Cafe Care Package - A New Tool Tackling Coffee Waste

Most of the conversation in specialty coffee sits at the two ends of the chain. There is the farm, the varietal, the processing, the roast curve. Then there is the cup, the grinder, the recipe, the water. The middle gets almost no attention, which is strange, because the middle is where a lot of small coffee businesses quietly bleed time and money.

That middle is wholesale ordering. A cafe texts their roaster on a Sunday night. The roaster reads it between shifts, retypes it into Xero, hopes they read the WhatsApp correctly, then does the same thing forty more times. It is unglamorous, invisible work and it happens every single week in every roastery in the country.

Cafe Care Package is a new Australian tool built to take that job off the table. We spoke to Lukas Martin, founder of Cafe Care Package about why he built it and what it changes.

What Cafe Care Package Actually Is

Cafe Care Package is two things under one roof, built by Lukas, who by his own account has "worked almost every job in coffee wholesale."

The first is a wholesale ordering system for roasters. Each wholesale cafe gets a single link. That link opens with the roaster's name and logo on it, the cafe taps what they need and the order lands in the roaster's Xero as a draft invoice. Nothing gets retyped. Pricing is listed as a flat fifty dollars a week.

The second is a set of free tools for cafes, starting with a surplus tool. A cafe lists the food it has left before close, sets a pickup window, shares one link and customers reserve it. The cafe keeps every cent. Zero commission, zero platform cut.

Two very different products, joined by one idea: the software should get out of the way and let the business keep its own customers.

Why Wholesale Ordering Is Still A Mess

If you have never sat on the roastery side of this, the scale of the problem is easy to miss.

A roaster with fifty wholesale accounts is fielding fifty separate ordering habits. Some cafes text. Some send an Instagram DM at 11pm. Some ring. Some send an email with no quantities on it. The roaster then becomes a translation layer, converting fifty inconsistent messages into fifty consistent invoices, usually by hand, usually before 6am.

Every one of those manual steps is a chance to get a number wrong. A wrong number is either a cafe running out of beans on a Saturday, or a roaster eating the cost of a bag they did not mean to send. Neither is dramatic on its own. Multiply it across a year and it is a real line on the P&L, plus hours of a small business owner's week spent on data entry rather than on roasting, cupping or building relationships.

Cafe Care Package has already been "proven on just under 200 cafes' worth of daily orders" before opening to other roasters. That is a meaningful thing to have behind you, because ordering systems do not fail on the demo, they fail on the messy Tuesday.

Will Cafes Actually Change How They Order?

The obvious question is whether any of this survives contact with real cafe owners. Software rarely fixes wholesale ordering on its own, because the problem usually starts with a voice note at 11pm on a Sunday.

We asked Lukas what running at that volume taught him about how cafes actually order. His answer surprised us. "People aren't as fussy as we think when it comes to changing platforms," he said. "There's no app and no login involved, and I've honestly not had one wholesaler tell me a customer wasn't happy to use our system."

Part of that comes down to how the link works. Rather than behaving like a website, Lukas says it "syncs to the tools on the customer's phone or computer." He is keeping the exact mechanics close to his chest ("I don't want to tell too many people how it works"), but he is confident in the result: "It works better than an app."

The real test is the least tech-savvy customer on the books, and that is where he sounds most sure of himself. "I've got roasters with some pretty dinosaur customers, and even they don't need tech support," he told us. "They just open their portal and everything is there for them."

Xero Drafts Are The Smart Part

Plenty of ordering platforms exist. What separates this one is that it does not try to replace the accounting you already do.

The setup reads your existing Xero: your products, your customers, your per-cafe pricing codes. You are not rebuilding a product catalogue in yet another system and you are not maintaining two versions of the same thing. When a cafe orders, it arrives as a draft invoice, which you review and approve just like any other.

That design choice matters more than it sounds. The reason roasters stay on text messages is not that texting is good, it is that migrating to a new platform usually means duplicating work before it saves any. Reading from Xero and writing back to Xero removes most of that switching cost. You keep your books where they are and you delete one manual step.

Payments stay wherever they already sit too, whether that is Pinch, Stripe or direct debit. Leave them there and Cafe Care Package takes no percentage at all.

The one exception is optional. Roasters who choose to take payments through Stripe inside Care Pack pay 0.35% per transaction, capped at $5. In return they can negotiate their own Stripe rates and manage their money in the same place they manage their orders. Lukas says roasters who have come on board, even those paying Stripe's standard rate, are "already saving a huge amount on fees and subscriptions."

The Commission Question, Which Is The Real Argument

Here is where the site gets pointed, and where we think it is right.

The pitch line on the wholesale page is: "What if we took money off you for processing orders, then took money off the money you gave us for holding your money? We won't."

That is a direct shot at the marketplace model and it deserves to land. Once a platform takes a cut of every order, its incentives quietly stop matching yours. It benefits from volume passing through it, from holding funds, from becoming the layer your customers think of as the supplier. The roaster becomes a listing. The cafe becomes an account on someone else's database.

Cafe Care Package explicitly rejects that: "This isn't a marketplace. Your cafes are never listed next to another roaster." On the cafe side the wording is the same: "It is not a marketplace and it does not sit between you and your customers."

When we asked Lukas how he landed on this model, he did not start with software. He started with the state of the cup.

"I think hospo is in a strange place right now," he said. Working in coffee, he is watching businesses respond to rising costs in one of two ways. They either "go cheap wherever they can and keep prices around the same point," or they "keep the quality up and charge for it."

"Because most people are doing number one, we are in the middle of a mediocrity crisis," he told us. When he looked at what else was squeezing wholesalers, the fees stood out. "I realised the fees aren't making sense. If I can save a roaster hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, I hope they feel more comfortable [keeping] coffee quality up when choosing green."

