The smallest amount of green coffee you can buy is whatever unit somebody else already broke the coffee into. Across most of the green trade that unit is one full bag, and a full bag runs between 59 and 70 kilos depending on where the coffee grew, which is 130 to 154 pounds on a warehouse scale. Below the bag there are boxes, because importers built them: 22 pounds, 50 pounds, 65 pounds. Above it there is a pallet, and above the pallet a futures contract of 37,500 pounds. You pick a rung on that ladder. You do not get to set the spacing between the rungs.
So the number that moves as a roastery grows is not really how much coffee you buy. It is which rung you can absorb, and therefore which sellers will deal with you at all. Inheritance opened accounts with four different importers in the eleven months between October 2023 and September 2024, and the format each one sold in is most of the reason why.
Who sets the minimum, you or the importer?
The importer sets it, and mostly by accident. Green is traded, weighed, insured and arbitrated in bags, so the bag is the unit of account long before it is a unit of sale. The Green Coffee Association's weighing guidance is a good look at how literal that is: on arrival a warehouse does not weigh the lot, it weighs a sample of bags and counts the rest. Their published best practice is that "normally, 3 bags are weighed for lots less than 500 bags, 5 bags for any lots 501 to 999 bags, and 8 bags for lots of 1000 bags or more," and that the resulting certificate carries the gross weight, the average tare, the calculated tare and the net. Tare is the weight of the empty sack. An industry that computes an average empty-sack weight is an industry whose smallest countable object is a sack.
Which is why the honest answer to "what is your minimum order" is usually two sentences that sound like they disagree. Cafe Imports publishes both of them in one line in its ordering FAQ: "While we have no minimum order, we trade solely in full-bag quantities of coffee." Royal Coffee says something similar about its own catalog in its buying guide, that "there are no minimum orders on full-size bags, Crown Jewel boxes, or Royal Gems," and then a 10-bag or 10-box floor for international orders. Nobody is stopping you buying one unit — the unit is the constraint.
Two things this is not. It is not the minimum on your machine: the minimum batch size for a coffee roaster is a question about what a drum will roast well, and the two numbers have nothing to do with each other beyond the word. And it is not an argument for buying direct instead. The whole function of an importer is that somebody else already committed to the container, financed it and cleared it, which is a service worth paying for at our size and one we have written about in what direct trade coffee actually means.
How much does a bag of green coffee weigh?
It depends on the country, and the differences are big enough to change an order. Chris Kornman at Royal Coffee keeps the best public table of this, and I use it rather than guessing. His bag weights by origin put it this way: the 132.28-pound bag "is exactly 60 kg," which he notes is the International Coffee Organization's standard for statistical purposes; "the next most common size is 69 kg (152.12 lbs), used by most American nations, including Mexico and all of Central America (except Panama)"; and "the final 'primary' coffee bag size comes from Colombia, and is 70 kg (154.32 lbs)."
Three numbers, and a 22-pound spread between the smallest and the largest. Order one bag of Ethiopia and one bag of Colombia in the same week and you have bought 132 pounds of one and 154 of the other without asking for either figure. Hawaii ships at 45.36 kilos, which is 100 pounds even. Monsooned Malabar from India comes in 50-kilo bags. Kornman also records that "many other non-standard bags exist, including half bags like 35kgs from Colombia and vac-sealed bags and boxes like some Kenyas in 30kg units," which is the first sign that the ladder has rungs below the bag.
Panama is the exception worth memorizing, because it sits in Central America and ships at 60 kilos rather than 69. Kornman flags it in the sentence itself, and his table confirms it. If you order a Panamanian coffee expecting the regional weight, a single bag arrives about 20 pounds lighter than you planned for.
The sack itself is woven, and the association's packaging statement asks for "sisal, henequen, jute, burlap, or similar woven material." Jute breathes, which is why a bag of green in a dry room behaves the way it does over months rather than weeks. We have written separately about how long a bag of green lasts once it is yours, and that piece is the other half of this one: it answers how much you should buy, while this answers what you are able to.
