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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Bellwether Coffee

Bellwether Debuts Small-Format, Countertop Electric Coffee Roaster for $15 Thousand

Today Bellwether Coffee announced its latest electric, ventless coffee roasting machine, The Bellwether Shop Roaster. The new roaster, which is the company’s third-generation electric roasting machine, will retail starting at $14,900, about one-quarter of the price of its second-generation roasting appliance.

According to the company, the Shop Roaster will be able to roast 3.3 pounds of coffee in about 15-20 minutes, meaning a throughput of up to 13 pounds of coffee per hour. As part of its new product lineup Bellwether will also offer a continuous roasting upgrade to the Shop Roaster for $5,000 extra ($19,900 for upgrade and the Shop Roaster). The continuous roasting upgrade will enable the auto-loading of green, unroasted beans into the coffee roaster, enabling up to 13 continuous roasts or 44 pounds of coffee before refilling the base with unroasted coffee beans.

We’ve been following Bellwether since the early days here at the Spoon when they were one of the early roasting infrastructure players pushing the industry towards electrification and decentralized roasting. While some of the bigger players in roasting, like Probat, have started to offer electric roasters, Whiel some players like Carbine have gone out of business, Bellwether continues to push the envelope on size and could attract even more coffee shops and retailers to experiment with roasting their own beans.

Bellwether Launches Cloud-Powered Small Batch Coffee Roasting-on-Demand

Bellwether, a maker of electric ventless coffee roasters for small-batch roasters and coffee shops, has launched a cloud-connected roasting service that enables coffee shops and retailers to roast coffee via a sharing economy model.

The new service – called Bellwether on Demand – allows anyone interested in roasting a batch of coffee to do so via its newly launched Bellwether Hubs. The Bellwether Hubs, the first of which is located at Bellwether’s headquarters in Berkeley, California, are software-controlled multi-roaster systems that enable anyone to roast a small-batch of coffee at scale.

From the release: “Each roaster in the Hub is controlled by a single interface that allows for flexibility to roast multiple SKUs at once, or fulfill large orders across multiple roasters simultaneously. The system’s software-powered precision can reproduce identical roasts on any roaster, giving retailers the ability to roast large volume orders with the freshness, quality and consistency of a small batch operation.”

This new offering from Bellwether is a natural evolution of the company’s small ventless roaster business that, as I wrote in 2019, moves “coffee roasting from the roastery into the coffee shop with their tech-powered coffee roasters.”

This new business takes the idea even further, adding a sharing-economy wrinkle to a platform already focused on democratizing coffee roasting beyond the big guys. In other words, the company is offering an easier on-ramp to wannabe roasters by offering coffee-roasting-as-a-service to smaller roasters who don’t have the resources to buy their own roaster or those who want to add their own custom-roasted coffee as a business but don’t see the need to invest in their own micro-roaster.

For now, the roasting service is only available through the company’s HQ-hosted Bellwether Hub, but Bellwether says it will soon be rolling out new hubs at customer locations across the country. For Bellwether customers with their own roaster, this offers them a new avenue to monetize their investment in a Bellwether through launching their own roast-on-demand services.

One such Bellwether customer is Daniel Levy, owner of Latitude Coffee.

“The additional revenue that comes from the Bellwether Network is very important to our business because it covers a lot of overhead expenses,” Levy said. “It covers the days that are a little bit slower. It covers the roaster, and it even covers the green beans we buy for ourselves. It’s a consistent revenue stream, and it also helps us be part of the larger Bellwether Community, so there is kind of a belonging to it.”

To use the Bellwether On-Demand service, roasters visit the website, and select their preferred coffee and roast level from the Bellwether Marketplace. From there, orders go directly to the nearest Bellwether Roaster Hub. Roasters can create and save custom profiles.

Bellwether Coffee Raises $40M Series B to Push Coffee Roasting to the Edge

Bellwether Coffee, which makes electric, ventless internet connected coffee roasting machines, today announced that it has closed a $40 million Series B round of funding. The round was led by DBL Partners and brothers Lyndon and Peter Rive, with additional participation from FusionX, Congruent Ventures, Coffee Bell, Tandem Capital, Spindrift Equities, XN Ventures, Balius Partners and Hardware Club. This brings the total amount of funding raised by Bellwether to $56 million.

As we’ve written before, Bellwether is basically a coffee roaster in a box. Because the machine is electric and ventless, just about any business can install one without needing to go through major physical retrofits to deal with the harmful gasses emitted during traditional coffee roasting. Bellwether’s internet connection means that users can download roast profiles from Bellwether’s cloud and re-create them on-site with precision.

The result of all this makes Bellwether emblematic of a broader trend we are seeing in food tech: pushing food production to the edge. Coffee production at the edge creates new possibilities for coffee sellers, coffee roasters and consumers.

For retailers, having their own roaster means stores like small cafés and supermarkets can create their own custom roast coffees specific to tastes in a particular region, opening up new lines of revenue. For independent roasters, a machine like the Bellwether allows them to expand geographically without having to ship coffee around the country or globe, which is expensive. Instead, smaller roasters can just upload their roast profile instructions to Bellwether’s cloud marketplace and make it available to anyone with a Bellwether. For consumers, on-site roasting means fresher coffee because it is roasted closer to the time of purchase and with less transit.

Nathan Gilliland, CEO of Bellwether, told me by phone yesterday that his company will soon have installed 100 units so far this year, and anticipates installing another 500 units next year. Gilliland said that 40 percent of his customers are independent cafes with one or two locations. Another 40 percent have multiple locations and may already do their own roasting, but use Bellwether to expand geographically. The remainder is a mix that includes a number of grocery stores roasting either their own brand or leveraging profiles from local roasters.

Bellwether generates revenue is a few different ways. It sells the roasting machine for $75,000 or leases it for $1,000 a month. Finally, Bellwether also sells green coffee beans from different farms for $3 – $5 per pound, though you don’t have to purchase them through Bellwether (though Gilliland said that 75 percent of Bellwether customers do).

Customers who do purchase a Bellwether are putting them on display in their stores, according to Gilliland. This theatricality and transparency echoes what we’ve heard elsewhere as food production goes to the edge. One of the reasons supermarkets are looking at Breadbot, which is a mini bread making factory — is that it can engage and delight shoppers.

Bellwether isn’t the only company in the coffee-roasting-on-the-edge space. Roastery, which debuted around the same time as Bellwether, also makes an electric ventless coffee roaster. Though at this point, Roastery has only raised an undisclosed round of seed funding.

Gilliland said Bellwether will use the new funds to scale up operations across sales and manufacturing to meet demand.

*An earlier version of this post stated that Bellwether had already installed 100 units this year, and that there was an additional subscription fee.