We delivered an AI production planner for a Charleston small-batch coffee roaster with 42 wholesale accounts and one 30-kilo machine — one that reads every standing order and green-bean lot, builds the week's roast schedule around freshness windows and machine time, and flags a bean shortage six weeks before it becomes an apology email

The owner of a small-batch roastery on upper King Street described his Sunday nights the same way three visits in a row: two hours at the kitchen table with a legal pad, trying to solve a puzzle with too many pieces — 42 wholesale accounts, each with standing orders and their own delivery days; a single 30-kilo roaster that can only do so many batches in a day; six origins of green coffee in the warehouse, each lot depleting at a different rate; and the physics of freshness, because a restaurant that gets week-old beans once starts returning your sales calls slower. He was good at the puzzle. He was also the only person who could solve it, which meant the roastery's production schedule lived in one man's head and one legal pad, and a single sick day had once cascaded into three shorted cafes and a lost account. We built him an AI production planner that solves the puzzle every week — and keeps solving it as the week changes. It reads the standing orders, the one-off spikes, and the delivery calendar, then builds the roast schedule backward from freshness: espresso blends roasted five to seven days before each cafe's delivery so they land at peak, single origins batched to minimize changeovers on the machine, the whole week fit inside the roaster's real daily capacity with room left for the retail bags. When a beach-season cafe doubled its order on a Tuesday, the planner reshuffled Wednesday and Thursday in seconds and showed him exactly what moved and why — no legal pad archaeology. The part that changed the business, though, was upstream: the planner watches green-bean burn rates against every lot in the warehouse and against import lead times, so it flagged that his Colombian lot would run out six weeks before it did — while there was still time to book a replacement at a good price, instead of discovering the empty pallet on a Monday and paying spot-market rates for whatever was in a Charleston warehouse. Ten weeks in: zero stockouts, wholesale waste from over-roasting down roughly a third, and the schedule now lives somewhere his head roaster can see it — which means the owner took his first full week off in four years and the roastery did not notice. His review: "The legal pad is now a grocery list." The 30-kilo machine is still the bottleneck. But for the first time, it is the only one.