How long coffee stays fresh after roasting

Roast dates exist because coffee is a food with a clock. It does not become unsafe. It becomes dull. Workplaces treat the bag like stationery, which is how a good roast turns into a brown smell in a tea room cupboard.

The useful window is shorter than the best-before on a supermarket shelf. We are not publishing a lab curve. We are telling you to order for the month you will drink, which is how the machine plan is built.

After roasting

Coffee changes in the days after it is roasted, then it fades. Darker roasts hide age better. Lighter roasts tell on you. Treat that as kitchen knowledge, not a specification Arico will certify for your bag.

Storing beans is airtight, room temperature, old bag finished first. The fridge is still the wrong place.

Ground coffee does not get the same window. Whole beans versus ground is the faster clock.

Best-before is not roast date

A best-before of next year tells you the bag is still food. It does not tell you when it was roasted. Supermarket beans are built for that label. Freshly roasted beans, the way Arico sells them, are built for the month you will drink them.

If there is no roast date, assume you cannot tell.

Opening everything at once

A roast date of yesterday is not a reason to dump five kilograms into the hopper. The usual workplace mistake is the opposite: opening every bag so "people can choose".

If two bags are in the cupboard, the older one goes in the hopper. Date the clip if the print is easy to miss.

What to order against the clock

A month of coffee, not a quarter. Kilograms as the unit, monthly as the rhythm. A twenty-person site at two cups a day is roughly 6 to 7 kilograms a month as a working example, using about 7 grams a cup as a planning dose.

We roast locally and deliver on that monthly rhythm, with extras from the shop that ship the next day. On the machine plan the drop and the hopper sit on the same calendar. That is how you stay inside a sensible window without thinking about the window.