How to Start a Coffee Roaster

To start a coffee roaster you need three things a café doesn’t: a machine sized to your actual sales, somewhere zoned and ventilated to run it, and a reliable green coffee supply. Get those right and the rest is production discipline. Get the machine size wrong and you’ll either strangle your growth or spend a year paying off capacity you can’t fill.

This is a different business from opening a café, not a variant of it. A roastery sells a product, usually wholesale, often by the box rather than the cup. If what you actually want is a counter and a queue, starting a coffee shop is the other path, and the two have almost nothing in common operationally.

The market is moving in roasters’ favour. The National Coffee Association’s Fall 2026 report found 48% of American adults had specialty coffee in the past day, a record, and more than drink traditional coffee (National Coffee Association, September 15, 2026).

The Bottom Line

• Size the roaster to the sales you can prove, not the ones you hope for. A 5kg drum covers a lot of early growth.
• Budget $20,000 to $150,000 for the machine, and expect installation and ventilation on top.
• Green specialty coffee runs roughly $2.75 to $5.00 a pound, with high-end lots several times that.
• Zoning and air-quality permitting decide where you can operate. Settle that before signing anything.
• Wholesale roasting carries around 44% gross margins. The constraint is almost never roasting. It’s sales.

What kind of coffee roasting business are you building?

Decide this first, because it sets your equipment, your licensing and your cash flow.

• Wholesale roaster. You supply cafés, restaurants, offices and grocers. Larger orders, predictable repeat volume, thinner per-pound margin, and a sales job that never stops. Bellwether Coffee reports wholesale roasters running about 44% gross margins, with annual sales above $750,000 at the established end (Bellwether Coffee).
• Direct-to-consumer roaster. You sell bags and subscriptions through your own site. Much better margin per pound, much higher cost of acquiring each customer, and the fulfilment burden sits with you.
• Roaster-retailer. A café that roasts its own. Bellwether puts gross margins here around 65% with net margins near 8.79%, against roughly 6.86% for a retail shop buying beans in, but you’re running two businesses at once.
• Contract or private-label roaster. You roast under someone else’s brand. Steady volume, no brand-building, and total dependence on a handful of accounts.

Most new roasteries end up a mix of wholesale and direct, and that’s fine. What matters is knowing which one pays the rent in year one.

How much does it cost to start a coffee roasting business?

Bellwether puts commercial roasters at $20,000 to $150,000 and the average startup for a combined roaster-wholesaler-retailer operation at about $120,000. Korona POS’s 2026 equipment figures put a coffee roaster at $15,000 to $50,000 and up as a line item inside a café build (Korona POS, February 2026).

The machine is not the whole bill. Plan for:

• Installation, gas plumbing and ventilation. Often the item that blows the budget, because it depends entirely on your building.
• An afterburner or catalytic oxidiser, if your local air-quality rules require one. This is a major cost and a major permitting question.
• Green coffee inventory. You pay for beans long before you sell roasted bags.
• Packaging, bags, labels and a sealer. Small per unit, significant up front.
• Scales, a cupping kit, a moisture meter and storage racking.
• Roast logging software. Artisan is free and open-source and works with 30-plus machines; Cropster is paid and adds inventory and green coffee management (MTPak Coffee).

If you’re weighing a roastery against a café, the comparable café figures are in the coffee shop startup cost breakdown. Put the two side by side before you commit, because they spend money in completely different places.

Put the numbers into a plan rather than a spreadsheet nobody reads. What belongs in a good coffee roaster business plan is mostly the things a lender or landlord will ask about: capacity, sourcing, pricing and the sales pipeline. If you’re also considering the café side, the free coffee shop business plan template gives you a structure to fill in.

Choosing roaster capacity

MTPak Coffee’s guidance for new, small roasteries is a classic drum roaster with 5kg capacity, running batches of roughly 2 to 5kg. That is a sensible default, and here’s why: a 5kg drum doing 4kg batches at roughly 15 minutes a cycle gives you around 16kg an hour of roasted coffee, which is more weekly volume than most new roasteries sell in their first year.

