What a café should expect from its roaster

Short answer. Expect coffee that tastes the same each week with a roast date on the bag, fixed delivery days and a cutoff you can plan around, a par level so you never run out, at least 30 days' written notice before a price rise with the reason, equipment terms you have read, training when your staff change, one person who answers, paperwork that matches, and a way out that was agreed before you needed it. None of that is unusual and all of it can be written down. Score your current roaster against the nine sections below; if they get most of them right, tell them so and keep them.

This is not a guide to choosing a roaster. If you are still deciding, read how to choose a wholesale coffee roaster first: tasting, price per kilo, what to ask at the first meeting. This page starts the day after you say yes, and it is about the service standard you should be getting from then on. Take it section by section and mark each one yes, no or not sure. The "not sure" rows are usually the ones worth a conversation.

The coffee itself

Consistency is the thing you are actually buying. Your house espresso should land in roughly the same place on the grinder from delivery to delivery, and when it does not, you should know why before your morning regulars do. Coffee is agricultural, so blends change components and single origins run out. The standard is not that nothing ever changes: it is that changes are deliberate, announced and explained.

A roast date belongs on every bag. A best-before date twelve months out tells you nothing about whether a bag is three days or three months off roast, and it is the difference between an espresso you can dial in and one that gushes. Ask your roaster for its recommended resting window for each coffee and order so bags arrive inside it.

How to check. Keep a one-line log at the grinder: date, coffee, roast date, grind setting, dose and yield. Over two months it shows you whether the coffee is moving, whether the roast dates are consistent, and whether a complaint about "the coffee tasting different" is the coffee or your water filter.

Ask for it in writing. A roast date on every bag; notice before a blend component or a lot changes, with an updated recipe card; and what happens when a batch is not right — most roasters will replace it on the next delivery or credit it, and the good ones do not ask you to prove it.

Delivery you can plan around

You should be able to say, without checking, which day your coffee arrives and by when you have to have ordered. Roasteries roast in batches on set days, so there is always a cutoff and a lead time between your order and your delivery, and both are set by the roast schedule rather than by how busy the office is. That is reasonable. What is not reasonable is not being told what they are. Our guide to order cutoffs and lead times is written for roasters and shows how the numbers are worked out, which is useful if you want to know whether the cutoff you have been given is a real constraint or a habit.

The harder question is what happens when a delivery fails, because eventually one will. The standard is that you hear from the roaster before you find out from the empty box: a message the same morning, a new date or a driver deviation that week, and a credit for anything short without an argument.

How to check. Count a quarter. How many deliveries arrived on the day promised, how many were short or wrong, and how many times you found out by opening the box rather than from a message. One bad delivery in a quarter is normal. Three, with no message on any of them, is a pattern.

Ask for it in writing. Roast days, delivery days, the order cutoff, the lead time from cutoff to delivery, the delivery charge and any minimum order, and what happens to a failed or short delivery.

Never running out

Running out is the failure that costs you money the same day, and it is mostly preventable with arithmetic done once. Emmanuel Buschiazzo, who runs La Claque in Nice, told Perfect Daily Grind in November 2025 that among the challenges of running a multi-roaster café are "the potential problems with deliveries and making sure you actually have coffee to serve every day". If you buy from several roasters, that is your job. If you buy from one, a good roaster should be doing half of it for you.

The tool is a par level: the amount of coffee on your shelf at which you order more. Work it out from a day's use and the gap to your next delivery, then add a few days of safety for a bank holiday or a busier week than usual.

Order point = weekly use ÷ 7 × days of cover. With a weekly delivery and three days' safety the answer comes out at about one week's use, which is the version worth remembering: when you are down to a week's coffee, order.

A standing order sized on that number removes the Friday afternoon panic entirely, as long as you can change, skip or pause it yourself. A standing order you have to email about is not a convenience, it is a subscription. And when you do need coffee outside the schedule, ask; most roasters will find a way when it is rare, and most will say no politely when it is monthly. A roaster's own checklist for setting this up with a new account is in onboarding a new wholesale café — if yours did none of it in your first month, that is worth raising.

If your roaster uses Order Book, nothing repeats by itself: you order from your account each time, with your usual order at the top of the sheet, or your roaster prepares a proposed order you confirm with one tap.

