Plate VII · section 18 of 19

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Black control panel of a roaster, with a touchscreen, red and green buttons and an emergency stop, above the cooling tray filled with beans. — The digital console of a drum roastercottonbro studio · Pexels License

The dominant fact of these last three years fits in one word: electrification.

The Daily Coffee News tally gives the measure of the movement: eight commercial electric machines launched in 2024 alone, from 1 to 15 kg.

The paper cites the Typhoon 10 kg, the Gemma Induction from 2 to 120 kg, the Coffee Crafters Valenta 3 and 15. Then the Diedrich DR3-E, the Bellwether Shop Roaster, the Aillio R2 and R2 Pro, the Roastino.

The list of names counts as much as the number. Diedrich heated its drums with gas, by infrared burners; the DR3-E takes the Idaho house to all-electric. In other words, electric has ceased to be the preserve of newcomers.

The capacities say whom these machines are for. Except the Gemma, none exceeds 15 kg, the upper limit of almost all electric. With no flame or gas connection, a machine can be installed where the coffee is sold. This is what the paper calls a “paradigm shift.”

A year does not make a trend. The next two each add their batch of announcements, and that is what separates a movement from a fad.

May 2025Stronghold releases the S8X, Ikawa the Pro50X
July 2025Giesen overhauls its ranges
April 2026Stronghold S2
May 2026Ikawa Go
August 2026Aillio showroom in El Salvador

Two things can be read in this sequence. The same houses come back from one year to the next, which looks like a range being maintained rather than a trial run. And Aillio's showroom opens in El Salvador, that is, in a producing country and not a consuming one.

Probat, which bought A.C. Horn and Royal Duyvis Wiener in 2024 then unified its brands in 2025, sells three electrics and is experimenting with hydrogen.

On the software side, Cropster and Artisan share profiling, and automatically tracked profiles descend to the shop and to the home. What was a craft becomes a setting you download.

How much does this market weigh? Here, caution.

Market research firms value it between 0.5 and 2.6 billion dollars. The gap comes from the perimeter, that is, from what each decides to call a roaster, and not from a disagreement on sales.

IMARC announces 516.5 million for 2025, with growth of 3.8% a year. The firm gives Europe and industrial as dominant, and hot air as the first segment. Market Research Future, for its part, announces 2.58 billion for 2024.

A gap of one to five authorizes no figure. Better to say so than to choose one.

What remains is what frames the trade, upstream and downstream. Upstream, the volume to roast: world consumption reaches 177 million bags in 2023/24 according to the ICO, 30% of it in Europe.

Downstream, regulation, and it is Europe again that sets it. The acrylamide regulation and the 2017 furan opinion frame roasting, because these two compounds are born of the very reactions that make aroma.

Smoke, for its part, is changing treatment: the electrostatic precipitator is gaining ground on the afterburner (STiR, August 2025). One captures the particles instead of burning them, and burning costs gas.

A blind spot remains, and it is considerable. Research always stops at the green bean. The 2026 review “From germplasm to cup” contains no section on roast profiles. And Vosloo was already calling in 2017 for real-time measurement of the roast degree: it still does not exist.

Daily Coffee News, 12/30/2024, 05/28/2025, 05/08/2025, 07/09/2025, 05/12/2026, 04/30/2026, 08/12/2026, 03/14/2024; Probat, history page 2024-2025; IMARC, Coffee roaster market (2025 edition); Market Research Future, Coffee roaster market (accessed 09/07/2026); ICO, Coffee market report, December 2024; STiR, 08/25/2025; Yang et al. 2026; Vosloo 2017, § 6.2, p. 134; Vosloo 2017, § 5.1.1, table 5.2, p. 106; Wilson 2014, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 135(6), p. EL265; Henry Schwartzberg, Roasting Chemistry and Profile Roasting, slideshow, Sweet Maria's Coffee Library, after Schenker, ETH thesis no. 13620, 2000; survey of plate 06

Gray areas

What the sources do not allow us to assert. We say so rather than filling the gap.

Ukers's dates for apparatus prior to 1700 (plates 1400-1500, pans 1500-1600, cylinder 1650) are reconstructions with no primary source cited; the mention of hull roasting around 1200-1300 in Ethiopia is backed by no document (Ukers 1922, ch. XXXIV, p. 615).
The hot-air patent attributed to Fullard in 1919 and Emmerich's “Kaffeeschnellröster” (1880 according to Probat's history page cited by the press, 1868 according to Perfect Daily Grind) could not be read in the original text; only Ukers's dates are retained as solid.
The date of Probat's purchase of Gothot, the founding dates of Officine Vittoria, Giesen (around 2007 according to sources not consultable here), Ikawa (around 2010) and Diedrich, as well as the year of the Bullet R1's first sale, have not been verified: websites inaccessible or silent on 09/07/2026.
The 1969 tangential Jupiter rests on a trade press article (Global Coffee Report, 2018); Probat's history page does not date it.
Schwartzberg's energy balance is a model calibrated on industrial measurements (250 kg and more); no published measurement was found for artisanal drums of 5 to 30 kg, nor for induction electrics. The savings claimed by Loring (80%), Bellwether (87%) and electrostatic precipitator vendors (30-50%) are manufacturers' figures with no public protocol.
Rao's DTR of 20-25% is an expert's observation on his own batches (2016), not a controlled study; no peer-reviewed publication links DTR or the shape of the RoR to the cup score.
Crack temperatures are probe temperatures, specific to each machine, each probe and each probe position: the plate retains about 200 °C for the first and about 225 °C for the second, medians of readings ranging from 175 to 207 °C and from 200 to 232 °C; Wikipedia gives 196 and 224 °C, Vosloo measures 175 to 181 °C and 200 °C on a Genio 6. No measurement of the actual temperature at the core of the bean during a commercial batch was found. In the laboratory, Schenker measured with a thermocouple the temperature at the center of the beans (ETH Zurich, 2000), and Wilson writes that first crack occurs around 200 °C inside the bean.
The size of the roaster market varies by up to a factor of five depending on the firms (IMARC, MRFR, Grand View); no public figure gives the number of artisanal roasters in France or in Europe in 2025.
The exact mechanisms of melanoidin formation and their sensory role remain poorly characterized (Perfect Daily Grind 2019; Hofmann 2001); research on non-volatiles lags behind that on volatiles (Yang 2026).

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