Work out your requirement properly before shopping:

• Estimate your weekly roasted pounds at the volume you can actually sell.
• Add the shrinkage. Beans lose meaningful weight in the roast, so you buy noticeably more green than you sell roasted.
• Divide by the hours a week you want to spend roasting. Not all of them, because you also have to sell, deliver and do the books.
• Leave headroom for one large account, not five.

Buying too small is a recoverable mistake; you roast more hours and upgrade. Buying too large is a cash-flow problem that lasts years. Drum roasters are the default for specialty work and hold resale value, so an undersized first machine is rarely wasted money.

Budget learning time as well as money. Bellwether notes that roasters working on a traditional gas machine often need at least six months before they’re consistently satisfied with their own output. Plan for that gap between buying the machine and selling what comes out of it.

Sourcing green coffee

Bellwether’s figures put specialty green coffee at roughly $2.75 to $5.00 a pound, with high-end suppliers such as Onyx in the $9.50 to $15.00 range, and direct marketplace sourcing around $4.00 a pound. That spread is your single biggest cost decision.

Where new roasteries buy:

• Domestic green importers. The usual starting point. They hold inventory in warehouses, sell in single bags or pallets, publish cupping notes, and let you sample before committing.
• Online green marketplaces. Lower minimums, good for building a varied first lineup.
• Importer sample programs. Order small sample sets, roast them, cup them, then buy the lot you actually liked. Do this before every purchase.
• Direct trade relationships. Better story and sometimes better coffee, but it means committing to volume and handling logistics and payment terms yourself.

Two practical constraints. Green coffee is a crop, so a lot you love will eventually run out, and your wholesale accounts will notice. Build your menu around a blend you can keep stable plus rotating single origins. And storage matters: green coffee needs a dry, stable, off-the-floor environment, and a humid basement will cost you an entire purchase.

Zoning, licensing and ventilation for a roastery

Roasting is a food manufacturing activity, and that pulls in a different set of rules than a café.

• Zoning. Most roasteries sit in industrial or light-industrial space. Confirm the use is permitted before you sign, and confirm it in writing.
• Air quality permitting. Roasting produces smoke and odour. Many jurisdictions require emissions control, typically an afterburner, and your neighbours will notice if you skip it. This is the single most common reason a roastery build stalls.
• Food facility registration. Registration with the FDA as a food facility, plus whatever your state and county require.
• Health department inspection and a certificate of occupancy.
• Fire marshal sign-off. Gas lines, chaff collection and a hot machine in a small room all get attention here.
• Labelling compliance. Your bags need the legally required information, not just the brand.
• A business licence, an EIN and a seller’s permit.

Start the air-quality conversation before you choose the building. It is much cheaper to discover the rules while you’re still able to walk away from a lease. The siting criteria for a roastery (loading access, three-phase power, ventilation, industrial zoning) are the inverse of what a café needs, and the coffee shop location guide is worth reading for the contrast if you’re considering a space that does both.

Setting up the roast-to-pack workflow

The production routine is what separates a roastery from a hobby. Build it deliberately:

1. Receive and log green. Record lot, origin, moisture and arrival date. Store off the floor.
2. Sample roast and cup. Decide the roast profile before you run production volume.
3. Build the roast schedule. Group by profile and batch size to minimise machine-temperature swings between batches.
4. Roast and log. Record charge temperature, time, development, drop temperature and final weight for every batch. Artisan or Cropster does this for you.
5. Degas. Coffee needs rest before it’s packed and sold, and bags need a one-way valve.
6. Weigh, pack, seal, label. Roast date on every bag, no exceptions, because wholesale buyers check.
7. Quality control. Cup your own production on a schedule, not just when something goes wrong.

