Bean-to-bar inventory platform
Sovereign Coffee — Rio Grande Valley, TX
A small-batch roaster ran three cafes, a bakery hub, and a syrup unit on spreadsheets and gut feel. We built a platform where every cup sold depletes the exact ingredients it used — real-time inventory truth across all locations.
The challenge
Where it started
Inventory drifted across every location. There was no ingredient-level visibility, purchasing was reactive, and the true cost of each drink was invisible — the numbers lived in scattered spreadsheets and the owners’ heads. Multiply that across three cafes and roughly a thousand transactions a day, and margin leaked everywhere.
The approach
How we built it
- 01
Cost the recipe
Every drink and bake is a bill of materials down to the gram. The recipe engine makes the real cost of each item visible for the first time.
- 02
Build the seam
One entry point for all sales — manual or register-fed. Each transaction runs a server-side atomic depletion, so stock updates the instant a cup is sold without race conditions.
- 03
Wire Square
Dual-mode payments: an in-app POS terminal takes cards directly, or an inbound webhook reads sales off external registers — whichever a cafe already runs.
- 04
Give owners command
A cross-cafe dashboard rolls up sales, low-stock alerts, and waste. Role-based access scopes each cafe to its team while HQ sees the whole operation.
The outcome
What changed
Inventory is now truth instead of a guess. Owners see cost per drink, get low-stock alerts before they run out, and purchase against real data rather than instinct — with every location reporting into one screen.
“We own the whole cup now — bean to bar. Nothing leaves the shelf without the system knowing exactly what it cost us.”
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