Category playbooks for DTC brands
Coffee wholesale is two businesses wearing one name. Selling twelve-ounce retail bags to a shop that puts them on a shelf is one product with one price. Selling five-pound bulk bags to a cafe that grinds and brews them is a different product with a different price, a different case pack and a different buyer inside the same building.
A roaster who quotes one wholesale price for both will either lose every cafe account on price or give away the shelf margin. Getting that split right is the first decision in this category, and everything else — freshness, packaging, delivery rhythm — follows from it.
The two prices, worked through
Take a single-origin that costs you six dollars and forty cents per twelve-ounce bag, landed: green coffee, roast loss, the bag, the valve, the label and the labour.
The retail bag. You sell it at twenty dollars on your own site. A shop stocking it on a shelf needs to make a normal retail margin, so wholesale lands near ten dollars, suggested retail twenty. Case of six bags, seventy-two dollars per case at the twelve-dollar tier or sixty at ten. Your margin on the case is roughly twenty-two dollars, and you packed one box instead of six.
The bulk bag. A cafe buying five-pound bags is not reselling the bag, they are selling brewed coffee at four dollars a cup. They care about cost per pound and consistency, not about the packaging. Price per pound here typically sits well below the equivalent of the retail bag — think a per-pound number in the low teens for a specialty coffee that would be twenty-six dollars a pound at retail in twelve-ounce bags.
That gap upsets roasters until they do the cafe arithmetic. A five-pound bag yields somewhere around one hundred and thirty twelve-gram doses, which at four dollars a cup is a lot of revenue from one bag. The cafe is buying an input, not a product, and inputs are priced against the other roasters who will happily deliver on Tuesday.
Quote both tiers separately on the line sheet, with a clear label. Cafes who also want retail bags for their shelf get the retail tier for those, and it is worth saying so explicitly before they ask. The general shape of setting these tiers is in how to calculate wholesale price.
Case packs, freshness and the roast date problem
Coffee is the rare wholesale category where the product degrades visibly within the order cycle, and the case pack exists to manage that rather than to fit a shelf.
Standard shapes:
| Format | Case pack | Sold to |
|---|---|---|
| Twelve ounce retail bag | Six or twelve per case | Shops, grocers, gift stores |
| Five pound bulk bag | One or four per case | Cafes, offices, restaurants |
| Single-serve sachets | Twenty-four or forty-eight | Hotels, offices, travel retail |
Roast to order. Do not hold finished stock for wholesale in any quantity beyond a week, because a bag with a roast date three weeks old is a bag a specialty shop will not put out. Build your lead time around roast days — "we roast Monday and Thursday, orders in by noon the day before, shipping same day" — and say it on the line sheet. Buyers plan around a rhythm far more happily than around a vague ten-day window.
Put the roast date on the bag, not a best-before date. In specialty retail the roast date is a credential; a best-before date reads as commodity coffee and costs you the account you most wanted.
Packaging and labelling that a shelf demands
A bag that works for your own online orders often fails in a shop. Three things have to change.
A degassing valve, always. Freshly roasted coffee releases carbon dioxide for days. A bag without a one-way valve either swells or has to be rested, and neither is acceptable when the shop wants it on the shelf on arrival.
A barcode on every retail unit. Shops scan. A brand without unit barcodes gets either a manual price sticker, which slows the shop down, or a no. Buy your own prefix rather than borrowing one, because a barcode that resolves to another company's product causes real problems at a grocer.
A compliant food label. Net weight in both measurement systems, your business name and address, the ingredient statement, the roast date and the origin. Roasted coffee beans are one of the few foods generally exempt from a full nutrition panel when sold as beans or ground with nothing added, but the moment you add flavouring, sugar or milk powder you are in a different labelling regime, and a grocer's compliance team will check.
Design the front of the bag so the variety and roast level are readable from about two metres. On a shelf your bag is competing with eleven others at a distance, not being read in a hand.
What a cafe account actually costs you
A cafe is the most valuable account type in coffee wholesale and the most expensive to serve, and new roasters routinely price it as though it were a shelf account.
What comes with it beyond the beans: dialling in the espresso on their machine, often more than once. Training a barista, sometimes repeatedly as staff turn over. A grinder loan or a shared purchase in some arrangements. Branded cups, tent cards or a menu mention. And a delivery rhythm — many cafes want weekly, and they want it on the same day.
Price the relationship, not the bag. A cafe doing forty pounds a week at an honest per-pound margin is a substantial standing order that reorders without any selling, which is the whole prize in this category. A cafe doing four pounds a week that needs a training visit every quarter is a customer you are subsidising.
Set a minimum that reflects this. A weekly delivery minimum, rather than only an order minimum, is common and reasonable: ten pounds a week, or the order moves to a fortnightly schedule. The general logic of minimums is in minimum order quantity.
Where coffee buyers look
Coffee sits awkwardly on general wholesale marketplaces. The gift-shop platforms are built around non-perishable, non-repeating goods, and coffee is perishable and repeating — the economics of a platform commission on an account that reorders weekly for three years are very different from a commission on a one-off candle order.
Where buyers actually come from in this category, roughly in order of yield: direct outreach to independent cafes in your own city, the wholesale enquiry form on your site that arrives because someone drank your coffee somewhere, regional food and beverage trade shows, specialty grocers' local-supplier programmes, and coffee competitions or cuppings where roasters and buyers are both present.
If you do list on a general marketplace, list the retail bags only, keep the bulk tier direct, and treat the platform as a way to find shelf accounts rather than cafe accounts. The trade-offs of that route are laid out in wholesale marketplace vs own website.
The first ten doors
In rough order of how likely they are to say yes to a small roaster:
- Independent cafes that do not roast, within delivery distance. The core account. They already buy from someone and switching is normal.
- Bakeries and delis serving coffee alongside food, who care more about reliability than about a competition score.
- Specialty grocers and food halls for retail bags, usually a case of six to start.
- Offices and coworking spaces with a bean-to-cup machine. Low glamour, high reliability, no dialling in.
- Hotels and small inns, particularly for in-room sachets or a lobby machine.
- Bookshops, galleries and plant shops with a small counter setup.
- Restaurants wanting a better after-dinner coffee, usually small volume but a strong reference.
- Gyms, studios and climbing walls with a counter and a regular crowd.
- Farm shops and delis for retail bags with a local-producer story.
- Subscription and gift box curators buying seasonal lots in volume.
Work one to four first. They are the accounts where a sample bag and a Tuesday afternoon visit genuinely produce an order, and they are the ones that reorder without being asked.
To see which of those door types exist around a specific product rather than in general, paste your product or store link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of retailers and distributors stocking comparable coffee.
Questions roasters ask about wholesale
Should you lend a grinder? Only against a volume commitment written into the account terms, with the grinder remaining yours. A loaned grinder with no commitment is a gift to the roaster who takes the account from you next year.
Do you give a cafe exclusivity in their neighbourhood? Rarely, and never at the start. If you do, tie it to weekly volume and let it lapse automatically if the volume is not met.
How do you handle a cafe that pays late? First order up front, then terms only after three clean payments. Weekly deliveries and slow payment combine badly, and the fix is in net 30 terms.
What about private label for a cafe? Profitable and strategically risky — you become invisible and replaceable. Charge more for it, not less, and keep a minimum that makes the roast day worth it.