Formula for Wholesale Coffee Pricing

Your own Cost to Produce/Overhead will factor into this greatly, along with what your local market will bear. Try to figure out what it costs you (aside from green coffee price) to produce 1 lb or 1 kg of roasted coffee (labor, utilities, rent, etc). Add this cost to your green coffee cost (landed, in your warehouse), then multiply by 2 (100% markup). This should put you in the ballpark of the minimum wholesale price. The wholesale prices I’ve seen tend to be 30-50% off retail price for roasted and packaged coffee (usually a tiered system based on volume purchased weekly).

Example: $3.50/lb green coffee cost. $2.50/lb cost to produce/overhead = $6 x2 (markup to wholesale) = $12/lb.
x140% = $16.80/lb. retail.

Of course, different locales will produce different costs, and your markup may need to go higher than 100% to remain profitable. Also note that your cost to produce will go down as your average volume produced increases.

Finally, there are more than a couple of ways to do this and is by no means definitive. I’m stoked to see what others contribute here.

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