Hotel Coffee Supplier

A hotel buys coffee for four services at once: in-room brewers, the lobby, a breakfast that is usually free, and banquet or conference service. One line on a purchase order, four different jobs, and a guest who judges all four as your hotel. Our wholesale coffee program covers the account, formats and delivery.

Four coffee services wearing one line item

In-room. Brewed at 6am by a guest with no scale, on a machine housekeeping wipes rather than descales. The honest limit up front: we bag in 250g, 2lb and 5lb and do not publish a pod or pre-portioned packet format, so raise single serve before you plan around it.

The lobby. Somebody is paying cafe money for a cappuccino and comparing it to the cafe they like at home. The one service where a more interesting coffee earns its place.

Breakfast. High volume, no charge, poured black next to the eggs, held for hours. The least glamorous service and the one that generates the most reviews.

Banquet and conference. Two hundred people released into a fifteen minute break, all wanting coffee in the first six minutes. A timing problem before it is a taste problem.

Whether one coffee can cover both a paid lobby drink and a free urn is the first real question. The answer is partly.

Ordering against an occupancy curve

Order volume in a hotel is not flat, and on the Gulf Coast it is not close. Spring through late summer runs full, and there are shoulder weeks where a third of the building is dark. A standing order built on the annual average is wrong most of the year.

The arithmetic fits on a napkin. A three gallon urn holds about 11.4 liters, roughly 1.5 pounds of coffee, and yields about 32 twelve ounce cups. A 120 room property at 70 percent occupancy is around 130 guests, and if 60 percent take coffee at a cup and a half each, that is 120 cups, four urns, six pounds a morning, forty pounds a week for breakfast alone. At 55 percent occupancy the same math gives 32 pounds. That swing is a 5lb bag a week in both directions.

Because we roast to order every Wednesday, the order should reflect next week's arrivals rather than last quarter's average. Stockpiling defeats the point, since coffee held a month in a dry store is the freshness you paid for leaking out of the building.

Formats follow the service. 5lb for breakfast and banquet, where a bag is opened and emptied inside days. 2lb for the lobby bar, which fills a hopper cleanly. 250g if you shelve bags in a gift shop or put one in a suite. Free grinding matters more here than at most accounts, because urn grind and espresso grind are not the same, and one delivery can carry both.

The free breakfast urn is where hotel coffee dies

Brewed coffee holds about thirty minutes on a hot plate and about an hour in an insulated airpot before it tastes like the container instead of the coffee. A hotel breakfast runs three hours, so a single 6:30 brew is being poured at 9:15, and the 9:15 cup is the one that gets written about.

The fix is scheduling, not sourcing. Brew smaller batches more often, move off glass decanters into insulated servers, write the brew time on a card on the pot, and dump on the clock rather than when it looks low. No roaster can supply their way around a pot held for two hours.

Second is dosing. A level two tablespoon scoop is about 10 grams and the same scoop heaped is closer to 14, so two staff using one scoop produce a 40 percent swing in strength. Portion control here means a measured scoop and a written count per urn taped behind the brewer.

Third is procurement rather than operations. Coffee gets bid on price per pound by someone who will never taste it, and the F&B director inherits the result. Our concession: at pallet volume with price as the only variable, a national supplier beats us. What we offer instead is coffee roasted the same week forty minutes from your loading dock, delivered on our own vehicle inside forty miles.

Brewers, urns and a staff that turns over

Design the program so it is hard to make badly, because the person making it in October was hired in September. Satellite brewers with insulated servers beat glass on a burner, and urns handle banquet volume a batch brewer cannot. If the lobby cappuccino comes from a front desk agent three weeks into the job, a good super automatic serves your guest better than a manual two group nobody has dialed since installation.

That reaches into the coffee itself. The coffee we would put in your lobby is not the one we would put in your urn, and the urn coffee is deliberately less exciting. A wide brewing window, forgiving of a wrong dose and a long hold, is worth more at breakfast than a coffee that is thrilling brewed correctly and unpleasant when it is not.

One exception. For a conference break where the client is paying for an experience rather than a beverage, an urn is the wrong tool however good the coffee is. That is what our coffee cart does, with a barista and a real espresso bar, as a booking alongside your supply account rather than part of it.

What sets the number on a hotel account

Pricing is set per account and appears in your B2B account after approval. Volume, format, delivery or shipping, and order rhythm are the four inputs. The hotel specific note is seasonality: give us the annual shape rather than one monthly figure, because a peak month number and a shoulder month number describe two different accounts.

For scale only, retail on this site is $18 for a 250g bag and $117 for a 5lb bag. Your number arrives with approval, once we know your occupancy curve and what you brew on.

Questions an F&B director asks

Can one coffee serve both the lobby bar and the free breakfast urn?

One can cover both if you choose it for the urn and accept a compromise in the lobby. A medium roast with body holds up in an urn and still pulls a decent cappuccino. Most properties settle on two: a workhorse for breakfast and banquet, and something better where a guest is paying attention.

Our occupancy swings by season. Can the order move with it?

That is the normal case here, not an exception. Because coffee is roasted to order every Wednesday rather than pulled from a warehouse, the order tracks the arrivals in front of you rather than an annual average. Tell us the shape of your year and the standing order steps up and down with it.

How do we keep coffee consistent when the staff making it changes every few months?

By removing judgment from the process. A measured dose in grams, a written cup count per urn, and a dump time on the pot make the result repeatable by whoever is on shift. On our end every batch is graded for roast color, so the coffee arriving in October matches the one your team learned in June.

Can you supply coffee for in-room brewers?

We roast in 250g, 2lb and 5lb and we do not publish a pod or pre-portioned packet format, so ask before you build an in-room program around it. Rooms with a pour-and-brew pot are straightforward. Single serve packaging is a conversation during your application rather than an assumption.

Can you handle banquet and conference volume?

Yes, and the way to make it easy is calendar rather than urgency. Production runs every Wednesday, so events already on your books get ordered against directly. Send the banquet calendar as it fills and the volume rides the standing order.

Open a hotel account

For a hotel dining room operating as a standalone restaurant with its own dinner service, our restaurant coffee supplier page is closer to that job. For the property itself, tell us your room count, your breakfast service, what the lobby runs on, and how occupancy moves through your year. Apply for a wholesale account and we will build the order around the curve rather than the average.