One of the biggest reasons why industry folks attend the annual Expo trade show is to preview the newest products being released. Some are so new that they’re prototypes; others are newly approved for US sales.
Among roasting equipment, the biggest trend, unsurprisingly, was about automation. Many manufacturers told me about pushing a button and letting it run, another described an AI-powered model, and others touted a small and lightweight size, often resting on a table. A few of them installed microphones on the inside for first-crack detection.
Here are some of the most exciting new releases for roasting equipment making waves at the 2025 SCA Expo in Houston.
Roest P3000
The winner of the 2025 Expo Best New Product award in the “Commercial Coffee Preparation and Serving Equipment” category is the Roest P3000. It’s clear the designers put a lot of effort into this new model, thinking far ahead of what to do with the hardware in the company’s first production roaster.
Tom Hopkinson, Customer Success Manager at Roest, explains that it’s “all about making the process as easy as possible, and we’re doing that by recording a huge amount of data and using that data to make the replication perfect and make the user’s life easy.” He says with five minutes of labor—weighing coffee and putting it in the hopper—you can roast 25kg in one hour.
With its 18 sensors, a bean camera, and a microphone, Roest has laid the hardware groundwork for future features to arrive via firmware updates. There will be a first-crack detection that utilizes an AI-powered model that identifies the sounds of cracks, Hopkinson tells me. And the bean camera will be used to analyze visual data like bean color, size, shape, defects—live while roasting. Finally, there are also plans to add an automatic feeder and afterburner, so there’s “complete autonomous micro-roasting.” He says, “The entire process, from green to ground to sitting in your bucket hands-free, you can queue up 10 roasts and then work on something else or just sit back and relax.
The Roest P3000 starts at $34,900 and has a waitlist of six to nine months.
Aillio Bullet R2 and R2 Pro
Building on the popularity of the Bullet R1 released nearly a decade ago, the Aillio Bullet R2 and Bullet R2Pro is the company’s answer to production roasting. “We have many roasters that actually buy this as their new sample roaster that is super consistent, and then they come back two, three months later and say, ‘Well, we didn’t realize we bought a two-in-one roaster,’” says Steffen Lav, Aillio’s Managing Director of Europe. “They can also do small-size batches for production of very expensive beans.”
The two models vary by price, capacity, induction power, power stage numbers, and cooling tray (Pro model only). What they do share is an all-electric, induction heating model with newly developed FlowSense—a dynamic system that measures airflow and automatically adjust’s the roaster’s fan RPM—and a magnetic control panel for easy access and cleaning. Being lightweight (about 30 lbs, lighter than my dog!) means that Aillio has home users roasting in the kitchen and cafes making some space on the counter for a talking point in consumer education.
The Bullet R2 is retailing for $3999 and the R2 Pro at $4999.
BeanGo Cube X
Another compact roaster on this list is the BeanGo Cube X, which features an infrared electric drum and patented auto-first crack detection. With the embedded microphone near the chamber, the roaster can filter through the noise to detect the first crack.
Accompanying the roaster is an app where you can visualize your data, share profiles, and automatically repeat past profiles. Like a few other roasters on this list, it’s built to be plug-and-play, low maintenance, and has a small capacity of 100-300g.
The BeanGo Cube X will be around $3200, with a Kickstarter funding campaign anticipated in the next two months.
Air-Motion Roasters
Aptly named, the Air-Motion Roaster combines convection with a drum to create “the best of both worlds.” Founder and inventor Julian Platt explains: “Our metal is not in direct contact with our heat source, so the metal is never hotter than the air. It’s more gentle on the beans. We don’t experience tipping and scorching and blotching and all that.” The all-electric model takes fresh air via three blower fans, pushes it through the bank of heating elements to heat up, and compresses it upward into the open roasting chamber.
The unique cyclone system sits above the chamber and takes in fumes, smoke, debris, and impurities created during the roasting process. In a traditional drum roaster, says Platt, dust is incinerated, and smoke is infused back into the beans. The Air-Motion Roaster, on the other hand, uses the cyclone system to “take the dust out of the beans, so we start with clean beans.” And with each step, the chaff, moisture, and smoke are also removed. The result, according to the company, is a cleaner taste with clarity to the origin and taste profile, with the added bonus of being low maintenance.
Three models are debuting in the US: 3 kg ($27,500), 6 kg ($37,500), and 12 kg ($44,500), with distribution handled by Coffee Equipment Pros in Austin, Texas.
Stronghold S8X
The World Coffee Roasting Championship in Houston during Expo was sponsored by Stronghold and its S9X production roasting equipment. “The features for our product are automation and roasting replication, and that’s been our bread and butter from small roasters to the biggest roasters,” says John Lee, Head of International Business at Stronghold. “Right now, we have a mid-sized roaster for people who want to start, but they don’t want to invest a lot of money into roasting equipment. This will be a perfect size for small businesses.”
Newly certified in the US, the S8X model is an all-electric model with a smaller capacity of 4.5 kg. Like the other X series roasters, it has a triple-heat system with three heat sources: convection, conduction, and radiation, allowing for even more precise control over the roasting process. The accompanying Roastware software now has an auto-replication feature for saved profiles, ensuring consistency across roasts.
Bunafr Smokeless Home Coffee Roaster
While the name implies that it’s for home users, the compact Bunafr roaster can also be used as a nano roaster or sample roaster. Batch sizes are 100 to 300 g, smokeless, fully automated, and uses a hybrid of conduction and convection heat. While there is the option for custom recipes in the app, there’s also a dial for roast level presets, making it an easy entry point for home roasting.
The feature that makes it unique to this list is that the company also sells small-batch green coffee—sourced by an in-house Q-grading team—in single bags or on a subscription basis. Every coffee has an accompanying QR code with a roast recipe, so you can truly push a button and roast. “You could roast while you’re toasting,” says Anjani Annumalla, founder and CEO of Bunafr. “Saturday morning, you’re toasting a bread—you could push a button, you roast coffee—and then you’ll enjoy the best coffee for the rest of the week.”
The Bunafr roaster retails for $1499 and has a waitlist.
Jenn Chen (@thejennchen) is an Editor At Large at Sprudge Media Network. Read more Jenn Chen on Sprudge.
