How to Start a Coffee Roasting Business

Most people want to start their own coffee roasting business because they love the drink. But to succeed, you’ll need in-depth knowledge of your product and the coffee roasting industry.

You might already have this. But if you don’t, we suggest going on a few training courses to learn the ropes. There are tonnes out there, covering subjects like:

Green sourcing: Understanding bean origins, varietals, processing methods, and how to select quality beans. Sourcing high-quality green beans is the foundation for roasting excellent coffee and building a strong brand reputation.

Coffee roasting techniques: Learning roast curves, development stages, heat transfer, and how to control flavor profiles through roast levels. This lets you develop consistent flavor profiles that meet customer expectations.

Sensory skills and cupping: Developing your palate to identify aromas, flavors, defects, and roast quality through standardized tasting methods. This enables you to identify quality, spot defects, and refine your offerings based on flavor.

Coffee brewing methods: Hands-on training with pour-over, espresso, French press, Aeropress, and other brewing techniques. Learning this helps you roast beans to suit customer habits and improve the overall drinking experience.

Quality control: Learning how to assess consistency, troubleshoot off-flavors, and create repeatable roast profiles ensures every bag meets your standards, builds trust, and reduces costly product waste.

Equipment maintenance: Best practices for cleaning and maintaining grinders, roasters, and espresso machines. Proper maintenance keeps equipment running efficiently, reduces downtime, and extends its life.

Packaging and storage: Understanding degassing, shelf life, and choosing packaging to preserve freshness. This protects coffee freshness and flavor, helping you deliver a consistently great product to customers.

Business fundamentals: Covering branding, marketing, pricing strategies, customer experience, and scaling your coffee roastery. These are essential for turning a passion for coffee into a profitable operation.

A good example of where you can learn these skills is the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA). It provides a structured, globally recognized education system through its Coffee Skills Program.

It’s aimed at aspiring roasters, baristas, coffee shop owners, buyers, and anyone building a career in the specialty coffee industry. The courses are taught in major U.S. cities and each module is available in three levels: foundation, intermediate and professional.

☕ Roast as a hobby first

Many successful coffee entrepreneurs started by roasting for friends and family for 1–2 years before going commercial. If you’ve no experience in roasting, then consider doing the same - it’ll help you put the skills you learned in your training courses into action.

Researching the market enables you to identify the type of product and business that is likely to be successful.

Things to consider include:

Study local competitors

Visit their coffee shops and roasteries, take a look at their pricing, branding, and packaging. Try their coffee and assess the customer experience. What do they do well? What could be improved? Don’t just study what your competitors are doing; look for gaps they’re missing and think about how you can offer something different or better.

Analyze online competitors

Do the same online. Check out roasters selling via sites like Amazon, as well as those selling subscriptions, like Trade Coffee or Mistobox. Read their reviews and see what customers like and dislike about them. Check out their shipping policies and consider if you could offer more attractive ones.

Create surveys

Send out online surveys to learn about people’s coffee preferences. Creating the survey is easy, but finding people to fill it out is harder. Share your survey on social media and offer an incentive for those who complete it, such as a free bag of coffee.

You could also conduct surveys in person at coffee shops, but make sure to get the owner’s permission first.

Define your ideal customer

Your ideal customers are the people who are most likely to buy your coffee. For example, are you targeting specialty coffee drinkers who seek a unique taste experience or budget-conscious individuals looking for a caffeine boost on their way to work?

Either way, creating a profile of your customer will help ensure all aspects of your business are geared towards them. This profile should include:

Demographics (age, gender)
Budget
Buying behavior
Preferred communication channels
Pain points
Occupation
Taste preferences
Values
Lifestyle

Use your market research to get to know your ideal customer, so you can create products that match what they want and need.

The ultimate aim of your market research is to come up with a broad outline of what you want to sell, who you want to sell it to, how you will sell it, and what will make your product unique.

This will help guide your decision-making. For example, if you do decide to sell to cost-conscious people who just want to grab a coffee on the way into work, then spending lots of money on high-end beans probably isn’t worth your while.

Next, it’s time to do some financial planning. You need to consider your setup costs, ongoing costs, the profit you’ll make, and any financing you require (plus how to repay it).

