Wholesale coffee price calculator

Short answer. Wholesale price per kilo = cost per roasted kilo ÷ (1 − target margin), and the cost per roasted kilo is green ÷ (1 − roast loss), plus packaging, labour and energy, delivery and overhead. Green at €8.00 a kilo with 15% roast loss is €9.41 of green in every roasted kilo; add €0.60 packaging, €1.20 labour, €1.50 delivery and €0.80 overhead and the coffee costs €13.51 to put on a café's shelf. At a 40% gross margin that is €22.52 a kilo without VAT, or 41 cents of coffee in an 18 g double.

The calculator

Everything is per kilo of roasted coffee and without VAT. Start with what the green actually cost you landed, including shipping, import duty and the importer's margin, not the FOB price you print on the bag. The defaults are the worked example further down; change every one of them to your own.

If you only want the green, loss, packaging and labour version, the price list template has a shorter calculator and the list format to put the answer in. This one adds the costs that only show up once you are delivering to cafés every week.

The formula, written out

Six lines, in the order they happen. Every one is per kilo of roasted coffee.

• Green per roasted kg = landed green price per kg ÷ (1 − roast loss)
• Packaging per kg = bag, valve and label per bag ÷ bag size in kg
• Delivery per kg = cost of one drop ÷ average kg per drop
• Cost per kg = green per roasted kg + packaging + labour and energy + delivery + overhead
• Price per kg = cost per kg ÷ (1 − target gross margin)
• Margin per kg = price per kg − cost per kg

Two things about the fifth line. It is a divide, not a multiply: a 40% margin is cost ÷ 0.60, which is cost × 1.667, not cost × 1.40. Marking cost up by 40% gives you a 28.6% margin, and roasteries lose whole years to that one keystroke.

The other is that the margin percentage is the last decision, not the first. Work the cost out honestly first. If the price that comes out is one no café will pay, the answer is a different coffee, a bigger minimum order or a cheaper drop, not a smaller number in the margin box.

A worked example: the house espresso

A roastery buys a Brazil and Colombia blend component landed at €8.00 a kilo of green. It roasts to a 15% loss, packs into 1 kg bags at €0.60 for the bag, valve and label, and counts €1.20 a kilo for the roaster's time, the packing and the gas. It delivers on a van route where a typical drop costs €12 in fuel, vehicle and driver time and carries 8 kg. It allocates €0.80 a kilo of overhead: the rent on the roastery, insurance, the accountant, the phone.

Notice what the delivery line did. The same coffee, priced on green, loss, packaging and labour alone, costs €11.21 and prices at €18.69 on the same 40% margin. Adding the drop and the overhead moved the price €3.83 a kilo, which is just over 20%. That gap is where a roastery can be busy, well reviewed, and making nothing.

At €22.52 a kilo the café pays 41 cents for the coffee in an 18 g double, before its own waste. On a €3.50 flat white that is about 14% of the price it keeps after VAT. The coffee cost per cup calculator is the same arithmetic from the café's side, and it is the version to put in front of an owner who thinks in drinks.

Roast loss, and why pricing off green weight is wrong

Water leaves the bean in the roaster, so a kilo of green does not make a kilo of roasted coffee. Somewhere between 12 and 18% of the weight goes, depending on how far you take the roast: a light filter roast loses less, a dark espresso roast more. Fifteen percent is a fair middle, and it is worth weighing ten batches in and out and using your own figure per profile rather than one number for the whole roastery.

The mistake is to take the green price straight into the price sheet. A kilo of roasted coffee at 15% loss needed 1 ÷ 0.85 = 1.176 kg of green, so the green in it cost 17.6% more than the invoice line suggests. Price a €8.00 green as if it were €8.00 and you are €1.41 a kilo short before you have bought a single bag.

Green needed = 1 ÷ (1 − loss). The uplift is the same number expressed as a percentage.

Two percentage points of roast loss is 20 to 25 cents a kilo on this green, which sounds small until you multiply it by a year of roasting. It is also the cheapest thing on this page to measure: a scale and a notebook next to the cooling tray.

Green prices themselves move faster than most price sheets. The ICE arabica contract set a record at 440.85 US cents a pound in February 2025 — about $9.72 a kilo at 1 lb = 0.4536 kg — and was trading around 283 cents, roughly $6.24 a kilo, in mid-September 2026. Those are dollars, and the euro rate moves too, which is exactly why this page stays in euros per kilo and asks you for the landed price you actually paid.

