The roaster's half of a supplier switch is measured in days. Your half runs closer to two weeks, and every hour of it is paid for at your own grinder by people you are already paying.
On our end an account starts with an application, one conversation about volume, grind and delivery, samples if you want to taste before you commit, and an approval that is normally issued within 24 hours. Then your first order joins the next Wednesday roast. That is the whole of it, and none of it touches your bar. Your end is the part with a cost attached: shots into the sink while somebody finds the new espresso recipe, a batch brewer that needs a fresh ratio, an opener who has to be told what changed before they decide the grinder is broken, and a retail shelf that looks different to the regular who buys a bag every Friday. Our own page for cafes puts the real dial-in cost at the following week's corrections rather than the first afternoon's, which is why I said two weeks and not one.
None of that is a reason to stay where you are. It is a reason to put a date on it, tell the people who will absorb it what is coming, and stop treating a supplier change as a purchase decision when it is an operations project with a coffee attached.
How long does switching coffee suppliers actually take?
Work backward from your roast day, not forward from your decision.
We roast to order every Wednesday. We do not roast into a warehouse and pull from stock, so an order does not ship the afternoon you place it; it joins a roast. That is a genuine constraint and it belongs to us rather than to you, but it decides your calendar all the same. A changeover has a date on it instead of a moment, and the date is a Wednesday.
The sequence that works, in the order the work actually lands:
- Taste it on your own equipment first. Not at a cupping table, not from a description. Samples are normally part of getting started with us, and the reason to insist on them is that a coffee reads differently through nine bars of pressure and six ounces of milk than it does in a cup on a bench. Ask for enough to pull real shots, not enough to taste politely.
- Settle volume, format and grind before you are approved. Those three answers are what your pricing is built from, and getting them right up front is the difference between one conversation and three.
- Put your first order on a week you are staffed for. Not the week of a holiday, not the week your best barista is away, and not the week the machine is due for service.
- Dial the espresso on a slow morning. Whoever is going to own the recipe should be the one who builds it, and they should build it with time rather than with a line in front of them.
- Move the batch brewer second. It is a smaller job than espresso and it is easier to isolate, so doing it on a separate day keeps two unknowns from arguing with each other.
- Leave the retail shelf until the drinks are right. A customer who buys a bag of something they tasted in the cup is a much easier conversation than one who buys a bag of something you are still deciding about.
Six steps is two working weeks in a real shop, not an afternoon. The shops that find a changeover brutal are usually the ones that did all six on the same Tuesday.
What does the changeover cost your bar?
Coffee, labor and a week of your drinks being slightly wrong. Only one of those three is on an invoice.
The coffee number we publish for our own account holders is fifteen to thirty shots to land a new espresso, plus milk drinks to confirm it holds under steam, which comes to roughly 300 to 600 grams at a 19 gram dose, and closer to a full 2lb bag once you add the following week's corrections. Put that beside your retail shelf price and it is not nothing: a 2lb bag of coffee going down the drain is real money to an independent, and it is the cheapest part of the switch. The expensive part is the person standing at the grinder while it happens. That is a paid hour of somebody's morning, several times over, in the part of the day when they would otherwise be serving.
Then there is the part nobody invoices and everybody feels. For about a week, the drip tastes like a slightly different coffee to the person who has ordered the same thing every morning for two years, because it is. Some of them will say so. A few of them will order something else for a while. That settles, and it settles faster if somebody behind the counter can say what changed and why, which is a decision you make before the first bag lands rather than after the third complaint.
Anchor the whole thing against what you already lose to a bad week of something else. A changeover costs about what an unplanned grinder failure costs you, except that you get to pick the date. That is the entire argument for planning it.
Should you run both roasters at the same time?
For one week, yes, if you can afford the shelf space and the second hopper.
An overlap week is the cheapest insurance in this whole process and almost nobody buys it, because it looks like paying twice. What it actually buys you is the ability to stop. If the new espresso will not hold under milk, or the batch brew goes flat in the server by the third cup, you put the old coffee back on Thursday morning and nothing about your Saturday is affected. Without the overlap, the only way back is an emergency order from a roaster you have just told you were leaving, which is a phone call I would not want to make either.
Run it like this. Keep one week of the incumbent's coffee on hand. Dial the new espresso on the second grinder if you have one, or on a morning you can afford to lose if you do not. Serve the new coffee for a full week including a weekend, because a Saturday rush tells you things a Tuesday will not. Then decide.
If you are carrying decaf, remember you need a grinder for it regardless, so the second-grinder problem is usually a question of sequence rather than of capital. Two grinders is the floor on a bar that serves decaf at all, and a third for batch brew if the counter allows it.
What do you owe the roaster you are leaving?
Notice, and the truth about why.
I have an obvious interest in you switching, so take this with the weight that deserves. But I have watched the other side of this, and the reason it matters is practical rather than sentimental. There are cafes on this coast that never returned a call, not because the coffee was wrong but because somebody else had already been standing in their kitchen for two years and the relationship was real. A local business buys on relationship, and that is not a statement about charm. It is a statement about who fixes a short delivery on a Thursday.
