Buying green for a wholesale book

Short answer. Hold cover per coffee, not in total: lead time plus a safety margin, longest for the house espresso and the decaf, shortest for anything seasonal. Commit forward on the coffees you cannot be without and stay spot on the rest. Keep committed volume inside what your steadiest accounts and retail can absorb without your largest café. And tell cafés a blend is changing before they taste it.

What changes when the coffee is somebody else's business

Three things, and they reorder every buying decision you make.

Consistency outranks novelty

A café has a grind setting, a recipe card, a menu description and a barista who has learned the coffee. A new and more exciting lot is not a gift to them; it is a morning of re-dialling and a customer asking why the flat white tastes different. Save the excitement for the guest slot, where it is the point.

You are now part of their supply chain

Being out of stock used to mean a gap on your own shelf. It now means a café serving somebody else's coffee on Saturday, and cafés who have tried somebody else's coffee sometimes keep drinking it. Stock cover stops being a cash-flow preference and becomes a service-level commitment.

You can see further ahead, so you have to act on it

Sixteen accounts with settled rhythms tell you within a reasonable margin what you will roast in eight weeks. That visibility is the one real advantage wholesale gives a green buyer, and it is wasted if you still order when the bin looks empty.

How much green to hold

Work in weeks of cover per coffee, then convert to kilos, bags and money. The numbers below are the worked example running through these guides: sixteen wholesale accounts at 8 kg a week plus a small retail side.

Two figures in there tend to be the ones that change behaviour. The first is the reorder point: at these numbers you place the order when about a tonne is left, which almost always feels far too early and is not. The second is the cash. Thirteen thousand euros sitting in sacks is a real position for a small roastery, and it is the honest argument against holding sixteen weeks of everything.

Note that this counts kilos, not the ageing of the coffee in them. Green is comfortable for months in decent conditions, but a lot bought in December and still being roasted in September is a different coffee from the one you cupped. Long cover on a fast-moving component is prudent; long cover on something slow is how you end up roasting a bag you no longer like.

How much cover each coffee earns

Cover is not one number. Set it by what happens to your cafés when that particular coffee runs out.

The decaf line is the one most roasters learn the hard way. It moves slowly enough to feel unimportant and is bought by almost every account, so a gap in the decaf is a phone call from eleven cafés rather than one. Treat it like a house coffee that happens to be slow.

Bag sizes vary by origin — commonly 30, 35, 60, 69 or 70 kg — which means your real order quantities are lumpy. Round up to whole bags, and prefer one extra bag of the house espresso to one extra of anything else.

Spot, forward and what a small roaster can actually get

Split the book by role rather than by preference. A workable shape for a roastery with a settled wholesale base is roughly two-thirds committed and one-third free, moving towards more commitment as the accounts get steadier.

Spot

Buying what is in the importer's warehouse now, priced now. Flexible, no commitment, and you take whatever is left when you get there. Right for seasonals, guest slots and anything you are trying out.

Forward booking

Reserving volume of a named coffee for delivery across the coming months, usually at an agreed price, often with the importer holding the coffee and releasing it against your call-offs. This is the tool that matters for a house espresso: it protects both the supply and the price you have quoted your cafés.

Call-off or drawdown

The practical version of the above: you commit to, say, twenty bags over six months and take three or four at a time. You get the security without paying for or storing all of it at once, which is the single most useful thing a small roaster can ask an importer for.

Price-to-be-fixed

Volume committed now with the price set later against the exchange. It exists, it is normal at larger scale, and it is usually the wrong instrument for a roastery that cannot easily change its own prices mid-year.

Whatever you commit to, size it against the book you would still have after losing your largest account. A café taking 20 kg a week is over a tonne of green a year; a twelve-month commitment built around it becomes an expensive problem the month it leaves. If one account is more than about a fifth of your volume, that is a reason to shorten commitments, not a reason to hope — see how many wholesale accounts a roastery needs.

A house espresso you can keep buying

The coffee your wholesale book is built on has a different job from everything else you roast. It has to be available every week of the year, taste the same in March as in October, work in milk on machines you have never seen, and hold a price you have promised. Those constraints point towards a blend, not because blends are better, but because a blend can absorb a component change without the café noticing and a single origin cannot.

• Design it around replaceability. Two or three components, each with a plausible substitute from another origin or harvest. A house espresso that depends on one microlot is a house espresso with an expiry date.
• Keep the crop calendar in view. Origins land at different times of year. A blend whose components all arrive in the same quarter will always have the same annual gap.
• Swap one component at a time. Never two. When the phone rings, you want to know which change caused it.
• Cup the new version against the old one before the changeover, at the dose and ratio your cafés actually use, in milk. Your filter palate is not the test.
• Keep a week of the outgoing version so the changeover is a transition rather than a cliff, and so you can send the two side by side to whoever asks.

Telling cafés a coffee is changing

Before they taste it. A café that is told finds it interesting; a café that finds out on the bar rings you to ask what you have done to their espresso, and that call costs more goodwill than the change ever earns.

