Selling equipment to your cafés

Short answer. Sell grinders, brewers, water treatment and everything consumable. Refer espresso machines unless you have a technician. Lend only where the kilos pay the machine back. Quote all of it separately from the coffee. And do it for control rather than for profit: the margin is real but small, while a café grinding your coffee on the wrong burrs costs you an account.

Four ways to handle it

Most roasteries should be doing three of these at once: selling the small stuff, referring the big stuff, and lending in the handful of cases where the arithmetic works. The fourth row is the default and it is the expensive one, because the café still buys a grinder — just the wrong one, from a marketplace, in a hurry.

What an equipment line is actually worth

Before building a catalogue, find out what it earns. The defaults below are a sixteen-account roastery where a quarter of accounts buy something in a year.

At the defaults the whole equipment line is worth about half a wholesale account, for sixty hours of work. That is the result most roasters need to see before they order a pallet of grinders. It is not an argument for doing nothing — half an account for work you were partly doing anyway is fine, and the retention effect is not in the calculator at all — but it is an argument against treating equipment as a growth plan.

Push the inputs around and the picture changes in one specific direction. Raising the equipment margin from 25% to 35% adds €360. Raising the share of accounts buying from 25% to 50% adds €900. Raising consumables from €120 to €300 an account adds €1,008 — from the cheapest, least glamorous line in the list. That is the real shape of this business: the repeat purchase beats the box.

What to sell

Grinders — yes

The single piece of equipment that most changes how your coffee tastes, and the one cafés most often get wrong. You have an opinion worth paying for here, the installation is a dial-in rather than a plumbing job, and a café on burrs you chose is a café whose complaints are solvable.

Brewers and batch brew — yes

Filter volume is usually a thing you are trying to sell anyway. Selling the brewer and the recipe together is how a filter offer actually lands. See running a guest coffee programme for what to put through it.

Water treatment — yes, and earlier than you think

Cheap, consumable, and the cause of a large share of the calls where a café says your coffee has changed. Selling filter cartridges on a schedule prevents more problems than any other thing on this list.

Consumables and small parts — yes, hold stock

Cleaning powder, tablets, brushes, baskets in your accounts' two sizes, shower screens, gaskets, tamper mats, paper filters. Cheap to hold, good margin, bought again, and having one in the van turns a complaint into a fix while you are standing there.

Espresso machines — usually not

Unless you employ a technician or have a dealer who will answer the phone at 7am in your name. A machine you sold and cannot fix is a liability dressed as revenue, and the day it fails is the day the café decides who their real supplier is.

Scales, tampers, jugs, knock boxes — as a kit

Low value individually, genuinely useful bundled into an opening kit for a new account. Good for the first delivery, and it costs less than one month of a discount.

Where the margin really is

Three things, in ascending order of how much they matter and descending order of how exciting they are.

1. The machine. A modest percentage after distributor pricing, delivery and the hours around it. Treat it as break-even with a relationship attached.
2. Installation and setup, if you charge for it. Many roasteries give this away, which is a defensible choice when it is winning the account and an expensive habit when it is the fourth grinder this year. A half-day install has a real cost; either bill it or count it as a discount.
3. Consumables. Better margin, bought monthly, delivered in a van that is already going there. If you only do one thing from this guide, add six consumable lines to your order sheet so a café can add them to the coffee order without thinking.

That last point is worth a sentence on its own: the friction, not the price, is what stops a café buying cleaning powder from you. If it is a line on the same order they already place every Monday, they will buy it. If it needs a separate email, they will buy it from the same marketplace where they bought the wrong grinder.

Who fixes it

The trap in this whole area is becoming a service company by accident. It happens in a predictable order: you sell a grinder, you replace its burrs as a favour, you start carrying spares, and eighteen months later somebody is spending Thursdays in other people's cafés with a toolkit.

Decide the boundary in advance and write it on the quote:

• What you do: dial-in, burr changes, cleaning, water cartridges, swapping baskets and screens, and telling them what is wrong.
• What a technician does: anything plumbed, anything electrical, anything under warranty.
• Response times you can actually keep: next working day for parts you hold, a named dealer's number for everything else. A promise of "we'll sort it" made in a sales conversation becomes a grievance at 7am.
• A loan unit for grinders, if you can afford one. A spare grinder on a shelf is worth more than an apology, and it is the cheapest insurance against the Saturday where a café serves somebody else's coffee.