How to check. Count the times in the last six months you ran out, or nearly did, and what you did about it: a bag borrowed from another café, a supermarket bag, or a day of apologies. Each one is a symptom of no par level, not bad luck.

Ask for it in writing. Your par level per coffee, a standing order you control, and who to call for an emergency bag and what it costs.

Price changes, with notice and a reason

Wholesale coffee prices move, and they have moved a lot in the last two years. The standard is not that prices never rise. It is that you get at least 30 days' written notice, with your own new prices in euros per kilo rather than "prices are going up 8%", the reason, and how long the new prices are expected to hold. A price that first appears on an invoice is not a price change, it is a surprise, and it is the single most common reason cafés start quietly getting quotes.

It helps to know what the rise actually costs you before you react. At an 18 g dose a kilo makes about 55 double espressos, so €1 a kilo is about 1.8 cents a double. A café using 10 kg a week pays around €520 more a year for it: worth knowing, rarely worth changing roaster for. The coffee cost per cup calculator does it for your doses and menu prices.

It also helps to know the roaster's side, because it is genuinely not the same as the headlines. A roastery pays for green coffee months before it roasts it, so its costs lag the market in both directions. Our guide on how to raise wholesale prices without losing cafés is the advice roasters are given, and reading it tells you what a fair increase looks like and what a lazy one looks like. The other direction matters too: when green prices fall, it is entirely reasonable to ask your roaster what that means for your price list, and what happens when green prices fall sets out honestly when a cut is affordable and when it is not. Ask; do not demand. The answer "not yet, because the coffee we are roasting for you was bought in March" is a good answer, and a roaster who promised to move prices down as well as up should be held to it.

How to check. Look back at your last two price changes. Did you get them in writing, before they took effect, with the reason and your own prices on them?

Ask for it in writing. The notice period for a price change, in the terms, and that orders placed before the date are charged at the old price.

Equipment, and what a loan really costs

A loaned espresso machine is the part of the relationship that outlives everything else, so it is the part to read hardest. The economics are simple and nobody hides them badly: the roaster buys the machine and recovers it through the coffee price and a minimum volume over a fixed term. Buddy Capital, an Australian firm that finances espresso machines and so has its own side in this, describes it as "the most common trap first-time cafe owners walk into", and puts the problem precisely: "The lock-in only becomes visible three years in, when the coffee isn't selling, the roaster has been bought out, or you want to switch to a blend your customers actually like." It puts typical terms at two to five years with a minimum monthly volume, which matches what the trade looks like in Europe.

That can still be a good deal for a café that would rather spend its cash on the fit-out. It becomes a bad deal when the machine stops being good enough and the contract has no mechanism to fix it. The Australian roaster Carlini Coffee tells the story of a café whose supplier "had refused numerous requests over a long time" for a machine and grinder upgrade because the café's volumes had fallen. By the time they called another roaster the owners "had lost 3 baristas because staff refused to work on the crappy gear", and one owner was permanently stationed on the machine. Falling volumes and ageing equipment feed each other, and only the contract decides which one gets fixed first.

Two European points worth knowing. Under the Vertical Block Exemption Regulation (EU) 2022/720, an obligation to buy all or more than 80% of your coffee from one supplier is a non-compete obligation, and one that runs indefinitely or for more than five years is not covered by the exemption. And the Commission's Vertical Guidelines say that when the exclusivity ends, you should be able to take over lent equipment that is not specific to the relationship, such as an espresso machine, at its market value. For the arithmetic from the roaster's side, including what the machine has to earn to be worth lending, see how espresso machine loan agreements work. This is general information, not legal advice; have anything you sign checked in your own country.

How to check. Find the agreement. If you cannot find it, or you bought the café and inherited the machine without seeing it, that is the finding. Carlini notes cafés changing supplier after buying a business without proper diligence and meeting a legal threat for tens of thousands.

Ask for it in writing. The term and the minimum volume; who pays for servicing, parts and callouts and how fast someone comes; a trigger for upgrade or replacement when the machine no longer suits your volume or is past a stated age; whether you may serve a guest coffee; the buy-out figure at each year of the term; and what happens if you sell the café — whether the agreement transfers to the buyer or is settled at completion. Settle that one before you go to market, not during the sale.

