A customer once decided we put grams on our bags so he could not work out what the coffee really cost him. He was not rude about it. He had the arithmetic half-done in his head, he had landed on the least generous reading of it, and he was not going to buy anything until somebody answered him.
I was able to end it with a number. We publish what we pay for green coffee, so I showed him, and the argument went out of the room in about a minute. He was not angry about the price. He was angry about not being able to see it.
That is the same problem a church has the first Sunday it puts a price on a cup. The number you charge matters far less than whether your people can see how you got there. A congregation will accept almost any price it understands and resent a cheap one it does not.
What does a cup of coffee actually cost a church?
Start with the only line you can look up, which is the coffee. A five-pound bag of ASCENT is $117 on this site, so the green and the roasting and the bag come to $23.40 a pound. On our church page we figure about thirty eight-ounce cups to the pound, which is the cup a church actually pours rather than the twelve-ounce cup a cafe sells. Divide it out and the coffee in a Sunday cup is about seventy-eight cents.
Seventy-eight cents is the whole of what most churches think they are pricing, and it is the smallest thing in the cup. The cup itself, the lid, the sleeve, the creamer, the sugar, the stir stick and the trash bag all come off your own invoices, and I am not going to guess at yours. Add them up once, on a real receipt, and you will have a number that is yours rather than mine.
Then hold that total against what your people already pay for coffee somewhere else, because that is the comparison they are running whether you invite it or not. A drip coffee down the road is two or three dollars. If your cup costs you a dollar and you charge two, your congregation is getting the cheapest cup in town and you are covering your own supplies. If your cup costs you a dollar and you charge four, somebody will do the math on a napkin and you will hear about it.
Espresso drinks move the whole picture, because the milk and the labor are most of the cost and the coffee is a fraction of it. We work through what a single drink costs to build in our piece on pricing a coffee shop menu, and the method is the same in a lobby as it is behind a counter. The difference is what you do with the answer.
Should a church price at cost, or above it?
There are three honest positions, and I have watched churches take all three.
Free. The coffee is hospitality, it comes out of a ministry line, and it stays a cost forever. It is the simplest thing to run and the easiest thing to be generous with, and it grows with attendance in a way nobody budgets for.
At cost. You charge what the cup costs you, rounded to something a volunteer can take without making change. In practice that means a flat dollar, or two, with a jar rather than a till, and it means you never have to price a drink twice. The coffee stops growing as a line item and it stops being a source of revenue in the same moment, which for most rooms is the trade the arithmetic actually supports.
Above cost. You are running a small business in a church building, and the margin funds something. That can work, and it brings a register, inventory, a volunteer holding cash, sales tax questions for your accountant, and a congregation that now judges your latte against the one they bought yesterday.
The decision between them belongs before the floor plan, not after it, and we say so at more length on our consulting page. Drifting is the expensive option, because a church that drifts ends up carrying the costs of a shop against the revenue of a giveaway.
What I would add to our own page is this: the choice is not really about money. It is about what you want the coffee to do. Free coffee is for getting a first-time guest to stand still for four minutes. Priced coffee is for funding something specific that you can name from the stage. If you cannot name the thing the margin pays for, you have not chosen the third option. You have chosen the second one and added a register to it.
Who has already answered this, and what did they say?
Two answers are in print and they are worth reading in the order they were written.
Danny Franks, who writes on church guest services, answers the question directly and deliberately without a price. He tells a church to find its own philosophy, to ask why it is serving coffee at all, and to settle donations versus pricing and basics versus premium as separate decisions. He is right that those are the two forks, and I would send a pastor to his post before mine on the culture question. It carries no numbers, and it is not trying to.
The closest thing to a number in print comes from Mike Bacile of The Daily Java, writing in Church Executive in 2017. He puts an average cafe drink at about $2.50 in profit and drip coffee at about $1, against equipment packages he prices from $18,000 for a church of 500 up past $30,000 for a church over 1,000. He installs those packages for a living, which is worth knowing while you read the figures and does not make them wrong.
What I would not do is take his profit figures and reverse them into a price. A dollar of profit on drip tells you what somebody else's room cleared. It does not tell you what your cup costs, and the cup is the only end of this you control.
How many people will actually buy?
This is where I disagree with the number in print, and I would rather name the disagreement than quietly use my own.