The paperwork

Sales need less than roasters fear and loans need more. For a sale: a quote naming the model, the price without VAT, what installation includes, the manufacturer's warranty term and who to call under it, and payment terms. That is a page.

For anything you lend, the agreement matters a great deal more, because ownership, breakdowns, insurance, cleaning obligations and what happens when the café closes all need answers before they are urgent. The clauses, and the break-even arithmetic on whether a loan pays back at all, are in espresso machine loan agreements. The short version: a €6,000 machine lent to a café taking 3 kg a week at €7.29 a kilo earns €1,137 a year of gross profit, so it has not paid for itself for more than five years, before servicing.

One more line worth having, in both cases: what happens to equipment if they leave. For a sale, nothing — it is theirs, and saying so out loud makes you easier to buy from. For a loan, a notice period and a collection arrangement, agreed while everyone is still friendly.

Quote it separately

Never fold equipment into the kilo price. Three reasons, all of which arrive later.

• A bundled price hides the machine, so the café never knows what it cost and never feels it was paid for.
• Every future price rise reads as a machine payment going up, which turns a routine increase into a renegotiation — see raising wholesale prices.
• You lose the ability to say no. The next café wants the same deal and there is no clean way to explain why the number is different, because the number was never explained in the first place. The same logic runs through competing with a cheaper roaster: a concession with a name and a price is a decision, a concession folded into the kilo price is a leak.

When to refer it out

Refer anything that needs a technician, anything over about the price of a small car, and anything where the lead time will make you the villain. Find one dealer you trust, agree how they will treat your accounts, and hand the enquiry over with a name rather than a link.

Ask about a referral fee, and be relaxed either way. The real return is that the café got the right machine, it arrived when promised, and it was you who made that happen — which is the same currency as everything else in this guide.

Questions roasters ask

Should a coffee roaster sell equipment to its wholesale cafés?

Sell the things that decide how your coffee tastes and the things that get used up — grinders, brewers, water treatment, baskets, filters, cleaning products. Refer espresso machines to a dealer unless you genuinely have a technician. The point is not the margin on the box; it is that a café with the right grinder and clean water stops being a café that blames your coffee.

How much margin is there in coffee equipment?

Less than roasters expect on machines and more than they expect on consumables. A grinder bought through a distributor typically leaves a modest percentage once installation and your time are counted, while cleaning products, filters and baskets carry a far better margin and are bought again every month. Run the numbers before you build a catalogue around hardware.

Is it better to lend an espresso machine or sell one?

Neither, usually. Lending ties up capital and makes you responsible for a machine you did not build; selling makes you responsible for a warranty you cannot honour alone. Both work if you have a technician or a dealer partner and a written agreement. If you have neither, refer the sale and keep the coffee.

Who is responsible when a loaned espresso machine breaks?

Whoever the written agreement says, which is why there should be one. Typically the roastery owns the machine and covers mechanical failure, the café covers cleaning, water filtration and damage from misuse, and there is a named response time. Without that in writing, every breakdown becomes a negotiation on a Saturday morning.

What equipment should a roastery keep in stock?

Consumables and small parts: cleaning powder and tablets, group brushes, filter baskets in the two sizes your accounts use, shower screens, gaskets, water filter cartridges, tamper mats, brewer filters. They are cheap to hold, they earn a good margin, and having one in the van turns a complaint into a fix.

Should equipment be bundled into the coffee price?

No. Quote equipment separately and keep the kilo price clean. A bundled price hides what the machine costs, makes every future price rise look like a machine payment, and leaves you with no way to say no to the next café that wants the same deal without explaining the whole arrangement.

Where Order Book fits

Equipment you have lent lives on the client's page: what it is, its serial number, when it went out and what the agreement says. The machine itself carries a QR sticker, so a barista pointing a phone at it files a fault report against the right account and the right machine rather than sending a photo to somebody's personal WhatsApp.

Consumables are ordinary catalogue lines, so cleaning powder, filters and baskets sit on the same order the café already places on a Monday and arrive in the same van. That is the whole trick for the margin line in this guide: it is not a separate business, it is six more rows on an order sheet.

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