Training, and a person who answers

You will not have the same baristas in two years. That is the trade, not a failure, and it means training cannot be a single afternoon at install. Expect a proper session when you start — dose, yield, time, milk, cleaning, and a recipe card for each coffee that stays on the wall — and a route to a refresher when your team changes. Ask who pays for the second one before you need it.

Expect visits, too. Leah McMahon, who runs Silk in Oregon, told Fresh Cup that what pushed her to change roasters was attention: "I wanted more than just one visit per quarter. I wanted to go deeper." A quarterly visit is a reasonable floor for a small account and monthly is normal for a large one, but the number matters less than whether anyone looks at the coffee rather than only at the order.

And you should know who to call. Ideally one named person for orders and prices, a number for machine faults with the hours it is answered, and a way to reach someone that is not a shared inbox nobody owns. "Whoever picks up" works until a Saturday morning when the group head is leaking.

How to check. Ask your newest barista who trained them on the machine and when. If the answer is "the previous barista", your roaster's training stopped a while ago.

Ask for it in writing. What training is included at the start, what is available later and at what cost, the name and number of your account contact, and the fault number with its hours.

Paperwork that matches

Unglamorous and worth ten minutes a month. You should be holding the roaster's wholesale terms, a current price list you can check an invoice against, a delivery note in every box listing what is actually in it, and invoices whose lines match those delivery notes. Payment terms should be stated and the same on every invoice. Our guide to what fair wholesale terms usually include is written for roasters drafting them, which makes it a useful list to read yours against.

Pay on the terms you agreed, and call before the due date if you cannot. A small roastery has paid for your coffee months before you ordered it and is financing that until your transfer lands. Roasters remember which cafés pay, and it is the cheapest goodwill available when you later need a favour on a Friday.

How to check. Take one month. Match every delivery note to its invoice line and every invoice price to the price list. Differences are usually honest mistakes, and finding three in a month tells you something either way.

Ask for it in writing. The terms, a dated price list, a delivery note with every delivery, payment terms and any late-payment charge.

How to leave

Agree the exit while everyone is happy, because that is the only time it is cheap to agree. The pieces are the same everywhere: a notice period, any minimum volume still owed, loaned equipment to return or buy out and who uninstalls it, an outstanding balance, and overlap stock.

Overlap is the part cafés forget. Your new roaster's first delivery is not the day you can stop serving the old coffee: your team needs a week to dial in, and you want enough of the old coffee to trade normally while they do. Order that overlap before you give notice, not after.

Tell your roaster yourself, and early. McMahon described calling her first roaster to say she was moving on: "I was emotional when I called my first roaster and shared my plan to move on." Roasteries are small businesses and most would rather hear it from you than work it out from an order that never came. It also gives them one chance to fix the thing that is actually wrong, which is sometimes all it was.

If you are signing with someone new, you can ask for a short trial rather than a term. The café in Carlini's story did exactly that with its next supplier: a three-month probation with the right to leave on seven days' notice. A roaster confident in its coffee and its service can usually live with that.

How to check. Read your notice period today. If you do not know it, you do not know how long leaving would take.

Ask for it in writing. The notice period both ways, the equipment position at the end, and how a final balance and any buy-out are calculated.

Questions to ask before you sign

Short enough to ask in one conversation. A roaster who answers all of them without flinching is the one to take seriously.

• Is there a term, and how long is it? If yes, what happens at the end: does it renew automatically, and with what notice?
• Is there a minimum volume? Per delivery, per month, or over the term, and what happens in a quiet month.
• Am I tied to you exclusively? If yes, may I run a guest coffee, a decaf or a filter from someone else?
• What is the notice period, on both sides?
• If you lend the machine: who services it, how fast, what does it cost me to buy out in each year, and what triggers an upgrade?
• What happens if I sell the café? Does the agreement pass to the buyer, and who settles what.
• How much notice do you give before a price change, and in what form?
• What are the roast days, the cutoff and the lead time? And what do you do when a delivery fails.
• What training is included, now and when my staff change?
• Who is my contact, and who do I call when the machine fails on a Saturday?
• Can we start with a trial period — three months, short notice — before any longer commitment?

