Loring Smart Roast

Loring Smart Roast, Inc. is an American manufacturer of commercial coffee roasting machines, based at 3200 Dutton Avenue, Suite 413, Santa Rosa, California.¹²³ It was founded by Mark Loring Ludwig, who ran a small coffee packaging business in Northern California, grew frustrated with the roasting equipment available to him, and spent about five years building something better.⁴²

The company sells one idea, and it is a good one: a single flame does two jobs at once. Loring’s machines use “a patented single gas burner system that provides heat for both roasting the coffee and incinerating smoke from the roast chamber.”⁵ That is the whole pitch, and it is marketed as the Flavor-Lock Roast Process.

Loring says its machines are in use in more than 60 countries, supported by a global team of certified technicians.⁴

Why one burner matters

A conventional roasting machine has two fires. One heats the air that roasts the coffee. The other lives in a separate box called an afterburner — a second chamber whose only purpose is to burn the smoke coming off the roast so it doesn’t leave the building as visible, smelly exhaust. Most cities require it. It doubles the gas bill and it heats nothing you can sell.

Loring’s design puts the smoke back through the same burner that is heating the roast air. The smoke gets destroyed, and the energy released doing so goes into roasting the next batch instead of up a stack.⁵¹ The company’s own summary of the effect is that its single-burner technology and integrated PID controls — the same kind of self-correcting temperature controller used in industrial ovens — “have set a new standard for fuel savings, roast consistency, and environmental responsibility.”²³

Three consequences follow, and they explain why the machine turns up where it does:

• No separate afterburner. One less piece of equipment to buy, vent, permit and maintain.
• Less gas per kilo. A customer testimonial on Loring’s own site puts it as “much cleaner and more efficient, using less gas while producing more.”¹
• A roastery you can put next to people. Smokeless, largely odourless operation is what lets a roaster sit inside a café, a mall or a residential block. Big Sur Coffee roasts on Loring machines in central Shanghai; Equator Coffees and Brandywine Coffee Roasters both build their sustainability and small-batch stories around the same design.

To verify — the energy-saving percentage

This wiki’s Equator Coffees note records the roaster saying Loring machines cut roasting energy by about 80%. No percentage of any kind appears on Loring’s own pages read for this note — the homepage, the technology page and two 2025–26 press releases all speak of “fuel savings” and “reduce CO₂” without a number.¹⁵²³ The direction is not in dispute; the size of the saving is a customer and marketing claim with no independent measurement traced here. Treat 80% as unverified.

To verify — "patented," but no patent found

Loring describes the burner system as patented on its own technology page and in its press boilerplate.⁵²³ No patent number, filing date or jurisdiction was located in any source consulted, and no patent registry was searched for this note. The word is the company’s own; the document behind it has not been read.

The machines

Loring names its roasters after birds of prey, sized by batch capacity:¹

	Model	Batch capacity	Where it sits
1	S7 Nighthawk	7 kg	Small production and filter-lot roasting
2	S15 Falcon	15 kg	Small-to-mid production; regional wholesale
3	S35 Kestrel	35 kg	Mid-size production roastery
4	S70 Peregrine	70 kg	The largest in the line

The pattern in specialty roasteries is often to run two: a big machine for the everyday espresso volume and a small one for single-origin filter lots. Big Sur Coffee runs an S35 for espresso and an S7 for filter; Brandywine Coffee Roasters works off a single 15-kilo Falcon.

Roast Architect, December 2025

On 10 December 2025 Loring released Roast Architect, a Windows application for designing and editing roast profiles away from the machine.³ A roast profile is the planned curve of temperature over time that a batch is supposed to follow; Roast Architect lets a roaster draw that curve point-by-point, set the charge temperature and the end-of-roast down to the second, then push the finished profile over the local network to any Loring roaster on it.³

It sells for a one-time licence of 399**, or **9 a month / $99 a year on subscription after a 14-day trial.³

The significance is smaller than the marketing but real: it moves profile design off the machine’s own touchscreen and onto a desk, which is how a multi-machine roastery keeps every roaster running the same recipe.

ColorTrack, April 2026

On 23 April 2026 Loring announced it had acquired the assets of Fresh Roast Systems, the Santa Clara company behind the ColorTrack line of roast-colour measurement instruments, and would relaunch the brand as ColorTrack by Loring, built at the Santa Rosa factory.² A prototype was shown at World of Coffee in San Diego; pricing and availability were to be announced in Q3 2026.²

Roast-colour measurement is the answer to a problem the Coffee roasting note lays out at length: nobody has defined “light,” “medium” or “dark.” A colour meter shines light at ground coffee and reads how much comes back, turning a marketing word into a number — the same job the Agtron scale does, on a different instrument. Buying ColorTrack puts that measurement inside the same system that controls the roast, which is what Loring’s president meant by “deeper insight and greater control over what’s happening inside their roaster.”²

To verify — how ColorTrack and Agtron numbers relate

Readings from different roast-colour instruments are not interchangeable, as this wiki’s Agtron scale note records. Nothing consulted here states how ColorTrack numbers map onto Agtron numbers, or whether they run in the same direction. Do not convert between them.

