The library coffee shop serves two coffee blends on a daily basis: Coastal Blonde and French Roast. Each is a blend of three high-quality coffees from Colombia, Kenya, and Indonesia. The coffee shop has 10 pounds of each of these coffees available to brew each day. Each pound of coffee produces sixteen 16-oz cups of coffee. The shop has enough brewing capacity to brew 1000 cups of these to coffee blends each day. Coastal Blonde is a blend of 20% Columbian, 35% Kenyan, and 45% Indonesian, while French Roast is a blend of 60% Colombian, 10% Kenyan, and 30% Indonesian. The shop sells at least one and a half times as many Coastal Blonde cups as French Roast each day. Coastal Blonde sells for $2.05 per cup and French Roast sells for $1.85 per cup. The manager wants to know what kind of business plan she should set up to maximize her sales.
Formulate this problem as a Linear Program in standard form.
Solve using Excel Solver and answer the following questions.
1. How many cups of Coastal Blonde and French Roast should the manager plan on selling?
2. How much revenue should she expect to make daily with this plan?
3. If someone offer her another pound of Colombian coffee each day, what is the most that she should pay for it? Why? What would be the effect on sales?
4. The manager is unable to sell fractions of a cup and doesn’t want have any coffee left over. If you employed an integer program instead of linear program would you expect the objective function to improve? Why?
5. If the shop could spend $20 per day on advertising that would increase the demand of Coastal Blonde to twice that of French Roast, should they?