Bacile expects twenty to thirty percent of weekend attendees to buy something. In the church cafes I have watched, the share of average attendance that turns into a paid order runs a good deal lower than that, and the gap is not a rounding error. I have written the figure I use, and the Sunday arithmetic that comes out of it, in what a church coffee shop costs to start, along with the hedging it deserves. It is a rule of thumb from other people's rooms rather than a measurement out of our books.
Two explanations fit the gap and I cannot prove which one is doing the work. One is that his churches are larger, and a room of a thousand behaves differently from a room of two hundred. The other is that a percentage collected by the person selling the equipment and a percentage collected by the person watching the line are measured from different chairs.
Either way, the move is the same and it costs nothing. Count one Sunday before you price anything. Put a volunteer with a tally sheet beside the urn for a single service and count how many adults take a cup, and count the second cups separately, because a room of eighty people can easily pour a hundred and ten cups and that gap is the whole difference between your supply cost and your revenue. Count the service, not the whole morning, and count a normal Sunday rather than Easter. That one number is worth more than every figure in this article, including mine, because it is the only one measured in your room.
What does charging drag into your lobby?
The price is the easy part. What comes with it is the part churches underestimate.
A register means somebody handles money, which means two people count it, which means a policy, which means a person who owns that policy when the volunteer who wrote it moves away. Inventory means somebody notices the cups are low on Thursday rather than at 8:40 on Sunday. Paying changes the clock, too. People who have paid expect to be served at the speed of the shop they paid at last week, and a volunteer trained twenty minutes ago cannot hold that line. Charging tends to push a church toward one paid person on the bar sooner than it expected, which is a payroll line that a Sunday morning's takings generally will not carry.
Volunteer turnover is the constraint underneath all of it. The person you train in February will be gone by June, and the routine has to live on a card rather than in her head. That is true of free coffee as well. Charging just raises what it costs you when it fails.
None of that is an argument against charging. It is the bill that comes attached to it, and a church that reads the bill first usually makes a better decision than one that reads it in October.
Why publish the number?
We started publishing what we pay for green coffee because I saw Onyx Coffee Lab doing it. They are a roaster I admire, and I figured that if they were not afraid to be fully exposed about what the coffee costs them, I had no business being coy about it. Most of our customers do not care. The one who did was the one standing in front of me with the wrong arithmetic in his head, and he is the reason it was worth doing.
A church has the same customer, sitting in the fourth row, and he has a stronger claim than mine did. He gives to the general fund. If the lobby now sells him a four-dollar latte, some part of him wants to know whether he is being asked to fund the same room twice.
So print the number. A small card beside the register that says what a cup costs the church, what it costs him, and what the difference pays for will end that conversation before it starts, in the same minute mine ended. If the difference pays for nothing in particular, you have learned something about your price rather than about your congregation. And the card does a second job you will not notice for a year: it survives the volunteer who wrote it. The reasoning behind a price is the first thing a church loses when the person who set it moves away, and a card on the counter is the cheapest place to keep it.
And you cannot do this halfway. A church that publishes a cost and rounds it in its own favor has done something worse than charging quietly, because now the number is on a card with your name under it.
When is charging the wrong answer?
When the coffee is already free and already working.
If your urn is clean, the coffee is fresh on Sunday morning, and people stand around with a cup in their hand talking to somebody they did not come in with, you have the outcome. Putting a price on it buys you a register, a counting policy and a slower line in exchange for takings that will not hire anybody. I have told churches to fix the urn and spend the money on something else, and that conversation costs us a project every time I have it.
It is also worth being clear about where I sit. We sell coffee to churches, so I have an interest in your program existing and none at all in what you charge for it. If you raise your price, the money stays with you. The number in this article is our price to you, and it is not what your cup costs once your volunteers have poured it, your lids are on it and somebody has emptied the trash.
And there is one question I have not answered here, because it is a real one and it belongs to a different article: who should own the cafe in the first place. A church that has settled that question will find pricing easy, and a church that has not will keep re-litigating the price because the price is standing in for the ownership. We worked through the four structures in who should own a church coffee shop.
Count one Sunday. Price the cup off a receipt rather than off a feeling. Then put the number where your people can see it, and let them argue with the arithmetic instead of with you.
If you are costing a cup for your church: ASCENT is $117 for a five-pound bag, which works out to $23.40 a pound, and it is the coffee the arithmetic above is built on. We grind it to your brewer at no charge if you tell us the model. If you would rather talk the whole thing through before you price anything, that is what our consulting is for.
