Masteroast, a UK-based private label coffee roaster and distributor, has partnered with BeanSync, a software platform built specifically for coffee wholesalers. Under the partnership, which began in March of this year, Masteroast are promoting BeanSync to its trade customers, the platform will connect to Isurus Fulfilment. The two businesses will run joint open days and workshops at Masteroast’s Peterborough site. Existing customers are being offered a three-month trial of the platform.

Masteroast has roasted and packed private label coffee in Peterborough since 1981, shipping around 5,000 tonnes a year to over 1,000 customers and undoubtedly the largest supplier to the Coffee Distributor market. BeanSync began with a problem its founder had watched from the inside. Harry McCrae grew up around Hessian Coffee, his father’s wholesale roasting business, where orders arrived by phone, text, email and WhatsApp before being re-entered by hand into the accounts system. Hessian looked for a platform designed for the way coffee wholesalers genuinely operate and found the market fragmented. Order management here, stock control there, accounting somewhere else again. Harry set out to build the one system that did it all.

Niall McCrae says “We spent a long time looking, and everything we found was built for someone else’s business. Generic order software doesn’t understand our industry, We were bolting tools together and filling the gaps with spreadsheets and memory. BeanSync was built by someone who had watched how a roastery actually runs, and it shows. Orders, stock, equipment, training and invoicing finally sit in one place, and the double entry has gone.”

Andy Fawkes, MD at Masteroast, commented “Like everyone, we are constantly chasing the operational benefits evolving IT has to offer. This is the first time we have seen something specifically tailored for the specialist industry we operate in by people that operate within it. Some real joined up thinking in a single system”

BeanSync brings wholesale ordering, customer portals, stock control, equipment servicing and your accounting into one system. Wholesale customers order through their own branded portal and orders flow into stock and invoicing without re-keying. Coffee machines out on site carry a QR sticker that a café can scan to reorder their usual products, report a fault, check the progress of an existing report, or watch training videos for that specific machine. Between them, the portal and the stickers are intended to take the inbound calls, the re-keying and the chasing out of a wholesaler’s day.