Subject: Small change to the house espresso from [6 October]

Hi [first name],

The [Brazilian] in the house espresso is at the end of its harvest, so
from [6 October] it's replaced by [a Brazil from the same region, new
crop].

What you'll notice: [a touch more chocolate, slightly less nutty]. Dose
and ratio stay the same, and the price doesn't change.

I'm dropping a bag of the new version with you [this week] so you can
taste them side by side before the changeover. Ring me if it doesn't
sit right and we'll work it out.

[Your name]

Say it the same way to every account and in each café's own language. The rest of the standard messages a roastery sends are in emails to send your cafés.

Turning next week's orders into this month's green

Wholesale's advantage is visibility, and the way to use it is a standing forecast rather than a stock check. Once a month, take the last thirteen weeks of confirmed orders per coffee, add anything you know is coming — a new account starting, a café closing for August, a guest slot ending — and run it through roast loss to a green figure per coffee. Compare that against what is on the floor and what is on the water.

1. Roasted kilos per coffee, per week, from real orders rather than memory.
2. Divide by (1 − roast loss) for green. The roast loss calculator does this from a single batch if you have never measured yours.
3. Multiply by cover weeks, per coffee, from the table above.
4. Subtract what you hold and what is already committed. What is left is the order.

Fifteen minutes a month, and it replaces the two failure modes small roasteries alternate between: the panic order at spot price because the house espresso has three bags left, and the tonne of something bought enthusiastically in February that is still being roasted in November. The weekly version of the same arithmetic, down to batches and hours at the machine, is the roast plan calculator.

Cost, and the number that is not your cost

Price your wholesale sheet from landed cost per kilo of green, plus roast loss, packaging, labour, delivery and overhead — never from the exchange price in the news. The C price is a price for a notional commodity lot; your coffee carries a differential, freight, duty where it applies, the importer's margin, storage, and the financing cost of stock you are now holding for ten weeks. How far apart those numbers are, and why, is in green coffee prices in euros per kilo.

Two consequences for a wholesale book specifically. When green falls, the fall reaches you months later and unevenly, which is why "green is down, can we have a discount" is a conversation to prepare for rather than react to — see green prices are falling: should you cut?. And when green rises, the cover you are holding is also the notice period you have given yourself to raise prices properly instead of overnight.

One more thing that now sits in the buying decision rather than beside it: from the EU Deforestation Regulation's application dates, the coffee you buy has to arrive with the information that lets you place it on the market legally. That is a question for your importer at the point of ordering, not at the point of roasting — see EUDR for roasters.

Questions roasters ask

How much green coffee should a roastery hold in stock?

Enough to cover your supplier's lead time plus a safety margin, per coffee, not in total. If your importer delivers in four weeks and you want two weeks of cushion, your reorder point for each coffee is six weeks of that coffee's usage. A house espresso component earns more cover than a seasonal single origin, because running out of the house espresso stops sixteen cafés and running out of a seasonal disappoints three.

What changes about buying green once you sell wholesale?

Three things. Consistency starts to matter more than novelty, because a café has built a recipe and a menu around a coffee. You become part of somebody else's supply chain, so a gap in your stock is a gap on their bar. And you have to commit earlier, because you now know roughly what you will roast in eight weeks and have no excuse for finding out too late.

Should a small roaster buy spot or book forward?

Both, split by role. Buy the house espresso components forward where your importer will let you, because that is the coffee you cannot be without and the one whose price you have promised to hold. Buy seasonals and one-off lots spot, because flexibility is the point of them. A common shape is roughly two-thirds of volume committed and one-third free.

How do I change a coffee in a blend without upsetting my cafés?

Tell them before they taste it, not after. Send a short note naming the coffee, the date, what will be different in the cup and what stays the same, and offer a sample to whoever dials in. A café that is told finds it interesting; a café that discovers it on a Monday morning rings you to ask what you have done to their espresso.

What happens to my green contract if I lose a wholesale account?

The contract does not care, which is the point of thinking about concentration before you sign one. A twenty-kilo-a-week café is a tonne of green a year. Keep committed volume below what your steadiest accounts plus retail can absorb, and lengthen commitments only as the book gets less lumpy.

Why is my green cost higher than the C price?

Because the C price is an exchange price for a notional commodity lot, not a landed price for a named coffee in your roastery. Differential, shipping, import duty where it applies, the importer's margin, storage and the cost of the money you tied up all sit on top. Work from your own landed cost per kilo, never the number in the news.

Where Order Book fits

Order Book does not buy green or hold your green inventory. What it gives you is the demand side of the arithmetic above, as a fact rather than a recollection: confirmed orders per coffee, per week, with each café's own rhythm behind them, which tells you what is coming as well as what came. Confirmed orders become the roast plan and the picking list for the morning, and the same kilos are what you multiply up for the month's green.

Two things help specifically with commitment risk. Insights show each account's share of the book, so you can see whether a twelve-month booking is resting on one café. And drift detection flags an account slowing down weeks before it cancels, which is usually enough notice to stop the next call-off rather than discover the problem in a full warehouse.

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