What is wholesale coffee?

Selling roasted coffee at a trade price to a business that will serve or resell it — a café, bakery, restaurant, hotel, office or shop — rather than to the person who drinks it. The coffee is usually sold by the kilo without VAT, on agreed payment terms, with a delivery day and a minimum order, and the relationship repeats every week or two rather than being a one-off sale.

How does wholesale coffee pricing work?

You build a price per kilo from the landed cost of green coffee, roast loss, packaging, labour, delivery and overhead, then add the gross margin you need — commonly 35 to 50% for specialty wholesale. Volume breaks reward cafés that take more each week. A worked example: €10.91 to produce, sold at €18.20, which is €7.29 a kilo of gross profit and about 40% gross margin.

How much coffee does a café buy a week?

It varies more than any other number in wholesale. Count drinks rather than guess: a café selling 150 espresso-based drinks a day at an 18 g double, six days a week, uses about 16 kg. A quiet café selling 40 a day uses about 4 kg. Plan on what an account orders in its first three months, not on what it told you it would order.

What margin does a café make on wholesale coffee?

A large one, which is why coffee is on every menu. At €18.20 a kilo, the coffee in an 18 g double shot costs the café about €0.33. Sold in a €3.00 flat white that is roughly 11% of the menu price before milk, cup and labour. It also means a price rise of €1 a kilo is under two cents a drink.

How is wholesale different from selling coffee retail?

Fewer customers, each much larger, each buying again every week or two on credit. That changes everything: losing one account matters, an account that goes quiet is a real problem, you are judged on reliability as much as on the coffee, and you carry the risk of getting paid. It is a supply relationship, not a series of sales.

What does a roastery need before taking its first wholesale account?

A price list you can defend, written terms, a delivery day and cutoff you can keep, enough roasting capacity to absorb the account without breaking your retail week, and a way to invoice. None of it has to be elaborate, but all five need to exist before the first delivery rather than after the first argument.

How Wholesale Coffee Works: A Guide for Roasters

Short answer. You sell roasted coffee by the kilo, without VAT, at a trade price, to businesses that serve or resell it — on agreed terms, on a delivery day, on credit, again and again. The coffee is the easy part. Wholesale is a business of prices you can defend, a week that runs the same every week, and accounts that are worth far more kept than won.

What wholesale actually is

A wholesale account is a business that buys your coffee to serve or resell. Three features distinguish it from everything else a roastery does, and all three shape the work.

It repeats. A café orders every week or fortnight, largely the same thing. Your revenue is a rhythm rather than a series of sales, which is why a broken rhythm is the earliest warning you get.
It is on credit. You deliver first and are paid later, typically in 14 to 30 days. You are financing your customers, which means terms and chasing are part of the job rather than an administrative afterthought.
You are a supplier. Your coffee is served under someone else's name, on a machine you do not own, by staff you did not hire. You are judged on reliability at least as much as on the roast.

What it is not: distribution. Selling to a wholesaler who resells to cafés is a different business with different margins. And it is not retail with bigger bags — the comparison at the end of this guide is worth reading before assuming otherwise.

Who buys wholesale coffee

Buyer	Typical volume	What they care about	How they buy
Café or coffee bar	4–25 kg a week	Taste in milk, consistency, someone who answers the phone	Weekly or fortnightly, often the same order
Bakery	3–15 kg a week	One coffee that works with no trained barista	Weekly, alongside other suppliers
Restaurant	2–8 kg a week	One flawless coffee at the end of a meal, and decaf	Fortnightly or monthly
Hotel	5–40 kg a week	Breakfast volume, room product, procurement paperwork	Monthly, on a contract, slowly
Office or workplace	2–10 kg a week	Machine that works, nobody thinking about it	Standing order, low attention
Grocer or deli	2–10 kg a week	Retail bags, margin, shelf life	On resale, wants sale-or-return terms

Volumes are working ranges for a European independent, not a benchmark. Count drinks rather than trust them: 1 kg makes about 55 double espressos at an 18 g dose, so a café selling 100 espresso-based drinks a day over six days uses around 11 kg a week.

Most roasteries start with cafés and discover the others by accident. The others are worth deliberate attention: restaurants and hotels buy on different cycles with different people deciding, and offices are the quietest recurring revenue in the trade. See wholesale coffee for restaurants, hotels and offices.

How the money works

Follow one kilo the whole way, using the worked example that runs through these guides.

