Wholesale Coffee Sales on Shopify: The Complete Guide
One café buying 100 pounds a week, at $6 a pound of profit, is worth about $31,000 a year. Five of them is over $150,000. And a café that’s happy with its coffee rarely switches roasters. That’s why wholesale is worth building.
It only pays if three things hold. Your prices cover what a pound really costs you. Net 30 doesn’t drain your cash. And taking orders doesn’t eat your week. This guide goes in the order you’ll meet those: who to sell to, how to price, who gets terms, how to win your first cafés, and what to fix before you reach 50 accounts.
Build around cafés, then add grocery and offices
Wholesale coffee is three kinds of account, and they behave differently.
| Account | Typical volume | Gross margin | Usual terms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cafés and restaurants | 50-200 lb a week per location | 40-50% | Net 30 once they’re established |
| Grocery and retail | 24-100 bags a month | 20-35% | Net 30-60, sometimes consignment |
| Offices and hotels | 20-50 lb a week | 30-40% | Net 30 or card |
Cafés are the best accounts. They order every week, they’ll pay for quality and reliability, and they stay. Switching roasters means retraining baristas, redoing recipes and risking complaints, so most owners only change when something goes wrong. That makes cafés slow to win and slow to lose. Keep them by giving more than beans: dialing-in help, barista training, equipment support.
Grocery has thinner margins and more paperwork. You’re competing for shelf space, and larger chains can charge slotting fees per product and ask for promotional support. Start with independent grocers and specialty food shops. They’re easier to get into and more flexible on terms. You’ll need retail-ready bags (UPC codes, labels) and a shelf life of 30 to 60 days.
Offices and hotels are steady but slow to close. A 200-room hotel might need 50 pounds a week, but it usually wants equipment and has a long buying process. Offices want simple reordering, whole bean and ground, and often an equipment package.
What all of them want from you is the same short list. Two or three blends that taste the same every time, because their recipes depend on it. Reordering that doesn’t need a phone call. Help when a new barista starts. And for some, a house blend or their own label on the bag.
Price from your full cost per pound
Most roasters underestimate their cost. Before setting a price, add up everything a pound of wholesale coffee costs you to deliver, not only the green.
Here’s an example for a specialty blend. Put in your own numbers.
| Cost | Per pound |
|---|---|
| Green coffee (example: specialty grade) | $5.50 |
| Roasting labor and overhead | $2.00 |
| Packaging | $1.00 |
| Freight and delivery | $0.75 |
| Samples and losses | $0.50 |
| Full cost | $9.75 |
The costs people forget: samples (often 5-10% of what you roast for wholesale), freight, slotting fees for grocery, invoices that are paid late or never, and the time you spend on accounts.
At a full cost of $9.75, selling at $12 a pound leaves you about 19%. That’s not enough to run a business on. At $16 you keep about 39%, at $20 about 51%. If you haven’t raised wholesale prices since your green went up, run this first.
What each channel tends to support:
| Channel | Your cost | Wholesale price | Gross margin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cafés (per lb) | $9-11 | $16-20 | 40-50% |
| Cafés (per kg) | $20-24 | $35-44 | 40-50% |
| Retail bags (12 oz) | $6-8 | $11-15 | 35-45% |
| Grocery (with slotting) | $6-8 | $8-11 | 20-30% |
| Offices | $9-11 | $14-18 | 30-40% |
Talk to cafés in cost per cup. A café owner thinks in drinks, not pounds. At $40 a kilo (about $18 a pound), a double shot of 18 to 20 grams costs the café about 72 to 80 cents. Next to a $6 latte, that’s an easy number to say yes to. Do that math for them.
Give volume discounts only where you save money. A simple ladder:
| Tier | Weekly volume | Discount | Why you can afford it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | under 25 lb | 0% | |
| Bronze | 25-50 lb | 5% | Fuller delivery runs |
| Silver | 50-100 lb | 10% | Fuller roast batches |
| Gold | 100+ lb | 15% | Runs roasted just for them |
An account that commits to the same order every week saves you planning and waste, so 3-5% off for a standing order is fair. Build a price review into any long agreement, because green prices move.
Net 30 is a loan, so decide who gets it
Cafés expect to pay on terms once they know you. But Net 30 means you’ve delivered the coffee and wait a month for the money. At 50 accounts ordering $500 a month each, that’s $25,000 of your money sitting in their bank accounts at any time.
Protect it with a ladder rather than terms for everyone:
- A new account pays by card, or on delivery, for its first orders.
- After a few orders paid on time, move it to Net 15.
- Once it has a track record, Net 30.
- Give each account a credit limit, and hold new orders when the balance goes past it or an invoice is 60 days overdue.
How to work out whether terms pay for themselves at all: When do net terms make sense?. How to get paid on time once you offer them: How do coffee roasters get paid on time by wholesale accounts?