What can you buy below a full bag?
Boxes, and they are somebody's product decision rather than a trade standard. Royal breaks selected lots into 22-pound Crown Jewel boxes and 50-pound Royal Gems boxes. Cafe Imports runs a separate small-format brand, La Bodega, whose coffees come in 50-pound GrainPro-lined bags shipped free by ground. Genuine Origin, which is Volcafe's online arm, sells spot coffee in 65-pound boxes, and Rob Sulkow explained the reasoning on their own blog: the boxes exist to be "easy-to-handle" and they are "entirely free to ship within the continental U.S."
That last clause is the one to sit with, because it runs backwards from what you would expect. A 65-pound box often ships free. A 154-pound bag gets a freight quote, arrives strapped to a wooden pallet, and needs somebody with a pallet jack or a strong afternoon at the receiving end. The small format is not the expensive one. It is the one the importer has already paid to make convenient, and you are buying that convenience whether you notice it or not.
What you give up is choice. A box catalog is necessarily a subset of a bag catalog, because somebody had to decide which lots were worth breaking down and pay a person to do it. Crown Jewels are a selection Royal made. Buy at the bottom of the ladder and you are shopping from a shorter list.
How does the minimum change as a roastery grows?
Ours changed four times, and the dates are on our own partner pages rather than in my memory. In October 2023 we bought our first bag of green from Sweet Maria's, for a plain reason: they sell in single-digit pounds, and twenty pounds was a normal order for a roastery that had existed for weeks. In February 2024 we added Genuine Origin, whose 65-pound box was the next size up we could actually finish. In August 2024 we started buying from Unravel Merchants, who pack vacuum-sealed lots in 30-kilo boxes. In September 2024 we added Yellow Rooster, who warehouse in Florida and will ship a pallet, a half bag, or a small freight shipment depending on what you ask for.
Eleven months, four companies, and all four partner pages are still live on our own site. The rung and the counterparty move together, because the format is the thing being sold almost as much as the coffee is, and no importer is going to invent a size for you.
The honest reading of our own sequence is that it is not a clean climb. A 65-pound box and a 30-kilo box are within a pound and a half of each other, so the third account we opened did not buy us any more weight than the second one had. What it bought was a different kind of lot in different packaging, from a company that breaks Ethiopian coffee down into vacuum-sealed units. That is the thing to take from a ladder like this one, and it took me a while to see it: the rungs are not evenly spaced in pounds, because they were never designed as a ladder. They are four companies' separate answers to the question of how small a piece of a container they are willing to sell, and the gaps between them are accidents of somebody else's warehouse.
The one genuine half-step between a box and a bag is the half bag, and it is the only sub-bag format I found in two places rather than in one company's catalog. Kornman lists 35-kilo half bags from Colombia; Mill City Roasters records the same 35-kilo half-bag format from a Colombian producer it works with. Seventy-seven pounds, and it exists because somebody at origin agreed to split the sack before it shipped.
Steve Green at Mill City Roasters attaches volumes to the rungs, in a piece on green coffee buying basics from October 2023. His version: "If I'm clocking off something like 100 pounds a month and I want to scale, I should be investing in at least a couple of full bags of each coffee. If I'm doing 500 pounds a week, I should be looking at a minimum of 6 to 10 bags of each." Run those against the weights above and the arithmetic is unforgiving. Six bags of a Colombian coffee is 926 pounds of one coffee, in your building, in one delivery.
What does a minimum order cost you in cash rather than per pound?
Take whatever your per-pound green number is and multiply it by 154. That is the cash a single Colombian bag removes from your bank and parks in a corner of a dry room, where it will sit until you have roasted and sold your way through it. Per-pound thinking makes the bag look cheap. The bag is not a price — it is a position.
