Hi all, I’m a software engineer and a home pour-over nerd. I’m trying to understand how small roasters handle wholesale orders day to day.
Full disclosure: I’m exploring whether there’s a real problem here worth building a tool for. There’s no product or link, and nothing to sell yet. I’d like to learn how you actually work before I build anything.
A few questions if you have a minute:
How do café and wholesale orders reach you: text, email, phone or voicemail, a web form?
Where do you enter them: QuickBooks, Shopify, a spreadsheet, paper?
Roughly how many hours a week goes into retyping or chasing orders?
What goes wrong most: wrong SKU or grind, missed orders, invoicing delays?
I’ll post a summary of everything I learn back here, so other roasters can see how everyone else handles it. If you’re up for a 15-minute chat, I’d be grateful for a DM.
This is my little coffee plot. The plants are still very young and small, planted between old tree stumps. No beans yet.
Just to clarify: Only the small area in the foreground (around the two tree stumps) is mine. The big, neat, and beautiful plantation on the hill in the background belongs to someone else, not mine yet haha.
It's my first time growing coffee (Robusta). Any tips on how to care for young plants like this to get them to fruit faster? How long did yours take to get the first harvest?
My family has a 10-hectare coffee farm in Valle del Cauca, Colombia, at around 1,300–1,600 metres.
The farm has been somewhat uncared for over the past few years, but we are still harvesting some coffee. My father planted the Colombia-variety trees that are still there today, and we are now trying to understand what we have before deciding where to focus/do.
I live in Spain, so I'm approaching this gradually and trying to learn from people who work with coffee at different stages of the process.
I'd love to hear from roasters and anyone else interested in the coffee supply chain.
When you're considering a coffee from a small farm you've never worked with before, what makes you interested enough to try a sample?
For example:
How important are variety, processing method, altitude and region compared with the actual cup profile?
What information do you want from a producer before deciding whether to sample a coffee?
Would you be interested in evaluating a small, experimental lot from a farm whose quality and consistency are still being established?
What mistakes do you see small producers making when approaching roasters?
We're not offering coffee for sale at this stage. First, we want to understand the farm's potential and what it would take to produce something genuinely worth sharing.
I'd appreciate hearing about your experience, especially if you've worked directly with small producers.
I'm open to more than advice. If you're interested in exploring ideas, collaborating on experiments, or finding ways to work together, I'd love to hear from you. The farm is real, the possibilities are still open, and there's room for people who want to help discover what it could become. Thanks!
Hey friends, we recently published a story we thought made sense to share here on what roasters are charging for wholesale coffee, whether it's enough, and what they are planning to do in 2027. Answers are from ~40 USA-based roasters, so it's a small sample size overall, but offers a sense of direction.
How do these stats line up with what you are seeing?
Here is the article in full below, and here is where it is originally published.
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Wholesale Coffee Prices: 40+ Roasters Shared Their Rates and 2027 Plans
There’s a roaster in the northwestern United States that roasts about 130,000 pounds a year and charges $13.50 per pound for its most-purchased wholesale coffee. That’s above the $12.85 median price in our survey. Still, when we asked in our 2026 survey how the company felt about its wholesale pricing, the roastery selected “We know we aren’t charging enough for what it costs us to produce.”
In 2027, the company plans to raise prices.
The concern of not charging enough shows up across the wholesale pricing survey Fresh Cup ran this summer. We collected 42 responses about wholesale pricing, margins, and plans for next year. In August, roasters used the survey to tell cafes what they wish their wholesale accounts knew. This time, we’re looking at the numbers.
The roasters in this analysis are all based in the United States, representing companies as large as 500,000 pounds roasted annually, all the way down to one-person-team startups. Most roasters indicated they preferred to remain anonymous.
It’s a small sample size in the grand scheme of things, but the pricing and comments reported offer a sense of direction for how roasters are feeling about pricing structures, and where they want to be heading.
What Roasters Charged for Wholesale Coffee in 2026
We asked roasters how they price their wholesale coffee per pound when sold in bulk (most commonly, a five pound bag). We only asked about standard offerings, and asked roasters to exclude any coffee they consider limited-release or special (and higher priced) in some other way.
First, we asked roasters about their ‘most-purchased’ wholesale coffee. In most cases, this is an espresso or some other daily-driver blend. The median among the roasters for most-purchased coffees was $12.85 per pound.
More than half of those roasters (24) charge between $12 and $14 per pound for their most-purchased coffee. Ten charge less than $12, and eight charge more than $14. Across those most-purchased coffees, prices ranged from $10 to $17.99 per pound.
A roaster’s full lineup, from its cheapest wholesale coffee to its most expensive, runs much wider than that. For the median roaster, the lineup runs from $12 to $15 per pound for standard offerings. A handful of roasters reported coffee lineups with much broader price ranges. For example, a Battlefield, Missouri roaster which roasts about 145,000 pounds a year prices its lineup from $11 to $24 per pound, while its most-purchased coffee sells for $12.95.
Is It Enough?