Leadership

Robert W. “Bob” Austin joined Loring as President and CEO in August 2012, announced in a company release that October.⁶ He was still signing off as President of Loring Smart Roast in the April 2026 ColorTrack announcement, making his a notably long tenure for the industry.²⁶ Scott Burchell is Director of Sales and Marketing and the named press contact on the company’s 2025 and 2026 releases.²³

To verify — other names attached to Loring

This wiki’s research report attributes to a business-contact database the claims that Abbie Walther was named president in 2021 and Vice President of Operations Services in 2023, and lists Dan Christ, Ed Barr and Judy Hertel as decision makers. None of these appear on any Loring page read here, the databases in question scrape and infer job titles rather than report them, and the 2021 “president” claim sits awkwardly against Robert Austin holding that title in both 2012 and 2026. Stated as an unverified database claim, not as company history.

When was it founded?

The sources do not agree, and two of the conflicting ones are Loring’s own.

	Year	Where it comes from
1	1998	Loring’s own About page: founded by Mark Loring Ludwig4
2	2008	Loring’s own 2012 CEO press release: “founded the company in 2008”6
3	2003	Business directories and the company’s LinkedIn profile, repeated across data-aggregator profiles7

To verify — the founding year is genuinely unsettled

A plausible reconciliation is that 1998 is when Ludwig started the work, the five years of development the About page describes lands the first working smokeless machine around 2003, and 2008 is an error or a reference to a later incorporation.⁴⁶⁷ That is a hypothesis, not a finding. No incorporation record, state filing or company history document was consulted. Do not state a founding year for Loring as fact; state the range and the disagreement.

What it is not

Worth saying plainly, because the name appears constantly on café menus and bag labels: Loring grows, buys, mills and sells no coffee. There is no Loring lot, no cupping score, no altitude, no processing method and no auction price attached to the name, and none should be attributed to it. It does not appear as a producer, exporter or buyer in Best of Panama or Cup of Excellence records. Like La Marzocco on the espresso side, its entire place in specialty coffee is as the machine other people’s coffee is made on.

To verify — the Japanese installed base

A Kyoto retailer’s blog states there are “about 50 machines installed in Japan.”⁸ This is a single roastery’s blog post, not a Loring figure, and no company statement of installed base in any market was found. Interesting if true — see Japan coffee market — but unverified.

To verify — company size

Third-party business databases give employee counts ranging from 11–50 to 51–200 and revenue estimates ranging from about 12.7 million to 25–75 million for the same private company.⁷ These are modelled estimates from scraped data, not filings, they contradict each other by a factor of five, and Loring publishes no figures of its own. No headcount or revenue number should be stated for Loring on this wiki.

Related

• Coffee roasting — what the machine is actually doing to the beans, and the roast-level vocabulary problem ColorTrack addresses
• Agtron scale — the other roast-colour instrument scale, and why readings between instruments don’t transfer
• La Marzocco — the equivalent equipment name on the espresso side of the bar
• Sample roasting — the small test roast that sits upstream of production roasting
• Big Sur Coffee · Brandywine Coffee Roasters · Equator Coffees — roasteries on this wiki that run Loring machines
• Carbon-negative coffee · Climate change and coffee — the sustainability argument the single-burner design is sold into
• Third wave coffee · Specialty coffee — the light-roast movement that made precise, repeatable roast control worth paying for
• Japan coffee market — a market where Loring adoption is claimed but unquantified
• Coffee trade shows — World of Coffee, where the ColorTrack prototype was shown

Official links

• Official site — Loring Smart Roast

Footnotes

1. Loring Smart Roast — homepage (official) — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Santa Rosa address, the S7 Nighthawk / S15 Falcon / S35 Kestrel / S70 Peregrine line-up with capacities, the single-burner description that roasts and incinerates smoke without an external afterburner, the “Reduce CO2” framing and the customer testimonial on gas use ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. Loring Smart Roast Acquires ColorTrack Product Line — press release, 23 April 2026 (official) — confirmed by reading the PDF; source of the Fresh Roast Systems acquisition, the ColorTrack by Loring relaunch, the World of Coffee San Diego prototype, the Q3 2026 pricing timeline, Robert Austin as President, Scott Burchell as Director of Sales and Marketing, and the patented single-burner and PID boilerplate ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

3. Loring Smart Roast, Inc. Releases Roast Architect Software — press release, 10 December 2025 (official) — confirmed by reading the PDF; source of the Roast Architect release date, the profile editing and LAN upload description, the 399 / 9 monthly / $99 annual pricing, and the Scott Burchell title ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

4. About — Loring Smart Roast (official) — confirmed via WebFetch; source of Mark Loring Ludwig, the coffee packaging business, the five years of development, the “world’s first machine capable of smokeless coffee roasting” claim, the 1998 founding year and the “more than 60 countries” figure ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Technology — Loring Smart Roast (official) — confirmed via WebFetch; sole source of the exact wording “a patented single gas burner system that provides heat for both roasting the coffee and incinerating smoke from the roast chamber” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. Loring Adds New CEO — press release, 24 October 2012 (official) — confirmed via WebFetch; source of Robert W. Austin joining as President and CEO in August 2012, the founder’s 30 years in food processing equipment, the “clean, green” design goal, and the conflicting 2008 founding year ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Loring Smart Roast — LinkedIn company profile — cited via this wiki’s research report alongside ZoomInfo, LeadIQ, ContactOut and Explorium profiles of the same company; not fetched here; collective source of the 2003 founding year, the privately-held classification and the conflicting employee and revenue estimates flagged above ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. What’s Loring Smart Roast and Why You Should Choose It — Kurasu — cited via this wiki’s research report; not fetched here; a Kyoto coffee retailer’s blog and the sole source of the “about 50 machines installed in Japan” figure ↩