I turned down a coffee on exactly that arithmetic. An importer reached out asking if I would buy from his company, and I wanted to say yes, but the coffees tasted like others I had already had from neighboring countries and the price did not survive the trip. By the time his coffee landed at my roastery it would have cost around $12 a pound green. I have had a coffee on my shelf more expensive than that, so the figure on its own was not the problem. The problem was that $12 had to compete with every other coffee available at $11 or $12, and roughly $2 to $3 of his number was shipping. One factor, and it made a coffee I liked impossible to buy. Those were that deal's numbers and not a rule about freight, and I would not want anybody quoting them back as one.
Can you contract for more coffee than you take delivery of?
Yes, and this is the part of the trade that small roasters find out about last. Green at the bag level is not only sold off a shelf; it is contracted, and delivery is a schedule. Steve Green again, on the same page: "That doesn't mean I have to take delivery all 10 bags today. I can contract for 10 bags, take a couple now, pay a minimal storage fee monthly for the balance, take delivery, and be invoiced for maybe 2 per month for 5 months." He is direct about why that matters, calling it "a good way to manage your cash flow."
Not everybody works that way, and the difference is genuinely useful to know before you ask. Genuine Origin's model is the opposite end: "there are no warehouse storage fees and no contracts," and instead you can "place green coffee orders now and, during checkout, select shipping dates up to 90 days in the future" paying when the coffee ships. One approach charges you a little to hold coffee you have committed to. The other holds nothing and lets you date the box. Both are reasonable; they are answers to different cash-flow problems.
What do spot, afloat and forward actually mean on an offer list?
Royal defines the three positions plainly in its own ordering guide. Spot: "the coffee is currently located in one of our warehouses and ready to ship out." Afloat: "coffee is in transit from one of our origin ports to our warehouse." Future shipment: "the coffee has been contracted but has not yet left the port." Cafe Imports describes the same spread as spot orders, period contracting over a duration, and forward-booking coffees that have not arrived. For a roastery buying a box or a bag at a time, spot is the whole world. The other two become available at about the point where the bag stops being a stretch.
Where does the ladder stop?
Above the pallet it stops being retail. Genuine Origin's own sister operation for larger wholesale sourcing starts, by their published account, at "a minimum of 100 bags at 60kg each," which is 13,228 pounds of one coffee. Above that is the futures market, where the Coffee C contract on ICE has a contract size of 37,500 pounds. That is the trade's native unit, and every format above exists because somebody broke it down. One futures contract is about 1,700 of Royal's 22-pound boxes.
Does renting a roaster get you out of buying a whole bag?
No, and I would rather say so on our own page than let somebody find out after they have signed up. The Inheritance Coffee Lab rents time on a production roaster in Pensacola, and our own roaster rental page is blunt about the limit: "we do not source or import it." Renting the drum removes the machine from your problem list and leaves the green exactly where it was. The same page makes the physical version of the point, that "green arrives on pallets, and a pallet does not fit in a garage."
Our page on starting a coffee brand without buying a roaster puts the same limit in one clause: you buy green yourself, in the quantities it is sold in, and you find somewhere to keep it. Those quantities are the ones above, and they are the reason a garage roastery and a 154-pound bag are an awkward pair.
So here they are, once, in order: a few pounds from a seller who breaks lots down for home roasters. Twenty pounds. A 22-pound box. A 50-pound box or bag. A 65-pound box. A 30-kilo vacuum pack. A 35-kilo half bag. One full bag at 132, 152 or 154 pounds depending on the country. A pallet. A hundred bags. Thirty-seven thousand five hundred pounds. The question is never really how much coffee you want. It is which of those you can pay for and finish.
Inheritance Coffee, Pensacola. If the green is the part you want to own and the roaster is the part you do not, toll roasting is the arrangement for that: you own the coffee, we roast it under your brand, and you ship it or drop it off. If you would rather run the machine yourself, the co-roasting application takes about five minutes, and access runs as a membership rather than a drop-in rental.