So the roaster you are leaving is not a vendor you are cancelling. They are a business in your town who will still be in your town, who knows your machine, and who might be the person you call when your new supply has a bad month. Give them a date rather than a silence. Tell them plainly what you were not getting, because half the time the answer is something they could have fixed and did not know about, and the other half it is something they cannot fix and they would rather know. I would rather be told.
And do not let the new roaster make you the bad guy on their behalf. If somebody selling to you is enthusiastic about how badly your current roaster is doing, that is a preview of how they will talk about you.
What happens on the new roaster's end after you say yes?
Less than you would think, which is why the timeline belongs to you.
Here is our side, in full. The application asks for your business name and address, what kind of business you run, what you brew on, and roughly how much coffee you go through in a month. Somebody reads it and follows up, because half of what we need to know is not on the form. That call settles volume, format, grind and whether you are inside the forty mile delivery radius, and it is where your pricing gets answered specifically. Approval creates a B2B account with a wholesale catalog and your own prices attached. After that you sign in and order, and the order joins the next Wednesday roast. The rest of what an account includes sits on our wholesale program page.
Two things about that worth saying out loud, because they cut against us.
We grade roast color with an Agtron on every batch, and that is not a flourish. It is the practice that lets me hold a coffee you approved in March at the same place in September, and it costs us the option of quietly improving a coffee you have already built a recipe around. We would rather hold what you signed off on than surprise you with something better. If that sounds conservative, it is, and it is conservative on purpose: your recipe is the asset, not our curve.
And we roast one day a week. That is good for you in the way that matters most, which is that what arrives was green coffee a few days earlier rather than a few months earlier. It is bad for you in the way that shows up on a Thursday, which is that the schedule is a schedule. Ask any roaster you are considering what their roast day is and whether they keep it when it is inconvenient. That answer tells you more than a price sheet will.
When should you not switch coffee suppliers?
When the coffee is fine and the deliveries land.
Better coffee on its own is a bad reason to move, because the improvement lands on the cup and the cost lands on your labor line, and those are not the same ledger. What justifies a changeover is a problem you can name: a profile that keeps moving under the same coffee name, deliveries you cannot plan around, a roaster who has opened a shop in your market, or a price you can no longer make work at your menu. If you cannot name one, you are about to spend two weeks buying a marginal improvement in a drink most of your customers take with milk.
Here are the places we are honestly the wrong answer, so you can rule us out cheaply rather than expensively.
- If you use a bag or two a month. An account is more process than it is worth at that volume, and buying our coffee at retail is simpler and probably cheaper. We will tell you that on the call rather than after you have applied.
- If you buy by the pallet and price is the only variable. A national supplier will beat us, and you should go and buy from them.
- If you sit well outside forty miles. Delivery inside that radius is free and it arrives on our vehicle, which is the part of this a national supplier cannot copy. Outside it we ship, plenty of accounts work that way, and the tradeoff is real: a shipped bag spends days in transit that a delivered bag spends on your shelf.
- If you need a standing custom blend at volume. What we roast is almost entirely single origin, and the current lineup is on our coffee collection. Ask, and tell us what the coffee has to do, but do not assume it is on the shelf.
One more, because it is the one that catches people. Check whether your current coffee is tied to your espresso machine. Where equipment is on loan against a bean agreement, the coffee is not the thing you are actually cancelling, and the exit sits in a contract rather than in a conversation. Read yours before you take a sample from anybody, including me.
What does a good changeover look like a month later?
Nobody mentions it.
That is the whole benchmark. A month after a switch that went well, the recipe on the card is the one the bar actually pulls, the opener stopped thinking about it in week two, the regular who buys a bag on Friday buys the new one, and the only person still aware a change happened is you. If you are still adjusting in week five, the problem is rarely the coffee. It is usually that the recipe never got written down, or that it got written down by somebody who no longer opens.
Your dial-in is only ever as good as your most recent hire, which is the real argument for a supply you can plan around rather than a supply that is marginally better on paper. A coffee that arrives on a day you know, ground the way you asked, graded so it is the same coffee next quarter, is worth more to a bar than a cup score you cannot reproduce on a Saturday. What you are protecting is the drink tasting the same on a Tuesday as it did on Saturday.
If you are reading this because you are opening rather than switching, you have the better version of this problem, with no recipes to rebuild and no incumbent to leave, and the sequence for opening a shop covers the coffee decision in its place. And if you are the roaster on the other side of one of these conversations, the view from your chair is a different piece entirely, and it is the one that explains why better coffee alone has never been enough to move an account.
If you want to price a switch properly: tell us what you pull shots on, what you brew batch on, and roughly what you go through in a month. Samples are normally part of getting started, approvals are normally issued within 24 hours, and inside forty miles of the roastery delivery is free. Start at apply for a wholesale account, or read what a bar gets from us first on wholesale coffee for cafes.
