To start a coffee roasting business, decide who you'll sell to first, cafés buying 5 lb bags or people buying 12 oz bags, because that sets everything else. Then choose where you'll roast (your own roaster, rented time at a shared roastery, or a toll roaster), sort out your business license, your state's food rules and, if you'll mostly sell to businesses, FDA food facility registration. Buy green coffee by the bag from an importer, keep a roast log from the first batch, price every bag from its real cost, and track green, roasted and packed coffee separately. A small start costs from about $12,000 if you rent roaster time to about $21,000 with a used roaster of your own, in the example budget below. Here's each step, the numbers, and a free startup budget.
The short version
- Pick your customers: wholesale to cafés, retail online and at markets, or both.
- Choose where to roast: your own roaster, a shared roastery, or a toll roaster.
- Get the paperwork right: business license, state food rules, FDA registration if it applies, and your air district.
- Buy green from an importer, a few origins at a time, and know your landed cost per kilo.
- Log every roast: green in, roasted out, the loss, and which lot.
- Price each bag from what it costs you, then check the market.
- TaroStack runs green lots into roasts into bags, and costs every one. More below.
Step 1: pick your customers
| Wholesale to cafés | Retail online and at markets | |
|---|---|---|
| Bag | 5 lb | 12 oz |
| Price per pound | Lower | Higher |
| Volume | Steady, weekly | Lumpy, seasonal |
| Work | Delivery, a café's schedule | Packing, shipping, marketing |
| Paperwork | Invoices, insurance certificates | Payment fees, a website |
Plenty of small roasters end up doing both, but start with one. Wholesale fills the roaster every week and makes planning easy; retail pays more per bag and takes longer to build. Your mix also decides a legal question in step 3.
Step 2: choose where to roast
Your own roaster gives you control and the biggest upfront cost. A shared roastery rents roaster time by the hour, often with storage, so you can start without buying equipment or dealing with ventilation. A toll roaster roasts your green to your profile for a fee per pound, which is the cheapest start and the least control. A common path is to start on shared time and buy your own machine once you're filling it several days a week.
Step 3: the paperwork
You'll need a business license and whatever your state requires of a food manufacturer, which varies by state and sometimes by county, so start with your state's agriculture or health department. Roasting also makes smoke, so ask your local air district what applies before you buy a roaster or sign a lease.
Then FDA. Facilities that manufacture, process, pack or hold food must register with FDA, but retail food establishments don't (21 CFR 1.225 and 1.226). A business counts as retail when its sales of food straight to consumers are worth more than its sales to everyone else, and businesses don't count as consumers (21 CFR 1.227). So a roaster selling mostly 12 oz bags to the public may be retail, and one selling mostly to cafés registers. Registration is free and is renewed between October 1 and December 31 of every even-numbered year, which includes this year (21 CFR 1.230).
One rule makes coffee easier than most food: whole or ground coffee beans are exempt from Nutrition Facts, because their nutrients round to zero, as long as the label makes no nutrition claims (21 CFR 101.9(j)(4)). The bag still needs the name of the product, the net weight and your business name and address. This is general information, not legal advice; your state and FDA have the last word.
Step 4: buy green coffee
Green coffee comes from importers, usually in bags of about 60 to 70 kg, and most importers will send samples first. Roast and cup the samples before you buy a bag. Start with three origins, not ten: every lot ties up cash, and green coffee loses quality if it sits for many months.
The number that matters is the landed cost per kilo: what you paid, plus freight and anything else it cost to reach your door. In the example in roast loss and cost per bag, a Brazil lot came to $6.10 a kilo landed. Record each bag's lot from the importer, because the same origin from a new lot can roast differently and cost differently.
Step 5: log every roast
From the first batch, write down the green lot, the weight in, the weight out and the time. Roast loss is weight lost divided by green weight in, and it's usually somewhere around 12% to 20% depending on the coffee and how dark you go. It's the number your costing depends on, and each lot has its own. A ready-made log is in the coffee roaster inventory spreadsheet.
Step 6: price each bag
With that Brazil at $6.10 a kilo and a 15.3% roast loss, the coffee in a 12 oz bag costs $2.47, and the full bag, with the valve bag, label, labor, gas and overhead, comes to $4.22. At $9.00 wholesale that leaves 53%, and a retail price of around $18 leaves room for card fees and the occasional free shipping. Whether that adds up to a living is worked through month by month in is a coffee roasting business profitable.
The startup budget
These are example costs for a small start; replace every one with real quotes:
| Item | Example |
|---|---|
| Roaster, used, about 2 kg a batch | $9,000 |
| Scale, heat sealer, grinder for cupping | $900 |
| Green coffee: three bags, landed | $1,260 |
| Valve bags and labels, first 1,000 | $650 |
| Business license, registration, permits | $450 |
| Product liability insurance, first year | $900 |
| Ventilation or afterburner work, if needed | $2,500 |
| Website and online shop | $300 |
| Samples for cafés | $150 |
| Working cash, two months of running costs | $4,800 |
| Total | $20,910 |
| Without the roaster, renting roaster time | $11,910 |
Download the coffee roasting startup budget. Type your quotes beside the examples and the totals use yours. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.
Where this stops working
At the start, a notebook by the roaster and a spreadsheet for prices are enough. Then you're roasting four origins for six cafés and an online shop, a new lot of the Ethiopian arrives at a new price, two people are roasting on different days, and the roast log has gaps. The cost of a bag becomes a guess, the green coffee nobody ordered in time runs out the week before a café's big order, and when a café asks which roast date their bags came from, someone flips through pages.
How TaroStack does it
TaroStack is built for exactly this chain: green coffee in by the lot, roasted in batches, packed into bags, and sold. Here's what it takes off your hands from the first week.
Green coffee comes in as lots, each with the importer's lot number, its date and the price you paid, with freight and other landed costs spread over what arrived. So the $6.10 a kilo is what that lot cost, not last season's number. A roast is a batch: record it and TaroStack takes the green from the lot you used, you enter what came out, and the batch shows its own roast loss and its actual cost against what the recipe said it should be. Nobody does the division by hand, and the same origin's new lot is costed on its own numbers.
Packing is a recipe too: the bag, the valve and the label come off stock, and each 12 oz or 5 lb bag carries the lot of the roast inside it, with its date. Your own batch history shows whether a roast yields what its recipe claims, so a drifting scale or a wetter lot shows up before it costs you a season. Lot labels print with a barcode, and everything works on a phone at the roaster, even with no signal.
Running out stops being a surprise. The reorder list shows each green coffee in days of cover at the rate you roast it, and flags where an order placed today would arrive too late, using how long that importer's deliveries really take, not what they promised. Planning turns your cafés' standing orders and your own sales history into what to roast and what to buy. And if an importer ever recalls a lot, one report shows every roast it went into, every café and customer who got those bags, and what's still on your shelves.
Cafés are customers with their own orders, picking lists and delivery notes, and every delivery records which roast went out. Margins are reported per product on what each bag cost you. If you sell online, TaroStack connects to your Shopify store, and to Square, so the bags on your website are the bags on your shelf.
Lots, expiry, receiving and recalls are on every plan, from $49 a month; roasts, packing recipes, true cost and planning are on Standard at $99. The first 30 days are free, with no credit card, and your green lots and products import from a spreadsheet. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.