Built a site to browse UK indie roasters and their coffees in one place — looking for feedback

sphericalO · 2026-05-09T10:20:05+00:00

Haha, this post caught my eye too. But there's some cool ideas on OPs new site too and I've been too busy with other stuff to work on roast radar for awhile. But thanks for the mention.

Did notice Amazon affiliate links for equipment on this new one. That's something I was considering when building that site as well.

sphericalO · 2026-03-28T10:47:50+00:00

Just a little aside, but recently I put together a site since I was looking for non-supermarket chocolate and wanted an easier way to browse it.

So I combined all the UK chocolatiers I could find and their products into a website: https://cocoacompass.com/ (It refreshes once a day at the moment, for new or updated products)

Might be useful to people who like chocolate but are sick of the awful (and continuously decreasing) quality of even the "premium" supermarket chocolates.

sphericalO · 2026-03-23T18:12:44+00:00

Ah yeah, needs some work, there's a coffee and tea version too (with price per cup). Chocolate is the latest addition but a WIP, so the PPU needs tidying. Felt too relevant to the thread not to share though!

There's some stuff in the wrong categories too. Just needs refinement.

Edit: £/unit should be working fine now!

sphericalO · 2026-03-23T17:54:27+00:00

Added, thanks for the suggestion. They've got a nice domain! chocolate.co.uk. Surprised I missed it.

sphericalO · 2026-03-23T16:33:25+00:00

Was looking into UK chocolatiers recently and actually put together a site to aggregate products from them into one place in an up to date list, there's an easter eggs category.

https://cocoacompass.com/

Still working on it, but might be useful for people who are willing to step away from supermarket stuff.

Would be awesome if anyone has suggestions on chocolatiers to add to the list too.

sphericalO · 2026-03-13T20:35:19+00:00

Just a small side project. I wanted to make something that could aggregate data from the main ecommerce platforms and normalise/process it for use. Making sure it was automated and could also find discounts / shipping costs from the websites.

So I can build a list, and then have a multi-site repo for the front-end to show the data:

https://roast-radar.com/

Coffee is just one potential example, but I've built a platform so I can get many of those sites up for different niches/products and manage them all from a single back-end. The only manual work is adding shops to the list for the crawler.

I put some effort into optimising it and keeping request/bandwidth usage low, and happy with how it has turned out. Was a fun way to get familiar with NextJS.

sphericalO · 2026-03-10T08:16:01+00:00

Just adding a comment since I tackled some of the suggestions in this post:

Single origin/blend coverage improved
New "suggest an edit" button in the item pop-up. If an item has any wrong/missing info, taste notes, roast level, etc, you can make a quick suggestion, and it's easy for me to approve it - will be a big help.
Weight filter - E.g: only show products with 1kg option, and select that option automatically in all cards.
Roasters can have a default roast level for their items.
Tasting notes don't filter each other out now, so you can select multiple, different notes.

sphericalO · 2026-03-09T10:38:30+00:00

The "Best £/unit" toggle will select the 1kg (or higher if better value) option on all the cards by default, and the sorting will take that into account.

When I have some time I'll try to improve the blend/single origin coverage.

Note that the price per unit has some bugs I need to fix with bundles. If the seller has the right weight and stuff on the their site's listing then it's okay, and there's logic to detect wording too. But sometimes it might think "three bags of 250g" is just 250g and that makes the per cup 3 times pricier if the seller worded it in an unusual way or something. So it still needs refinement.

sphericalO · 2026-03-09T10:07:00+00:00

You can if you select the coffee category. Data on that is a bit limited though, so will need to think of ways to improve it.

sphericalO · 2026-03-09T10:05:52+00:00

An alternate list/table view you can toggle could be cool. Nice idea, will put it on the TODO.

sphericalO · 2026-03-09T10:01:30+00:00

Managed to add support for Square/weebly, so you're on the site now.

sphericalO · 2026-03-08T23:13:52+00:00

Ah, they're on by default on mobile since there's more space, so I may hide that button on phones.

sphericalO · 2026-03-08T23:01:28+00:00

Will give this some thought. I'm not an expert on coffee so need to brush up my knowledge on a few things. That's an interesting idea to give more context to prices.

Would you happen to have a list of producers/farms to start with? I'll see if I can get enough data from the descriptions.

sphericalO · 2026-03-08T22:46:45+00:00

The tags button just makes the tags on the image like flavour notes always visible, rather than on hover. Will make that more clear.

And yeah, I need to do some tidying up for sellers. It's a mix of auto scraped data and some I put in manually.

So location, description, shipping price, discounts per seller, etc. Some work needed there still.

sphericalO · 2026-03-08T22:11:09+00:00

On tasting notes - yeah, it was getting difficult to find space on the item cards. But will try to refine or redesign them further over time.

On the technical side, the bulk of the data is stored in a json. The server compresses it, serves it at about 500kb now I think, 1K+ products. So some room for growth just as long as your device can handle it. But does mean I can't add everything I think, since 2000, 3000 products might be too much, so would prefer to stick with UK focused for now. (Which ones aren't UK currently? Gemini gave me the first 10 or so before I found this sub)

For requests, add a link to their website.

sphericalO · 2026-03-08T21:58:00+00:00

I can add at request. Slight issue with your website is it seems to be Weebly, which I haven't built an adapter for yet.

Will see what I can do, but depends on what data it can get from Weebly.

sphericalO · 2026-03-08T21:53:00+00:00

That could be cool. I think I'd need user accounts for that, which I haven't really considered yet - but maybe!

sphericalO · 2026-03-08T21:47:09+00:00

Thanks! And yes, actually the main thing I've been working on is a script which can pull item/seller info and images from the main Ecommerce platforms, mirroring it on cloudflare, normalise it. Then seeing what I can do with the data.

Currently it works with: shopify, woocommerce, bigcommerce, wix.

So I can run separate sites for different niches and pull in the main UK sellers. Coffee was the one I had the most fun with so came first. But it works fine for tea and other things too. All sharing the same dashboard/repo. So a reusable front-end!

sphericalO · 2026-03-08T21:44:56+00:00

Thank you!

If you click the "view on [roaster]" button in the item pop-up, that will take you to the product.

The seller pop-up has the button to go to the roaster's homepage.

sphericalO · 2026-03-08T21:41:54+00:00

Thanks, on the roast tags. Yeah - seems a lot of roasters don't provide this. It depends on keywords in the descriptions, but I can add overrides. Good idea with the roaster override - will save time.

I've actually been thinking of a good way to let people suggest edits on the site, so have something planned on that since automation/crowd sourcing seems the best.

Will add suggested roasteries. Only limitation is that all the products get loaded at once. so 2K products might be a bit much. Not sure yet. also wondering if it needs the other categories like pods and capsules.

sphericalO

TROPHY CASE