Begin by calculating the following costs:

Equipment

Equipment costs can be high for coffee roasting startups. At the very least, you’ll need:

A roaster: $10k–$150k
A sample roaster:$1k–$7k
Green beans: $2.75 to $15 per pound
Scales: $15–$300
Grinder: $300–$3,000
Coffee bags: $0.10 to $1.00+ per bag

However, you might also want to buy things like a moisture reader, color meter, or bean probe.

As you can see, the coffee roasting machine is the greatest expense, but its cost varies widely.

For consistent, professional results, consider a commercial roaster like the Mill City Roasters MCR-6. This costs around $20,000.

A more affordable option might be the Hottop KN-8828B-2K+. This only has a 300g capacity, but it’s far more affordable and realistic for start-ups.

Premises

If you’re planning to run a small operation and you have space at home (for example, in your garage), then you might not need to invest in premises.

But if you don’t, then you’ll need to consider where your coffee roasting business will be based and how much that will cost.

Incubator kitchens can be a good way to reduce fixed costs. These are purpose-built, rentable kitchen areas that give food-based start-ups a lower-risk way to get started.

For example, Grand Rapids Downtown Market incubator kitchen has space available for as little as $10 per hour.

Permits and business costs

You’ll need to pay for a range of permits and licenses depending on which state your business is located in.

We’ll go into more detail about these later in the article. But in general, you can expect to pay around $1,500–$2,000, with some costs recurring annually.

Typical permits required can include:

✔️ General Business License

✔️ Legal Entity Setup

✔️ FDA Registration

✔️ Seller’s Permit

✔️ Resale Certificate

✔️ Certificate of Occupancy

✔️ EPA Air Permit (if you roast more than 1 million pounds of green beans annually)

✔️ Employer Identification Number (if you employ staff)

💡Insurance matters

You’ll also need to buy insurance for your business. For example, many farmers' markets won’t let you sell unless you have public liability cover.

Once you have added up your costs, consider how much capital you have available and how much finance you can obtain.

Try to predict your sales and calculate how long it will take for your business to break even and when it will start turning a profit.

Map out different sales scenarios and calculate how much you’ll need to make to stay afloat and grow.

If you don’t like what you see, then look for ways to reduce costs. Perhaps you could buy a cheaper roaster or less expensive beans.

Next, you need to acquire your main ingredient: green coffee beans.

Choosing the right beans doesn’t just result in a good cup of coffee. It also shapes your brand identity, so make sure you do some research before firing up your roaster.

There are several ways you can source beans, including:

Importers and traders: Middlemen who buy beans from farmers and ship them. They have a good selection to choose from. This approach makes it easy to sample coffees and set up regular deliveries.

Coffee cooperatives: Groups of smallhold farmers who sell beans collectively. Buying from co-ops often supports fair pricing and community development.

Buy direct from producers: This can give you more control over quality. It also enables you to highlight the story of your beans and ethical sourcing as a selling point. However, this option takes more effort as it may involve travel, language barriers and setting up your own logistics.

When choosing beans, consider the following factors:

What do your customers care about? Do they want intricate flavor profiles? Or just a smooth, rich cup to start the day?
Your roast style affects which beans you should source. Light roasts work well with high-acid, complex beans, such as those from East Africa, while darker roasts pair better with more balanced or chocolatey profiles, like those from Brazil or Colombia.
Building direct relationships with farmers or cooperatives not only ensures a more ethical supply chain. It can also give you access to higher-quality beans and unique lots. You’ll have more control, more traceability, and a better story to tell.
Coffee is a seasonal crop, and bean availability shifts throughout the year. Planning ahead can help keep your menu fresh and your supply steady.
Make sure you get samples of beans and test out several roasting approaches.

Let’s assume you’ve purchased your roaster, or at least your sample roaster, and you’re ready to start making great coffee.

It’s best to do some product testing to begin with. Create at least one prototype and see what people think of it. Here are some of the ways to do this:

Share with friends and family
Give it to local specialty coffee shops (they can try it themselves and/or give it to customers)
Give it away at local farmers’ markets

Ask questions about your prototype, like: “What do you think of the aroma?”, “How would you describe the flavor profile?”, “What’s your overall impression? This tells you if people like it and why.

If people like it then try stepping up a level and trying to sell it. For example, if you were giving away free samples at the farmers market, try coming back the following week and selling bags at a special introductory rate. If people are still interested, then you know you are on to a winner.

