Fresh Roasted Coffee didn't inherit a conventional roasting operation and gradually modernize it. When owner and founder Andrew Oakes made the decision to scale the business, he approached the question of roasting infrastructure the way an engineer approaches a design brief: with a clear set of requirements and a willingness to reject any solution that did not meet all of them.
Oakes shopped the market carefully. His requirements were not complicated, but they were non-negotiable: the equipment had to support his goals for sustainability, reduce waste and make financial sense at scale. When he evaluated Loring Smart Roasters against those criteria, every box was checked. The company has run Lorings from the beginning of its scaled production life, and that decision has shaped everything that followed.
As Oakes put it directly: “Sustainability is a no-brainer. If it reduces my carbon emissions, and saves me money, it is a good investment.”
The problem with the drum
To understand why Loring was the right answer, it helps to understand what the long-accepted alternative looks like. Traditional coffee roasting relies on gas-powered drum roasters that require a separate afterburner to incinerate the smoke and chaff generated during each roast cycle. That afterburner runs on its own fuel supply, continuously, and it represents a significant and largely invisible operating cost layered on top of the roasting process itself.
The environmental math is equally sobering. According to published research, traditional coffee roasting accounts for 15% of coffee’s total emissions contribution and produces an average of 1.2 lbs of CO2 for every pound of coffee roasted. For Fresh Roasted Coffee, which roasted almost 3 million lbs of coffee last year, that calculus would produce roughly 1,764 US tons of CO2 annually if the company used conventional equipment. That is not a rounding error. That is a meaningful environmental liability, and it would show up on the energy bill too. Fresh Roasted Coffee does not use conventional equipment.
A closed loop changes the equation
Loring Smart Roasters are built around a patented single burner convection design that eliminates the external afterburner entirely. Rather than routing smoke to a separate incineration system with its own fuel demands and maintenance requirements, the Loring recirculates heat from within the machine itself. Smoke generated during roasting is incinerated inline, using the same thermal energy already present in the system. One flame. One closed loop. No afterburner.
The efficiency gains are substantial and documented. Loring reports up to 80% fuel savings and a corresponding reduction in greenhouse gases per roast compared to conventional drum roasters. Fresh Roasted Coffee’s fleet runs on natural gas, and the closed loop design means that gas is doing far more work per unit consumed than it would in a traditional setup. The recirculated heat system also significantly reduces the impact of ambient temperature, a variable that conventional operations simply absorb as a cost of business. Because a Loring draws on its own thermal reservoir rather than the surrounding air, it reaches target roasting temperature faster and with less energy even on the coldest production days. In colder months, the company puts that recirculated heat to further use, directing it to reduce the facility’s heating load. Efficiency without waste, at every level.
Fresh roasted coffee
Fresh Roasted Coffee’s current fleet consists of three Loring Peregrines, one Loring Kestrel, and one Loring Nighthawk, all housed in the company’s 84,000 square foot facility in Sunbury, Pennsylvania. Together they are capable of handling the volume the company now operates at, which approached 3 million lbs of roasted coffee in the past year. Loring’s machines have been permitted under some of the most rigorous air quality standards in the world, a compliance credential that matters as regulatory expectations around food and beverage manufacturing continue to tighten.
Powered by the sun, grounded in accountability
The Loring fleet is one pillar of Fresh Roasted Coffee’s environmental strategy. The second sits on the roof of the Sunbury facility: 1,300 solar panels representing a 753 kilowatt system designed to generate enough electricity to meet and exceed the facility’s entire operational needs. The system is grid tied. Pennsylvania’s winters do not deliver sufficient sunshine to run a 30-plus piece production facility entirely off stored solar, and Oakes is straightforward about that reality. The grid connection provides reliable backup during low-generation months. In summer, the array generates a surplus, and that surplus feeds back. The company publishes monthly sustainability reports that detail the CO2 avoided through both the solar array and the Loring roasting technology, giving customers and partners transparent, verifiable data on the company’s environmental performance rather than marketing claims.
The two systems work in concert. Solar reduces the emissions footprint of powering the facility. Loring reduces the emissions footprint of the roasting process itself. Together, they represent a material reduction in the carbon cost of every pound of coffee that leaves the building.
Consistency at scale: From the lab to the floor
Environmental performance addresses one half of the scaling challenge. The other is what happens to product quality when you move from a single experienced operator to a fleet of roasters running across multiple shifts.
Fresh Roasted Coffee runs three production shifts five days a week, plus a single 12-hour shift on both Saturday and Sunday. The roasters operate almost continuously during those windows. At that volume and pace, product consistency cannot be left to individual operator judgment. It has to be engineered in.
That engineering starts in the lab. The company’s Roastmaster develops every roast profile on a small Loring in a dedicated lab environment. That is where the craft happens: the tasting, the iteration, the fine tuning of temperature curves and timing. When a profile finally meets the standard, it is right down to the second.
From there, the perfected profile is uploaded to the full production fleet. Once a profile is uploaded, the operators run production roasts to that curve on any machine in the fleet. Every roaster receives the same instruction. Every roast follows the same line.
The business case for this approach compounds quickly. Roast to roast and lot to lot consistency means customers receive the same cup regardless of when their order was roasted or which machine handled it. That reliability builds the kind of trust that keeps customers coming back, and it is not something that can be claimed without the infrastructure to back it up. Reduced operator dependence also means that variability-driven waste, the off-spec batches that result from human error in a manual roasting process, drops sharply. When the profile is the constant, waste becomes the exception rather than an expected cost of production.
Setting a new standard
Fresh Roasted Coffee does not describe its sustainability program as a response to industry expectations. The framing Oakes uses is more ambitious than that: the company is not trying to achieve an industry standard. It is trying to set one, in sustainability, in transparency and in demonstrating that scalability and environmental accountability can grow together rather than trade off against each other.
That ambition shows up in the monthly sustainability reports, in the decision to invest in Loring from day one rather than treating clean technology as a future upgrade, in the solar array that now generates surplus electricity, and in the operational infrastructure that makes consistent, traceable, verifiable quality possible at nearly 3 million lbs a year. “I would want to inspire the coffee industry, and others in the food and beverage industry, to strive to offer the best products, at the best prices, while leaving as small a footprint as possible. It just takes commitment," Oakes said.
Oakes has articulated the broader vision clearly. He wants to inspire other roasters, and other food and beverage manufacturers, to stop treating sustainability as a cost center or a marketing exercise and to recognize it for what it actually is: a design problem with a real solution, and one that pays for itself over time.
The specialty coffee industry is at a point where that conversation is happening across the sector. The companies that will define the next decade of production are not choosing between craft and scale, or between quality and environmental accountability. They are the ones who have recognized that the right infrastructure, chosen deliberately and early, removes that choice entirely. Fresh Roasted Coffee made that choice at the starting line. The results are in the cup, on the roof, and in the monthly reports.