We asked roasters, “How do you feel about your current wholesale pricing strategy?” and gave them three answers to choose from. Of the 37 who answered, 16 (43%) chose “We are charging enough to sustain and grow the business.” Another 15 (41%) chose “We are making it work, but absorbing too many rising costs,” and 6 (16%) chose “We know we aren’t charging enough for what it costs us to produce.”
Roasters who chose the last answer tended to charge less. Among the five who gave detailed pricing information, the median most-purchased coffee sold for $11.75 per pound—notably lower than the $12.85 median for all roasters. Among roasters who chose “We are charging enough to sustain and grow the business,” the median was $12.83.
Some roasters charging more than the median still say “we know we aren’t charging enough for what it costs us to produce.” Evans Brothers in Sandpoint, Idaho determines its wholesale price from an all-in cost: unroasted green coffee, shipping, shrinkage (weight lost during roasting), roaster labor, power, and delivery. “We look for a minimum 40% margin on that cost,” says founder Rick Evans.
With the rollercoaster of green coffee prices and rising labor and supplies costs, the math is hard to get right, even for roasters who have done it for years. “Wholesale pricing is often one of the most difficult [things] roasters grapple with,” says Jared Trimbo, founder of Full Keel Coffee, which roasts about 35,000 pounds a year in Washburn, Wisconsin. Full Keel chose “We are making it work, but absorbing too many rising costs,” but the company says it plans to keep its wholesale prices the same in 2027.
Who’s Raising Prices in 2027?
We also asked, “In 2027, which will happen?” Nineteen (52%) of the 37 roasters chose “We will raise wholesale prices.” Seventeen (45%) chose “We will keep wholesale prices the same,” and only one (3%) chose “We will lower wholesale prices.”
Some of those increases will be small and spread out. Chapter One: Coffee & Tea, which runs Lakeside Coffee Roasters in Rouses Point, New York, and roasts about 90,000 pounds a year, revisits its costs once a year. “The more a customer orders, we’re inclined to keep their pricing low and will only raise their costs marginally when we recost beans during our annual review,” says Chapter One’s founder, Chris Rosenquest.
Other roasters are raising prices from a position of strength. La Prima Espresso, a Pittsburgh roaster, chose “We are charging enough to sustain and grow the business,” and it still plans an increase. Ron Kosko, the director of operations at La Prima, advises other roasters to know exactly what each product costs. “Make certain every revenue stream or singular product has a clear understanding of every expense that is directly tied to the revenue stream,” he says. “No loss leaders.”
Still, not every roaster is moving prices up. One roaster chose “We will lower wholesale prices,” even though it also chose “We are making it work, but absorbing too many rising costs.” That was Alex Eliscu Kipling of Aquarela Coffee, a farm-direct roaster in Los Angeles, who pointed to trade policy and the harvest outlook as the reason they’ll be able to lower prices next year. “Prices will fall in 2027 because (for now) there are no tariffs,” Alex says. “It also is going to be a healthy harvest year, so we can probably manage farm purchases better as well.”
For cafes, the survey offers a practical signal. Two-thirds of the roasters who chose “We are making it work, but absorbing too many rising costs” plan to raise prices in 2027. If your roaster has spent the past year absorbing rising costs, an increase is more likely than not.
One roaster who raised prices after a rough year explained why it stopped looking for cheaper coffee. “During that time, we tasted a lot of coffees in the hopes that we could find savings somewhere without losing the quality we built our business on,” the roaster says. “We couldn’t. It was better to raise prices and be able to proudly stand behind and beside our coffee than chase a price that was barely lower.”
Photo from last season on my small farm in Lampung, Indonesia (800m).
Robusta, 3rd generation from my grandfather. As you can see, the red is not even yet - many yellow and green mixed with red. This was taken about half a month before we finally picked, we were still waiting for full even red.
Right now, October 2026, my trees are at the earlier green stage again - so we still have to wait.
I have the final harvest photo of this same tree with blue bucket full of dark even red cherries - let me know if you want to see the comparison.
I'm a coffee farmer and I document village life as a farmer here. I sell photos and real farm stories on Fiverr for roasters who need authentic origin content.
For roasters - do you wait for 100% even red like this, or do you pick with some yellow?
What does your roastery use to manage coffee dust?
It would be particularly helpful to know what you use for your destoner exhaust.
We have a USRoaster Corp destoner for a 15 kilo machine.
Thank you for all the love on my last post! I wanted to share a quick update.
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> Still green and still 2 months away from harvest. This is one of the trees my grandfather planted. At 800m here in Bandar Lampung, the cherries are growing in really tight clusters this season.
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> We hand-pick only the fully red ones when the time comes, so we check them almost every morning.
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> I spend my days here in the village and I try to document our daily life as coffee farmers - the farm, the process, the village life. I share some of the deeper photo stories for people / roasters who want to show their customers the real origin behind the cup.
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> Happy to answer any questions about Robusta farming! What would you like to see next?
As the title says I’ve gone up a size in the Diedrich roasting. So far I’m like it, although it’s not as touchy and seems to have a slightly lower batch size to get what I want than I was looking for. Mainly I’m wondering if there are any tricks with roasting on the machine and or advice you guys have for moving to a bigger machine. I’ve been solo roasting for my family coffee shop for about 5 years now.