Now you have a product, it’s time to choose how you will sell it to customers. Coffee roasters have three main options:

Sell coffee through an intermediary, like grocery stores or coffee shops.
Open a coffee shop to sell coffee directly to customers.
Sell coffee directly to consumers (D2C) online.

For new coffee roasting businesses, the direct-to-consumer (D2C) online model often presents the best starting point.

Here’s why:

⚠️ Selling through an intermediary can be difficult if you don’t have an established brand and a proven track record of successful sales. You’ll also need sharp negotiation skills to get a good deal from retail outlets.

⚠️Running a coffee shop demands a lot of time and adds extra overheads, which means you’ll have fewer resources to dedicate to roasting. We recommend starting with one business first, then adding the other later if you decide to expand.

⚠️ Selling coffee directly to consumers offline via farmers’ markets or your own premises is a good way to start, but it limits your customer base.

✔️ Selling direct to consumers online, on the other hand, offers a range of benefits, including:

You can reach a vast global audience, as customers can interact with your brand and buy your products from the comfort of their own homes.
It’s also more scalable, as website packages, marketing tools, and delivery costs tend to be lower than those for premises and staff.
You get to keep more of the revenue you make, rather than having to share a chunk with intermediaries.
Because you interact directly with customers, you can build closer relationships with them. This allows you to better understand their needs and improve your customer service over time.

Here’s a quick overview:

Add a subscription service

Coffee is made for subscriptions. People drink it constantly, it disappears fast, and if you’re anything like us, running out is a full-blown crisis.

Selling coffee subscriptions offers a whole range of benefits:

More stable cash flow
Easier to forecast demand and manage stock
Customers connect with your brand regularly, improving its recognition
Upselling and cross-selling is easier
Customer loyalty is higher than for one-off purchases
Convenient for customers: they never run out of coffee.

A website is critical to any business, but it’s particularly important if you’ve chosen to sell D2C online.

Not only is it your “shop window to the world”, it also connects and hosts many critical business functions like payments, customer support, marketing and more.

Because of this, finding a platform that works for you is critical. Popular options include:

However, if you want to sell coffee subscriptions, then these platforms may not be the best options. That’s because they offer limited functionality out of the box.

For example, Shopify only enables subscriptions if you download third-party plug-ins. This creates several issues, including:

Extra cost and setup time requirements
Limited customization of workflows and designs
They don’t integrate well with Shopify’s built-in checkout
If the third-party app goes down or expires, then so does your subscription capability
Poor integration makes adding features like flexible delivery, trial periods, or bundling complex
As your business grows, you may have to add more and more plug-ins, making your website bloated and slow

The solution is to use a platform specially designed for subscription ecommerce, like Subbly.

Subbly enables you to create a fast, professional ecommerce website with everything required to sell subscriptions built in.

This includes:

✔️ Flexible billing/shipping: Customize delivery schedules (weekly, monthly, etc.).

✔️ Customer portal: Subscribers can pause, skip, or swap anytime.

✔️ Preference surveys: Collect roast or grind preferences at checkout.

✔️ Churn reduction tools: Built-in cancellation flows and retention offers.

✔️ One-click upsells: Let customers add extras to their next box.

✔️ Gifting options: Offer prepaid or fixed-length gift subscriptions.

✔️Build-a-box: Let customers customize their subscription contents.

✔️ Automations: Trigger emails, discounts, and more; no coding needed.

✔️ Analytics: Use subscription-specific insights like MRR and churn to track success.

☕ Subbly: trusted by roasters

Subbly is trusted by successful roasters like Pure Roasters, Sacred Bean, and Hatch.

In fact, Pure Roasters grew its recurring revenue 3x in 6 months using Subbly’s subscription tools.

Sign up for a free trial to find out how Subbly can help you sell coffee subscriptions.

Best of all, Subbly includes pre-designed website templates specifically for companies selling coffee subscriptions directly to customers, allowing you to get up and running even quicker.

Check out the template Hatch used to see it in action!

Coffee shops can sell subscriptions too, with Subbly Pass

Subbly isn’t just for online coffee sellers. It also works for coffee shops. With Subbly Pass, your regular customers can pre-pay for their favorite coffees and then simply scan their app at the counter.

It’s quick, convenient, allows you to offer loyalty benefits, and enables you to send promotions straight to their device.