Green, landed: €7.20 a kilo. Not the exchange price in the news — that is a commodity price for a notional lot. Yours carries differential, freight, duty where it applies, the importer's margin and storage. See green coffee prices per kilo.
Roast loss takes about 15%. A kilo of green becomes about 850 g of roasted coffee, so the green in a roasted kilo costs €8.47. Measure your own: roast loss calculator.
Add packaging, labour, delivery and overhead and you reach roughly €10.91 a roasted kilo, in the bag, at the door.
Sell at €18.20 a kilo without VAT. That is €7.29 of gross profit, a gross margin of about 40%. Build your own number with the price calculator.
The café pays about €0.33 for the coffee in a double shot at 18 g, sells the drink at €3.00, and so has roughly 11% of the menu price in coffee before milk, cup and labour. The cost per cup calculator does this from your numbers.

Two consequences fall out of that chain and both matter more than they look. First, at 8 kg a week an account is worth about €253 a month in gross profit, which is what every decision about discounts, visits and equipment should be measured against. Second, a €1 a kilo price change is under two cents a drink for the café and €416 a year for you — the asymmetry at the heart of competing with a cheaper roaster and of raising prices.

The wholesale week

Every wholesale roastery runs a version of this, whether or not anyone has written it down. Writing it down is most of what turns eleven accidental accounts into a business.

When	What happens	Where it goes wrong
Friday to Monday	Cafés place orders	The part you least control. Most roasteries take orders four different ways
Monday 12:00	Cutoff	Everything after this goes on next week's run
Monday afternoon	Roast plan and green check	Confirmed kilos become batches, and a green order if short
Tuesday	Roast	Roasted to order, so the coffee is at its best on the bar
Tuesday afternoon	Pick, pack, delivery notes	Bags labelled per client, notes printed per drop
Wednesday	Deliver	The visit is also your only regular look at the account
Wednesday	Invoice	Same day as delivery, or the payment clock starts late
Ongoing	Chase, record, repeat	Payments recorded, late ones chased on a fixed ladder

The two points of failure are at each end. Orders arriving by text, email, phone and in person means the week starts with an hour of transcription and a standing risk of missing one — see cafés that order by text, email and phone. And invoicing days after delivery pushes payment out by the same days, which is the cheapest cash-flow fix most roasteries have available.

The middle is arithmetic: confirmed kilos become batches and hours at the machine, and the green you need follows from that. The roast plan calculator does the week; buying green for a wholesale book does the months.

The terms you have to decide

Seven decisions. Make them once, write them down, and apply them to everybody — the alternative is making each one again, badly, under pressure, per account.

Price list and volume breaks: What each coffee costs per kilo without VAT, and at what weekly volume the price steps down. Published as a sheet, not quoted per conversation: price list template.
Minimum order: The smallest drop that is worth making. Below about 3 kg on a route, delivery eats the margin.
Order cutoff and delivery days: The deadline that lets you plan a roast, and the day the coffee arrives. Both fixed, both published: cutoffs and lead times.
Delivery charge: What it costs below your free threshold. A €12 drop is €0.74 a kilo on 16 kg and €2.78 a kilo on 4.3 kg, which is the whole argument for a minimum.
Payment terms: 14 or 30 days, set per account, with a credit limit for new ones. This is where wholesale businesses actually fail: late-paying café accounts.
Equipment: Whether you sell, lend or refer, and on what paperwork. Selling equipment and loan agreements.
Notice and the exit: How either side ends it, what happens to equipment, and how much notice a price change needs. Nobody wants to discuss this at the start, and everybody wishes they had. Terms and conditions template.

What each side owes the other

Not a contract — an expectation. Saying it out loud early is one of the cheapest things a roastery can do, because almost every account that ends badly ends over one of these.

You owe the café	The café owes you
Coffee that tastes the same as last month	Orders by the cutoff
Delivery on the day, and a call before they notice if not	Payment on the agreed terms
A named person who answers the phone	A named person who decides
Notice of a price change, in writing, in advance	Telling you when something tastes wrong, early
Help dialling in, and training new staff	A clean machine and water they maintain
Honesty when a coffee is ending or changing	Notice if they are leaving

The café-facing version of this, written so a roastery can send it to a prospect, is what a café should expect from its roaster.

How accounts are won

Almost entirely in person and on the phone. A short list of cafés that fit your coffee, volume and route; a visit at a quiet hour; two coffees left with roast dates and a recipe card; a call on the day you said you would call; a cupping or a defined trial; then the first order. Roughly twelve first visits produce one account, which is two or three visits a week for ten accounts a year.

