Most coffee shops should keep buying their coffee roasted, and the reason is not that roasting is hard to learn. The case for it is a per-pound saving set against a fixed cost, and both halves move once the coffee gets good. We publish what we pay for green coffee, and on the three lots carrying that figure today it is $7.45, $8.89 and $8.90 a pound. A cafe that has built its bar around coffee like that is not buying at the price the saving is usually calculated from, and the room, the ventilation, the permit and the weekly hours do not get cheaper to match.
What does green coffee actually cost a cafe?
More than the arithmetic assumes, if you are serving specialty. Our lowest published green price is $7.45 a pound, for the El Salvador we roast for espresso, and our highest is $8.90 for the Peru decaf. Those are what we pay before the coffee is roasted or bagged, and a cafe shopping the same lots would buy at numbers like them.
Coffee Shop Startups works the saving at four dollars a pound green against twelve roasted and lands on seven to ten dollars a pound, which on those inputs is correct. The inputs are what I would question. Four dollars buys a commodity lot, and a shop that has taught its regulars the difference is not going to serve one. Start the same arithmetic at $7.45 and most of the saving is gone before you have bought anything.
Whatever is left per pound has to cover a roaster, a vented room, an inspection, green storage and somebody's hours every week you are open, so the answer moves with volume and almost nothing else. The quantities that make it pay are larger than most single-location cafes move.
It also has to cover the dial-in. We publish what a new espresso costs a cafe to land: fifteen to thirty shots plus milk drinks to confirm it holds, and closer to a full 2lb bag with the following week's corrections. A shop buying roasted coffee pays that when it chooses to; a shop roasting its own pays it every time a green lot runs out.
What changed my mind about roasting?
A few years ago I would have given you a much nerdier answer. I was new to roasting and impressionable, and I believed the roast was what separated one bag from another. I buy green from a lot of the same farms and farmers as some of the best roasters in this industry and some of the worst. We are all serving very close to the same stuff, a little bit different. It took me too long to accept that what people buy is the brand.
I am not the first person to say so and I got there late. Thomas Wensma wrote it for Perfect Daily Grind in September 2025, and his sentence is better than mine: "quality alone is no longer enough to stand out." He is describing roasters. It lands harder on a cafe, which would be spending capital on the half of the business that has already stopped setting anybody apart.
When is roasting your own the right call?
When you want to be a roaster. That is a real answer and I am not being glib — the shops I have watched do it well wanted the work itself, and said the first year was a cost. Josef Mott put the practical half of it for Perfect Daily Grind in 2021: "Roasters and baristas require fundamentally different skill sets to do their jobs properly." You are not adding a task to the bar. You are hiring a second trade.
If you want it, protect your ability to change your mind. Our page on starting a coffee brand without buying a roaster holds one rule: every route to your own coffee can be walked back except owning equipment. Rent time, or have somebody roast to your profile, and you will know inside a month whether you like standing at a drum on a Wednesday. If the machine is already yours and the question is capacity, that is a different decision; if you have not opened a shop yet, start there.
Where is Inheritance the wrong answer?
We sell wholesale coffee to cafes and we rent time on our roasters, so we are paid whichever way you go, and you should read the paragraphs above knowing it. Where we are wrong is the shop for which the roasting is the point. If you want a machine you are not scheduling around anybody else, renting time from us will frustrate you inside a season. Buy the roaster and treat the first year as tuition.
What I would not do is roast your own to save money on a coffee you are proud of. At $7.45 a pound green, the saving is not what is keeping your shop open. Your bar is, and your bar workflow is where I would spend the attention first.
If you would rather not roast: wholesale pricing for cafes is set per account and lands in your B2B account after approval, following one conversation about volume and what you brew on. If you would rather roast: the Inheritance Roastery rents production time in Pensacola, and every self-roaster completes a basic roasting class first, with no exemption for experience.