When to start looking

Raise it with your roaster first. Most of these have a fixable cause, and a roaster who does not know cannot fix it. Start looking if you have raised it and nothing changed.

• The coffee has drifted and nobody can tell you what changed.
• Deliveries are late or short repeatedly, and you are the one chasing.
• Prices arrive on invoices instead of in a letter with notice and a reason.
• The machine is not good enough and requests to upgrade or service it go nowhere.
• Nobody has visited in a year, and your newest barista was trained by your last one.
• Calls and emails go unanswered, or every question goes to a different person.
• You cannot get a straight answer about the term, the minimum or the buy-out figure.
• The roastery has been sold or has changed direction, and the coffee or the attention changed with it.

A caution in the other direction: switching costs you real money — dial-in time, retraining, new recipe cards, possibly an equipment buy-out — and the second roaster inherits every problem that was actually yours, such as a water filter nobody changes or a grinder past its burrs. Fix your own side first, then judge.

Questions cafés ask

What should a café expect from its coffee roaster?

Coffee that tastes the same from week to week with a roast date on every bag, fixed roast and delivery days with a cutoff you can plan around, a par level so you do not run out, at least 30 days' written notice before a price rise with the reason for it, training when your staff change, one person who answers, and delivery notes that match the invoices. Every one of those can be written down, and a roaster who is doing them already will have no trouble writing them down.

How much notice should a roaster give before raising prices?

Thirty days is the normal minimum, in writing, with your own new prices in euros rather than a percentage. Ask for the reason too: green coffee bought at a higher price, a freight or packaging increase, or a change in the blend. A roaster who tells you a month ahead is giving you time to look at your own menu; one who tells you on the invoice is not.

How long can a coffee supply contract tie a café to one roaster?

In the EU, an obligation to buy all or more than 80% of your coffee from one supplier is a non-compete obligation, and the Vertical Block Exemption Regulation (EU) 2022/720 does not cover one that lasts indefinitely or longer than five years. Equipment loans in the trade commonly run two to five years. The Commission's Vertical Guidelines also say that when the exclusivity ends you should be able to take over lent equipment that is not specific to the relationship, such as an espresso machine, at its market value. This is general information, not legal advice.

What should happen when a coffee delivery does not arrive?

You should hear from the roaster before you notice it yourself, with a new date or a route deviation the same week, and a credit for anything not delivered without an argument. Deliveries fail everywhere; what separates roasters is the hour afterwards. If it is happening more than once a quarter, ask what has changed on their side.

Should a café have a standing order with its roaster?

Usually yes, if you can change, skip or pause it yourself. A standing order sized on your par level means the coffee is already on the roast plan whether or not someone remembered to order on a busy Friday. The condition is control: if pausing it for two weeks' holiday means emailing and hoping, cancel it and order manually instead.

How should a café change roasters?

Tell your current roaster before you sign with anyone else, and read the terms you are on first: a notice period, a minimum volume still owed and any loaned equipment all have to be settled. Order enough overlap stock to cover the gap and the week your team spends dialling in the new coffee. Then hand back or buy out the equipment on the terms written in the agreement, not on the terms remembered on the phone.

Where Order Book fits

If your roaster uses Order Book, some of the list above is simply already done. You get your own account, signed in with the email address your roaster already has for you — no password and no app — that opens on your own prices with your usual order at the top and every past order behind it, and you can still edit an order up to your roaster's cutoff. Enter your closed dates once and every roastery serving you stops reminding you on those days, and when the machine needs looking at you can ask for a visit from the same page. When the coffee arrives you mark it received, and if something was wrong you say so on the order. When prices change you are told your own new prices, in your own language, before they start. Your roaster's invoice is attached to the order, so it arrives with the coffee rather than a fortnight later.

None of that makes a roaster good. Consistency, someone who answers and a machine that gets serviced are people, not software. It does remove the excuses about the ordering being awkward, which is usually the part both sides quietly dread.

Roasters reading this: send this page to your cafés, and use it as the standard you want to be measured against. Start free for 30 days, no card, or see what it costs.