Training is worth paying for early. Daniel Horbat, 2019 World Cup Tasters Champion and founder of Sumo Coffee Roasters, makes the case directly: “By investing in training for yourself and your employees, you make sure everyone will be more productive, perform better, and deliver work of a higher quality which will create more opportunities for your roastery” (MTPak Coffee).

Packaging and pricing your coffee

Pricing works backwards from the channel, not forwards from your costs.

Wholesale buyers expect a per-pound price with a volume break, and they’ll compare you to their incumbent. Direct-to-consumer pricing is set by the retail bag, usually 12oz, where your competition is every other bag on the shelf and online. The same coffee lands at very different prices depending which door it goes out of, and the 44% wholesale versus 65% roaster-retail gross margin gap in Bellwether’s data is mostly this effect.

Three things to build into every price:

• The cost of goods, with shrinkage counted properly. Your cost per roasted pound is not your cost per green pound.
• Packaging and labels. Small per bag, meaningful across a month.
• Delivery. Dropping ten pounds at a café across town costs you something, and roasters routinely forget to put it in the price.

That last one determines whether wholesale is profitable for you. Weekly drops to a cluster of nearby cafés are cheap; scattered single-bag runs across a metro are not. Many small roasteries move this off their own staff onto a local delivery platform. Metrobi works with coffee, food, floral, catering and wholesale businesses on deliveries planned and posted ahead, single-stop or multi-stop, with route optimisation and proof-of-delivery photos, specifically so a growing wholesale book doesn’t turn the founder into a full-time driver.

Building the brand and the storefront

Your bag and your website are doing the selling when you aren’t in the room. A wholesale buyer will look you up before replying to your email, and a retail customer has nothing else to go on.

What matters at launch: a clear origin and roast story, legible labels, honest tasting notes, and a site that can take an order and a wholesale enquiry. That build is covered in how to create a coffee business website, including the subscription mechanics that make direct-to-consumer coffee worth doing.

Then comes the part that catches nearly every new roaster out: finding the first buyers. Roasting is a solvable technical problem; filling an order book is a sales problem, and it takes longer than the build. The tactics that work, from sampling and walking into cafés to cupping with prospects and pricing you won’t regret, are in how to get your first coffee roaster customers.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a coffee roasting machine cost?

Bellwether puts commercial roasters at $20,000 to $150,000 depending on capacity and features. Korona POS lists $15,000 to $50,000 and up for a roaster as part of a café equipment budget. Installation, gas work and ventilation are separate and can be substantial.

What size roaster should I start with?

MTPak Coffee recommends a 5kg drum roaster for new small roasteries, running 2 to 5kg batches. That covers more weekly volume than most first-year roasteries sell, and undersized machines hold their resale value if you outgrow them.

How much does green coffee cost?

Roughly $2.75 to $5.00 a pound for specialty green according to Bellwether, around $4.00 through direct marketplaces, and $9.50 to $15.00 a pound from high-end suppliers.

Do I need a special permit to roast coffee?

Usually yes. Expect industrial or light-industrial zoning, an air-quality or emissions permit in many jurisdictions, FDA food facility registration, health department inspection and fire marshal sign-off. Check the air-quality rules before choosing a building.

Is a coffee roasting business profitable?

It can be, with margin depending heavily on channel. Bellwether’s figures show about 44% gross margins for wholesale roasters, around 65% for roaster-retailers, and net margins of 8.79% for roaster-retailers against 6.86% for retail shops buying beans in.

Can I start a coffee roasting business from home?

Rarely as a licensed operation. Residential zoning, emissions and food-facility requirements usually rule it out, though some people start by renting time on a shared commercial roaster to build a customer base before buying a machine.

Where to start

Settle the building and the permits first, because they constrain everything else. Then size the machine to volume you can prove, set up a green supply with samples before purchases, and write down your roast-to-pack routine on day one rather than inventing it under pressure.

And start selling before the machine arrives. The roastery that opens with three committed wholesale accounts is in a completely different position from the one that opens with a perfect roast profile and an empty order book. That is why winning those first customers deserves as much planning as the equipment.