It’s an excellent way for businesses to sell subscriptions in person and not just online

All coffee roasters sell variations on the same product. That’s why branding is essential; it helps customers understand what your brand and product are about, giving them reasons to buy from you among the mass of competitors.

Things to consider when creating your coffee brand:

Positioning: What makes you different? It could be single-origin roasts from lesser-known regions or a bold new take on coffee culture. Make it clear and own it fully.
Voice and tone: Are you casual, bold, refined, or a mix? Choose a style that suits you and ensure it is consistent in every post, label, and customer interaction.
Visual identity: Your logo, colors, and typography should be instantly recognizable and cohesive. Make it memorable, not just good-looking.
Story: Why does your brand exist? Whether it started with a backpacking trip across Ethiopia or a childhood obsession with coffee, a real story gives people a reason to care.
Name: Keep it simple and easy to say. Ideally, it should fit naturally into a conversation, like “Have you tried [your brand] yet?”
Values: Be clear about what you stand for. If you value sustainability, quality, or transparency, show it in your actions as well as your words.
Experience: Every detail matters, from the first click on your website to the moment someone opens the box. Make every part of the journey feel intentional.

A good example is Death Wish Coffee. It positions itself as the world’s strongest coffee, focusing on its extreme caffeine content. This differentiates it from brands that focus on subtle flavor notes and an artisanal vibe.

The company is aimed at hardcore coffee drinkers, night shift workers and people who want to get a buzz from their drink.

With a skull and crossbones as its logo, the brand also stands out for its edgy visuals and tone of voice.

Packaging isn’t just a canvas for your brand. It’s also crucial to ensure your product remains fresh and is easy to store and ship.

Cost is a critical factor, but there are other things to consider too, including:

Sustainability: Packaging generates a considerable amount of waste. Sustainable packaging can help underline your environmental credentials.

Degassing valves: Fresh roasted coffee beans release carbon dioxide. Degassing valves allow this to escape without allowing oxygen to enter.

Reusable zippers: These keep oxygen out after the zipper is opened. This is especially important for ground coffee, which is sensitive to oxygen.

Storage and shipping: Use light, flexible pouches to save space and reduce shipping costs, while ensuring they are robust enough to withstand damage.

Labelling: Details like roast date, origin information, and brewing notes capture your coffee’s provenance, adding authenticity and trust.

There are many wholesalers out there selling coffee bags. Here’s a good example of a packaging specialist in the UK selling fresh coffee packaging.

If you’re selling from a website, then delivering your product is a large part of the customer experience. You should therefore find a reliable delivery partner.

When reviewing options, ask to see the company’s record in terms of speed of delivery, returns, damages, and prices.

Compare how fast different providers can deliver to customers in a certain location. Find out if they offer special add-on services like faster priority mail.

Customers should be able to track their orders and get regular updates on progress easily. They should also provide excellent support, so that if one of your customers has a concern, it is quickly addressed, leaving them satisfied.

Like branding, marketing is critical in competitive industries like coffee. It ensures the right people hear about your brand and are compelled to buy your products.

There’s a ton of marketing channels available, including:

Email marketing
Social media
PR
Sponsorship
Print advertising
Online advertising
Content marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO)

You’ll probably need to use all of them to some extent. The best way to plan your campaign is to think about where your target audience is present.

For example, if your ideal customers are professionals, then you might promote your brand via email and LinkedIn.

If you’re targeting a younger audience, then you might focus on social media advertising.

Here’s a good example of a marketing campaign from Death Wish Coffee. They have published several unusual coffee-based recipes on TikTok. Their target audience finds these compelling because:

They look delicious
It’s an unusual way to use their coffee
The recipes are quick and simple to make at home

You’ve nailed your roast. You’ve found your audience. Now it’s time to build a business that keeps customers coming back, cup after cup.

With Subbly, you can do just that. It’s a subscription-first ecommerce platform designed to help roasters launch, grow, and streamline their coffee business. From flexible delivery options to powerful automation tools, Subbly gives you everything you need to turn one-time buyers into loyal subscribers, without relying on clunky third-party apps.

Need proof? See how Pure Roasters Coffee is brewing success with Subbly at the heart of their operations.

Or you can sign up for a free trial to find out how Subbly can help you sell coffee subscriptions.

How to Start a Coffee Roasting Business (Step-by-Step Guide)

1. Become an expert