Email supports that process and does not replace it. The detail is in how to get wholesale coffee accounts, the arithmetic in a sales pipeline for a roastery, the messages in emails to send your cafés, and the page that works while you are roasting in the wholesale page on your website.

How accounts are lost

Rarely by announcement. In rough order of frequency:

The person who could dial it in left. The coffee gets worse without anyone changing anything. Training is the answer, and the laminated card more than the session.
Service drift. Two late deliveries, an unanswered call, a price change that arrived as an invoice.
A cheaper quote, at a moment when nothing else was tying them to you. Usually the symptom, rarely the cause.
The café itself changed. New owner, new concept, closed. Nothing to fix, but worth knowing early.
You let a bad account run. Below-cost pricing, never-paid invoices, three visits a month for four kilos.

The useful pattern is that almost all of them show up in the ordering rhythm before they show up in a conversation: later orders, smaller baskets, a skipped week. That is what spotting accounts going quiet is about, and it is the cheapest growth available, because an account you keep is one you never have to win again.

What makes it different from retail

	Retail	Wholesale
Customers	Many, small, anonymous	Few, large, known by name
One customer leaving	Invisible	A bad month
Payment	At the till	14 to 30 days later, on trust
Price	Per bag, with VAT, the same for everyone	Per kilo, without VAT, per client, with breaks
What you are judged on	The coffee and the brand	The coffee, the day it arrives, and who answers
Growth	More traffic	More accounts, or bigger ones, and losing fewer

This is also why retail tools fit wholesale badly. A checkout is built for a stranger paying now, not for a known business ordering the same thing on credit every Tuesday: Shopify for wholesale coffee.

Five numbers to know from the start

Your cost per roasted kilo, including roast loss, packaging, labour, delivery and overhead.
Gross profit per kilo, and therefore what an average account earns a month.
Kilos per week per account, from real orders over three months rather than what was promised.
Your largest account's share of the book. Above about a fifth, one café can dictate your year. How many accounts a roastery needs.
Days to get paid, actual rather than agreed.

Questions roasters ask

What is wholesale coffee?: Selling roasted coffee at a trade price to a business that will serve or resell it — a café, bakery, restaurant, hotel, office or shop — rather than to the person who drinks it. The coffee is usually sold by the kilo without VAT, on agreed payment terms, with a delivery day and a minimum order, and the relationship repeats every week or two rather than being a one-off sale.
How does wholesale coffee pricing work?: You build a price per kilo from the landed cost of green coffee, roast loss, packaging, labour, delivery and overhead, then add the gross margin you need — commonly 35 to 50% for specialty wholesale. Volume breaks reward cafés that take more each week. A worked example: €10.91 to produce, sold at €18.20, which is €7.29 a kilo of gross profit and about 40% gross margin.
How much coffee does a café buy a week?: It varies more than any other number in wholesale. Count drinks rather than guess: a café selling 150 espresso-based drinks a day at an 18 g double, six days a week, uses about 16 kg. A quiet café selling 40 a day uses about 4 kg. Plan on what an account orders in its first three months, not on what it told you it would order.
What margin does a café make on wholesale coffee?: A large one, which is why coffee is on every menu. At €18.20 a kilo, the coffee in an 18 g double shot costs the café about €0.33. Sold in a €3.00 flat white that is roughly 11% of the menu price before milk, cup and labour. It also means a price rise of €1 a kilo is under two cents a drink.
How is wholesale different from selling coffee retail?: Fewer customers, each much larger, each buying again every week or two on credit. That changes everything: losing one account matters, an account that goes quiet is a real problem, you are judged on reliability as much as on the coffee, and you carry the risk of getting paid. It is a supply relationship, not a series of sales.
What does a roastery need before taking its first wholesale account?: A price list you can defend, written terms, a delivery day and cutoff you can keep, enough roasting capacity to absorb the account without breaking your retail week, and a way to invoice. None of it has to be elaborate, but all five need to exist before the first delivery rather than after the first argument.

Where Order Book fits

Order Book is the desk that runs the week above. Orders arrive in one place — each café has its own account, signed in with the address you already hold, no password, at its own prices with its usual order at the top, in its own language — and confirmed orders become the roast plan, the picking list and the delivery notes. Catalogues, per-client prices, volume breaks, minimums, delivery charges and cutoffs are all things you set once rather than remember per account.

The part that is harder to do by hand is the rhythm. Every café is measured against its own ordering pattern and basket size, and the ones slowing down appear on a Monday call list before they have said anything — which, given how accounts are actually lost, is the difference between a phone call and an autopsy.

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How wholesale coffee works