US Roaster competition
Early Thursday morning we hit the ground running with Joe Marrocco of Cafe Imports and helped prepare for the cupping at the US Roaster competition. The judges were a who's who of the specialty coffee world as were the competitors. When the dust settled the winner with an average Roaster Guild sheet score of 78.59 and 48 votes was Tony Querio at Spyhouse coffee. The competition was exciting, informative and a blast to participate in.
Info sessions, master class & customer feedback
Our info session and masterclass on Friday were full houses. We presented our new user interface, our completely new Roast Compare and Roast Intelligence. We love the opportunity to present. But, for us, the best part is the feedback from fresh eyes and experienced partners. These sessions are so valuable we brought our developers. We know that getting this kind of feedback directly to development results in an even better product.
New releases
Where to start? Our Cupping app continues to develop rapidly. The backend supports over 100 customized cupping sheets and we presented the newest one - a SCAA cupping sheet bringing the paper form so many of you are familiar with into the digital age. It was very well received and will be available before the end of May. We released a completely new Roast Compare Ver 3.0. We believe is an industry changer. For the first time, you can view across profiles and see roast success directly related to cup quality. This innovation will enable a new level of quality by putting inputs and outputs front and center across roastery businesses. The new Roast Intelligence gives you even more flexibility, expanded alert functions (first crack coming? it's in there!), speedy links across the Cropster platform for time critical functions and on the fly profile switching - which got cheers from some roasters. Both of these releases are already with beta testers. If you'd like to participate just let us know. If not, it won't be long. Full release will be in 2-3 weeks. The latest info on releases is always available via our newsletter which is available on our homepage.
Giesen partnership
On Saturday our partners at Giesen released the latest version of their new roast profiler and it is powered by Cropster. New Giesen roasters now include key components of our Roasting Intelligence software. As a fully connected solution these roasters can be integrated into the full suite of Cropster software in seconds. Also, if you have a Giesen roaster built after Jan 2014, you can get updated to this version and make your Geisen/Cropster setup even smarter and more efficient. Stay tuned, well have more information on this in future blogs.
Hub continues to expand
If you're a coffee buyer or seller you have probably visited https://hub.cropster.com already. But we include the link just in case. Hub is growing at an amazing pace. There are now over 30 sellers on Hub offering almost 300 top coffees from across the world. Hub development also continues daily, searching by flavor and sensorial information was a start, Hub now includes region and even warehouse specific searches to further enhance functionality and ease of use for buyers and sellers alike. Want more information about upcoming auctions,new sellers and new coffees? Head over to Hub now.
Making Cropster even more intuitive
Cropster delivers a lot of functionality and with every release there is even more under the hood. At some point knowing what you can do and how can become a challenge. We have hired a user interface team and based on the feedback we have had so far - people have noticed. Things like tours that present information when and where you need it and cleaner, more comprehensive, reporting have brought cheers - and this is only the start. We brought our UI gurus to SCAA so they could talk to people directly, see how they use Cropster and listen to their opinions and feedback. This investment is already paying off across the Cropster platform. If you have ideas, comments or questions that could make Cropster better for you - please let us know. Send us an email, give us a call or fill in a questionnaire. People have told us an easier and more accessible Cropster will help deliver an even better coffee - were committed to delivering it!
We'll be going into more details on many of these items over the coming weeks. In the meantime, we hope this has given everyone a taste of the excitement at SCAA. It was wonderful to see so many familiar faces and if we missed you - we're looking forward to seeing you next year at SCAA 2017!
