasonably point out that you can't pay someone for four fewer minutes a day. That's true. But the math isn't really about the paycheck... it's about what those recovered minutes make possible.
As your roastery grows, the compounding effect of small inefficiencies grows with it. Catching them early is dramatically cheaper than engineering them out later when everything is bigger, faster, and harder to change.
And if growth isn't your goal? Then consider this: those recovered hours go back to your team. Time for more careful quality work. Time for training. Time to actually drink some of the coffee with the colleagues you're roasting alongside.
A Sort isn't a deep clean. It's a decision-making session. Here's how to run one effectively.
Block out two to three hours when the floor is quiet, before a shift starts or at the end of the week. Walk every section of your roastery with a notepad and ask of every item: does this belong in this space, right now? Not someday. Not sometimes. Right now, on a normal production day.
Items that clearly belong stay. Items that belong somewhere else are moved immediately if possible, or flagged if the right location needs to be decided. Items with no clear purpose get removed from the floor entirely — set aside in a holding area for one week, then donated, discarded, or stored properly if no one needed them.
Be ruthless with the grey areas. The instinct is to keep things nearby "just in case." But that instinct is what created the clutter in the first place. If you haven't needed it in the last month of normal production, it doesn't belong on the floor.
Once the Sort is done, you'll likely be surprised by how much floor space you actually have — and how much clearer the space feels to work in.
Sort is the foundation. But the system doesn't stop here. Each step that follows builds directly on the one before it, which is why getting Sort right matters so much.
In Part 2, Set in Order, we'll take everything that belongs on your floor and consider its final position.
In Part 3, Shine, we'll look at why cleanliness in a roastery isn't just about appearances, it's an inspection system. A clean floor is a floor that hides nothing.
In Part 4, Standardize, we'll turn everything you've built into written systems and visual guides so your operation doesn't depend on any one person's memory or habits.
And in Part 5, Sustain, we'll tackle the hardest part: making it all stick. Because the best system in the world only works if your team holds the standard when things get busy.
You don't need a complex plan or outside help to begin. You need a morning, a roll of tape, some Post-its, a marker, and a willingness to make a few (ruthless) decisions about whether things belong.
Start with Sort. Walk the floor and ask of every item: Does this belong in our production space? If the answer isn't a clear yes, it goes.
A well-organized roastery isn't just easier and safer to work in; it's also more efficient. It's a roastery that's ready to scale, ready to train new staff quickly, and ready to catch problems before they become expensive ones. Lean Roasting starts on the floor, with the same tools and the same thinking that transformed car manufacturing — applied to the craft you've built.
Start with the tape. The rest follows.
At SOVDA, we work with roasters at every stage — from 10t/year garage roasteries to worldwide players like DAK, Coffee Collective, Onyx, and Black & White. If you're thinking about how to build more efficiency into your roastery, click here to reach out to us.
Next up: Part 2 — Set in Order.