Win your first cafés with a tasting, not a sample bag
Leaving a bag of samples at a café rarely works. It sits on a shelf, gets cupped once in a busy shift and forgotten. A tasting on their machine works better:
- Offer to come by. “I’d love to bring some coffee and dial it in on your machine. No strings attached.”
- Make drinks together. Dial in the espresso and pull shots with their barista. It’s a working session, not a pitch.
- Ask what isn’t working with their current roaster, and what would make their week easier.
- Send a proposal within 48 hours, with prices for their volume.
Café owners buy from people they trust, and an hour behind their counter shows them more than a price list.
Where to find café buyers: the Specialty Coffee Expo, regional Coffee Fest shows and food shows; your local restaurant association and chamber of commerce; and equipment dealers, who hear about new cafés before anyone else.
A first email that gets answered is short and about them:
Subject: your coffee program
Hi [Name],
I was at [Café] last week and loved the space. Are you happy with your current roaster, or open to trying something?
I run [Roastery] here in [City]. We supply about 15 cafés locally and focus on [what you do differently].
Could I come by for a 15-minute tasting? I’ll bring beans and dial them in on your machine. No pressure either way.
[Your name]
When you get the meeting, talk about what keeps them up at night:
- Cost per cup. Bring the math above, worked out for their menu.
- Freshness. Commit to a roast date close to delivery, for example within 7 days.
- Reliability. Can you deliver every Tuesday at 7am, and never leave them out of coffee on a Saturday?
- Support. Will you help train new baristas, and pick up the phone when the grinder is off?
Before 50 accounts: standing orders, delivery days and fewer coffees
What works at five accounts breaks somewhere past twenty. Fix these before it does.
Move accounts to standing orders. An account that gets the same order every week, adjusted when needed, gives you a predictable roast and fewer rush orders. The small discount above pays for itself.
Give each area a delivery day. If you deliver locally, group accounts by area: the east side on Tuesday, downtown on Thursday. It roughly halves the time in the van.
Set minimums from how you roast. A 12 lb minimum can be one roast batch. Free delivery from 25 lb can be the point where a stop pays for itself. A case of six 2 lb bags can price in the packing time saved.
Keep the list short. Most cafés need one espresso blend, one drip coffee and maybe a rotating single origin. Every extra coffee is stock to track, freshness to watch and a decision for an account that would rather just reorder.
Let accounts reorder themselves. A portal where they see their past orders and reorder in a click saves you a call or email for every order.
Know when to hire. Somewhere around 30 to 40 accounts, wholesale admin becomes a part-time job. A part-time rep on commission, or someone to look after existing accounts, can pay for themselves: if a $60,000 hire lands 20 accounts worth $4,000 a year in profit each, that’s $80,000 in the first year.
Give your best accounts something others don’t: first access to new coffees, a house blend only they can order, prices held for a year, priority when a coffee runs short.
Where orders and invoices live
Once you have more than a handful of accounts, every order has to go somewhere and become an invoice. The options roasters on Shopify usually weigh:
- By hand: orders by email and phone, typed into your accounting. Free, and fine for a handful of steady accounts.
- Shopify’s own B2B: companies, locations, buyer logins and net terms inside the store you already run. It comes with your plan, but assigning catalogs per company or location needs Shopify Plus.
- A Shopify wholesale app: adds per-customer prices and wholesale ordering to your store.
- A separate wholesale store: a second, password-protected Shopify store. Full control, but two catalogs and two sets of stock to keep in line.
- A wholesale system next to Shopify, such as effizient: accounts order from their own portal at their own prices, phone and email orders go into the same list, and each fulfilled order becomes an invoice in QuickBooks or Xero. Your Shopify store keeps selling retail.
What each costs and where each one stops is on our comparison of wholesale ordering software for coffee roasters. We make one of them, and it says so on every row.
Your first 90 days
- Days 1-30: work out your full cost and set prices by channel. Decide where orders and invoices will live. Write a wholesale price sheet and pick 10 cafés to approach.
- Days 31-60: run tastings with five of them. Two or three new accounts is a good month. Get delivery and invoicing working smoothly.
- Days 61-90: move those accounts to standing orders, set up your terms ladder, and start on the next 10.
At the end of it you should have five to ten accounts and a way of winning the next ones that you can repeat.
Built for roasters, further down this road
The plan above gets you to your first accounts on Shopify. effizient is what runs wholesale once there are a few hundred of them - a portal where each cafe orders at its own prices, weekly demand built from what was actually ordered with blends broken down through their recipes, a board for each delivery day, and invoices written to QuickBooks or Xero as orders are fulfilled. Coffee is where it started and where it goes deepest.
That is what effizient does: wholesale ordering, per-location pricing, weekly demand and QuickBooks invoicing on one record.
About the author: Michael Wallbaum is the founder of effizient, a wholesale platform built for coffee roasters first. Before effizient, he built custom wholesale systems for Shopify merchants.