The costs roasters leave out

Ask a roaster what a kilo costs and you usually get green, loss, packaging and labour. Here is what else came out of the roastery that week, none of which is on the invoice to the café:

The drop

Fuel, the van, insurance, and an hour of somebody's morning. A €12 drop over 8 kg is €1.50 a kilo; the same drop for a café that orders 3 kg is €4.00 a kilo, and that café is probably on the same price as everyone else. Either set a minimum order, or price the small accounts on a different sheet, or accept that they are paid for by the big ones.

Samples

Every prospect gets a bag or two, and most prospects do not become accounts. Ten sample kilos a month against a hundred kilos sold is 10% of your volume going out at cost. It belongs in overhead, as a real line, not as a thing you forget because it was "only a sample".

Dialling in a new account

The first morning on a new grinder eats a kilo or two before a single drink is sold, and a good roastery sends someone to stand there while it happens. That is a day rate and a couple of kilos, spent before the account has bought anything. The onboarding guide has the rest of that first week.

The free kilo

The one at the start, the one after a bad bag, the one at Christmas. Each is fine and the total is not. Count them for a quarter and divide by the kilos you sold: most roasteries find between 2 and 5% of their output left the building unpaid, and that comes straight off the margin the calculator above says you are making.

Bags for a new blend

Printed bags come in minimums of a few thousand. If a seasonal blend runs for four months and you ordered a year's worth of bags, the unused ones are a cost of that coffee, not a cupboard decoration. Price short-run coffees with the real bag cost, which is the order divided by what you will actually sell.

Getting paid, and not getting paid

Net 30 means you finance the café for a month; a card payment costs you a percentage of the whole invoice, coffee and delivery alike, which the card fee page works out in euros. Write off something for what never arrives at all.

Lent equipment

A grinder on loan is capital sitting in someone else's café, plus the service visits. If you lend it, the minimum monthly volume that pays for it belongs in the price, and the arrangement belongs in an equipment loan agreement.

Compliance on the import

Due diligence on green from outside the EU is now work somebody has to do, per lot, with records kept. It is small per kilo and not zero; see the EUDR guide for what it involves.

You do not need a line in the calculator for each of these. Add them up for a quarter, divide by the kilos you roasted, and put the result in the overhead box. Most roasteries who do this for the first time find their overhead per kilo is double what they guessed.

Cost-plus or market price?

The calculator above is cost-plus: work out what the coffee costs and add a margin. The alternative is to price against what other roasteries in your city charge and let the margin be whatever falls out. Almost every roastery does some of both, and the useful question is which one you start from.

Cost-plus with a percentage margin means your profit per kilo rises and falls with the green. Cost-plus with a fixed cash margin per kilo means you pass on the cost and no more, which makes your cheap coffees relatively dearer than the competition and your expensive ones relatively cheaper. That is a deliberate choice, and Coffee Collective in Copenhagen told Perfect Daily Grind in April 2026 that it adds a fixed nominal margin to its coffee costs for exactly that reason, alongside publishing what it pays FOB. Its own published average went from $5.20 a pound in 2024 to $6.03 in 2025 — about $11.46 to $13.29 a kilo — and a fixed cash margin passes that through without inflating on top of it.

Torque Coffees, in Fresh Cup's March 2026 survey of 13 roasters adapting to green coffee costs, goes further and reprices whenever the FOB price of a coffee changes, up or down, telling customers straight away. The reported trade-off is that customers see every movement, and some smaller accounts left. The promise that makes it work is the downward half: if you move prices up with the market, you have to move them down too, or the next increase is not believed.

Use the fixed-margin row in the calculator to see the difference on your own numbers. At the defaults, a 40% margin gives €22.52 a kilo and €9.01 of margin; a flat €9.00 a kilo gives €22.51, almost the same. Push the green to €12 and the percentage margin asks €30.36 while the flat €9.00 asks €27.22. That €3.14 is the question: is it margin you have earned on more expensive coffee, or a rise the café will read as opportunism? There is no universally right answer, but the one you can explain is usually the one to send.

Wholesale price per kilo at different green costs

Every row uses the default other costs: 15% roast loss, €0.60 packaging in a 1 kg bag, €1.20 labour and energy, €1.50 delivery and €0.80 overhead, which is €4.10 a kilo besides the green. Read down your green column and across to the margin you want.

