Blocked

When was this roasted?

ALS-COFFEE-1.3-FRESH-001

This question matters to a buyer and CANNOT be answered from a public product page today. What would be required is stated in full.

Why this cannot be run

Blocked by G-02.

Assertion

roast_date matches_format an unambiguous calendar date bound to the act of roasting

Applicability

applies when
the product is roasted coffee sold by mass
signal
product_type or title indicates coffee

Accepted evidence

  • product_description — an explicit calendar date bound on the page to roasting, in an unambiguous form e.g. Roasted on 2026-07-20.
  • structured_data — the same date inside the JSON-LD product description prose

Explicitly insufficient evidence

What does not count, and why. Published because the omission is where a check quietly becomes a claim.

  • a roast LEVEL such as "Roast: Medium"
    It contains the token roast next to a value and is the single most likely false positive for any automated check, because roast level is commonly exposed as an option or specification row while the date is not.
  • "freshly roasted", "roasted weekly", "small-batch roasted"
    Adjectives with no date, and unfalsifiable on the page.
  • "roast date printed on every bag"
    This is an assertion about the bag rather than a date, and it is exactly the shape that defeats a check looking for the token roast date.
  • a best-before, best-by or use-by date
    A durability estimate is not an age, and a long durability date coexisting with no roast date is the pattern buyers complain about.
  • a packed-on or packaged-on date
    Packing lags roasting, and lags it by policy in rested-then-packed and gas-flushed operations.
  • a harvest or crop year
    That is a green-coffee attribute unrelated to when the coffee was roasted.
  • a structured production-date or feed expiration field
    The nearest structured-data property is vehicle-oriented and has no food semantics, and the dominant feed specification's expiration attribute controls when a listing stops showing and defaults to thirty days after the last refresh, so mapping either to freshness is categorically wrong and wrong in the flattering direction.
  • a date visible only in a product photograph or a review image
    Image content is not page text, and product photography is frequently a stock image of a different size or an older bag.

Conflict rules

  • When a roast date and a best-before date both appear — then treat them as answers to different questions and record both; a durability date can never be back-calculated to a roast day precedence: product_description > structured_data
  • When a static metafield holds a roast date — then treat it as low-trust: a field set once at product creation asserts something untrue about every subsequent lot, which is worse than no field

Discrimination

Authored expectation: no prediction, confidence low. The numeric band this standard used to carry is not published at this grammar version.

The roast date is a lot attribute stamped at pack time while a product page is a product-level document, so its absence is structural rather than negligent and should be near-universal. The band is above target and the entry is published as blocked partly for that reason: the honest contribution here is refusing the near-misses rather than certifying the claim.

The numeric fail-rate band this reasoning was authored with is NOT carried at grammar 1.2 and is not reproduced here. Authored bands held 1 of 10 against this category's own sample and every miss was HIGH, so a direction derived from the band would inherit the error that condemned it (SCHEMA.md §9.3 step 3). The band survives in ALS-COFFEE v1.1 (standard_hash f8ec2780f60c38931913e5b6cd37506500c8462709209de7180ba6691d6137e7), which is byte-frozen and still served.

For a shopper

Specialty buyers look for a roast date because flavour changes over weeks, and consumer testing publications supply physical bag tests precisely because the date is so often absent. Note that the mainstream trade association points shoppers to the best-by date instead, so the trade does not agree with itself here.

For a merchant

Publish the roast date for the lot currently shipping, in an unambiguous format, in a field you update as stock rotates — and keep it distinct from the roast level, which is a different fact that shares the word.

Grounding

  • America's Test Kitchen (consumer_guide)
    that mainstream consumer guidance tells readers roasters only sometimes print a roasted-on date and supplies a physical bag test to infer roast age, which is evidence the datum is frequently absent
  • Perfect Daily Grind (trade_press)
    that roast date is a third-wave trade convention which the specialty trade press itself cautions against using as a sole quality signal — the source both grounds the demand and limits it
  • Specialty Coffee Association, coffee standards index (trade_body)
    the decisive negative: no published trade standard covers roasted-coffee retail labelling, roast-date declaration, shelf life or freshness, so citing the trade body for roast date is unsupported