That is the line that stuck with us. Green coffee is the unroasted bean a roaster buys from importers and farms, and it is one of the biggest factors in how your coffee tastes. When margins shrink, it is also the easiest place to quietly trade down. A fee structure that leaves more money with the roaster is, indirectly, a fee structure that protects what ends up in your cup. In an industry where the relationship between a roaster and a cafe is the product, protecting that relationship and that margin is not a small feature. It is the whole point.

Cafe Care Pack as an Ordermentum Alternative

Ordermentum is the platform most Australian wholesalers already know and uses, At the time of writing this article Ordermentum's pricing is $200 a month for 15-150 customers plus a $399 setup fee. rising to $1,050 a month at 151 customers, with the company noting those figures are approximate and depend on usage, revenue and order volume. Cafe Care Package charges a flat fifty dollars a week no matter how many cafes you serve. At the entry level the two are close to line ball, roughly $217 a month against $200. The difference arrives as you scale, because the flat fee does not move when you sign your 151st account.

The bigger difference from pricing is that Ordermentum is a network, with venue discovery, payment processing and integrations across Xero, MYOB and NetSuite behind it. If being found by new venues is part of why you pay for software, that network is the product, Cafe Care Package neither offers it nor wants to. Care Pack is one link per cafe, no app, no login, no listing beside another roaster, reading and writing to the Xero you already use. So if you are paying to be discovered, Ordermentum is the established option with years of history behind it.
 If you already have the customers and you are paying to remove admin, a flat fee that does not grow with your business makes Cafe Care Package stands out as an Ordermentum alternative.

What A Roaster Does With The Time Back

Saving on fees is one half of it. The other half is time, and this is where Lukas gets practical.

We asked what a roaster's week looks like a month after moving off text messages and manual invoicing. "This frees up more time," he said. "Straight away you can either put that office human to work in a role that benefits the business more." His advice is to get creative with it: "I recommend having that person actually call customers and check in or upsell."

For smaller operations the benefit looks different. "For some roasters, this means saving on a salary," he said, "or being able to get out on the road and sell themselves if they are on a smaller scale at the moment and do the boring stuff themselves."

There is a second benefit hiding in the data. Because every order runs through one system, roasters can see patterns they would never spot across a phone full of messages. "Having access to analytics, like what people aren't buying, then using my system to prompt customers to try things they wouldn't usually order works better than I expected," Lukas said.

That matters more than it sounds. A cafe that only ever reorders the house blend is a cafe that never tries the new single origin. A well-timed nudge at the point of ordering is how a new coffee makes it onto a cafe's filter menu, and eventually into someone's morning.

Why This Helps Everyone Down The Chain

This is the part we care about most, because a wholesale ordering tool sounds like it only concerns two businesses. It concerns four groups.

The roaster gets hours back, fewer errors and more money left over after fees. That time goes into calling customers and selling, or into roasting better, cupping more and dialling in a cafe's espresso properly instead of sending a text saying "try going finer." The savings give them more room to buy better green.

The cafe owner gets an ordering process with no app and no login, a record of what they ordered and no platform sitting between them and their roaster. They also get pricing that is not inflated to cover someone's handling fee, because there is no handling fee to cover.

The barista on the floor gets the underrated win: the right coffee arriving on the right day. Most bad cups in a cafe are not caused by bad technique, they are caused by circumstance. Running out of the house blend and pulling the back-up bag. Getting a delivery three days late and serving coffee that is either too fresh or well past its window. Fewer ordering errors means fewer of those weeks.

The person drinking it gets the end result of all of the above, which is consistency, a bit more variety on the menu and, if Lukas is right about green buying, a better cup to begin with. Consistency is what turns a cafe into a regular habit. Nobody returns for a cafe that is great one week and unrecognisable the next.

And then there is the surplus tool, which pushes the chain one step further out. Food that would have been binned goes to someone at a discount, the cafe recovers cash on stock it had already paid for and the customer walking past at 4pm gets a reason to stop in. Zero commission means that recovered money stays in the till rather than being split with a platform. That is a different arrangement to most surplus apps operating in Australia, and it is a better one for the venue.

Why The Timing Matters

There is a reason this reads as more than a nice piece of software.

Australian cafes and restaurants closed at a rate of 12.03% in the twelve months to July 2026, almost double the 6.69% national average across all industries. One in eight venues that were trading a year ago are gone. As the site puts it, plainly: "Hospo is tight at the moment."

When margins are that thin, the answer is rarely one big move. It is a stack of small recovered costs: an hour of admin, a mis-picked order, a tray of food that gets sold instead of binned, a percentage that never leaves the business. Tools that remove friction without taking a cut are exactly the right shape for this moment. And if Lukas is right about the mediocrity crisis, those savings do not just help a business stay open. They give it room to keep making good coffee.

Where It's At, And Who Should Look

Being straight about it: this is early. The wholesale side is currently a waitlist while capacity opens, and the form asks for your roastery name, cafe count and current ordering method. Invoicing currently runs through Xero, so that is the thing to check before you sign up.

That is moving quickly, though. "I've actually had a lot of requests from roasters to integrate with other platforms wholesalers use often, so that's what I'm doing right now," Lukas told us. "We also have Shopify integration and Square on the way, meaning handling stock and managing the warehouse will be that much easier."

He is not treating the portal as finished either. "I'm still working as hard as I can to make this wholesale portal the most intuitive and easy to use platform on the market," he said.

If you are roasting and running wholesale accounts off text messages and manual invoicing, it is worth ten minutes of your time. If you run a cafe with food going in the bin at close, the surplus tool is free and costs you nothing to try.

We back tools built by people who have actually done the job. This one reads like it was built by someone who got sick of retyping orders at 5am, which is the best possible reason for a piece of software to exist.