All prices without VAT, per kilo of roasted coffee in a 1 kg bag. Your own delivery and overhead will differ; change them in the calculator and the shape of the table stays the same.

The table says something worth sitting with. A €2 a kilo move in green — ordinary in the last two years — is €2.35 on the cost per roasted kilo and €3.92 on the price at a 40% margin. A price sheet with no date on it is a bet that green will not move, and green has moved every year since 2024.

When to reprice

Reprice when the coffee you are roasting now cost more than the price sheet assumes, not when the bank balance tells you. The green in this week's delivery was bought months ago; waiting for the pain to arrive means you are already a season late.

• Put a date on the sheet. "These prices hold until 30 April" is a promise cafés value and a reminder that tells you when to run the numbers again. Six months is a hold most roasteries can keep; twelve, when green is moving, usually is not.
• Reprice on the contract, not the calendar, if you buy spot. When you sign for the next lot at a different price, put it through the calculator that day and see what the coffee needs to sell for.
• Check the delivery line twice a year. It changes without anyone noticing: a new café on the far side of town, an account that dropped from 10 kg to 4 kg but kept its Wednesday, fuel.
• Recheck the average kg per drop per account, not just overall. An account whose orders have been shrinking is both a margin problem and a warning that it is on the way out.
• Give 30 days' notice and tell each café its own new prices. The letter, the call script and the order of the conversations are in the guide to raising wholesale prices.

Once the number is settled, it has to go somewhere a café can read. The price list template has the columns, the terms that belong underneath and a CSV to download, and the terms page covers the minimum order and notice period that make the price stick.

Questions roasters ask

How do you calculate a wholesale coffee price per kilo?

Divide the landed green price by one minus your roast loss to get the green in a roasted kilo, add packaging, labour and energy, delivery and a share of overhead, then divide that cost by one minus your target margin. Green at €8.00 a kilo with 15% loss is €9.41 of green per roasted kilo; with €0.60 packaging, €1.20 labour, €1.50 delivery and €0.80 overhead the cost is €13.51, and at a 40% gross margin the price is €22.52 a kilo without VAT.

How much does roast loss add to the cost of a kilo of coffee?

At 15% roast loss a kilo of roasted coffee needs about 1.18 kg of green, so the green cost per roasted kilo is 17.6% higher than the price on the green invoice. At 12% loss it is 13.6% higher and at 18% it is 22% higher. Pricing off the green weight instead of the roasted weight understates the cost of every bag you sell.

Should delivery be built into the wholesale price per kilo or charged separately?

Put it in the price per kilo and charge separately only below a minimum order. A €12 drop split over 8 kg is €1.50 a kilo, which is more than most roasteries' packaging and labour put together, and it is the cost that disappears when a café halves its order but keeps its delivery day.

What gross margin should a roastery make on wholesale coffee?

There is no standard number, and a percentage on its own tells you nothing until delivery and overhead are inside the cost. Decide the margin in euros per kilo you need each account to contribute, check what percentage that is at today's green price, and see whether it still works when green moves €2 a kilo. A price that only survives at one green price is not a price, it is a coincidence.

How often should a roastery reprice its wholesale list?

Put a date on the list and review on that date, rather than repricing when the margin has already gone. Arabica traded at 440.85 US cents a pound in February 2025 and around 283 cents in September 2026, so a list written against one year's green can be far from the next. Six months is a reasonable hold to promise cafés when the market is moving; twelve is a promise you may not be able to keep.

Why is a 250 g bag more than a quarter of the kilo price?

Because a bag, valve and label cost roughly the same whatever goes in them, so a 250 g bag carries four times the packaging per kilo. With €0.60 of packaging, a coffee that prices at €22.52 a kilo in a 1 kg bag comes out at €6.38 for 250 g, which is €25.52 a kilo. Roasteries that price small bags as a straight quarter of the kilo price lose the difference on every one.

Where Order Book fits

This page prices one coffee once. What it cannot do is tell you what you actually made, because that depends on which café bought what, at which price, on which drop. In Order Book each coffee can carry its green price and roast loss, so the cost follows the green, and the insights page shows gross margin per coffee and per account against the prices those cafés really paid. The average kg per drop is there too, per account, which is the input on this page roasters guess at most.

When the price changes, you write it once with the date it starts and every café is told its own new prices beforehand, in its own language. Orders already placed are not repriced. Invoices still come from your own invoicing software; Order Book carries the order, the prices and the delivery note.

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