Ask anyone planning a roastery what their first big decision is, and you will almost always hear a brand and a drum size. It is the most tangible part of the project: you can visit it, touch it, hear it. It is also, in our experience, the line item least likely to determine whether the business survives its third year.
The uncomfortable framing is this: roasting coffee is a manufacturing business with a commercial problem attached. The machine converts green coffee into roasted coffee. It does not convert roasted coffee into paid invoices. Everything that decides the outcome happens after the beans come out.
A roaster advertised at a given kilo rating describes a batch under ideal conditions. Effective capacity — what you can actually put through in a working week — is materially lower once you account for heat-up and cool-down, profile changes between origins, cleaning, rest time, packaging and the simple fact that a person has to be there. Business plans that divide an annual volume target by the catalogue figure tend to conclude that a small machine is plenty. Plans built on effective capacity often reach the opposite conclusion.
This matters more than it sounds, because the gap between the two numbers is exactly where a roastery discovers it has under-bought its machine and over-promised its customers at the same time.
The arabica market has been under sustained pressure — prices rose sharply from 2023 and reached historic highs, with the whole chain absorbing the shock. For a roaster, that is not simply a higher cost per kilo. It is a financing question. Green coffee has to be bought before it is roasted, roasted before it is sold, and sold before it is paid for, frequently on trade terms that stretch weeks beyond delivery.
The consequence is that two roasteries with identical equipment and identical volumes can have completely different survival odds depending on how much working capital sits behind them. A plan that funds the machine and the fit-out but treats stock and receivables as an afterthought is not funded.
Roasting drives off moisture. You buy green and you sell roasted, and those are not the same quantity. Any unit economics built on the green price per kilo, without converting to a sellable-kilo basis, will overstate margin. It sounds elementary written down; it is one of the most common errors we find in real business plans, and it also quietly distorts any comparison against outsourcing.
Roasted coffee reaches a customer through routes with very different economics. Selling direct to consumers captures the highest price per kilo but requires you to build demand, acquire customers and absorb fulfilment. Selling to hospitality — cafés, restaurants, hotels — offers volume and recurrence, but at lower prices, longer payment terms and with expectations attached. Private label fills the machine and finances learning, at the thinnest margin of all.
Most roasteries end up serving several of these at once, which is reasonable. What is not reasonable is modelling the business on the blended margin of the best channel while planning volumes that can only come from the worst one.
This is the part that surprises newcomers most. Winning a café account is rarely about a better roast. It typically involves equipment on loan, installation, grinder calibration, staff training, service visits and emergency replacement when a machine fails on a Saturday morning. Those obligations sit on your balance sheet and in your calendar for the length of the relationship.
That is a service business wrapped around a manufacturing business, and it is entirely viable — but it must be priced and resourced deliberately, not discovered after the fact. A roaster who promises the service level of an established supplier at the price of a newcomer has effectively bought the account at a loss.
There is an alternative that most plans skip entirely: having someone else roast to your specification. It removes the capital, the capacity risk and the learning curve, and it lets you test whether you can sell coffee before you commit to making it. It also caps your margin and hands over part of the craft.
Whether that trade is worth it is a legitimate calculation, not a matter of taste — and the comparison has to be made carefully, because outsourcing is quoted on one basis and your own production costs land on another. Getting those two onto the same footing is where the honest answer lives.
Not "which roaster should I buy", but "who has already agreed to buy the coffee, at what price, on what terms, and how much of my capacity does that account for". A roastery with committed volume and a modest machine is a business. A roastery with an excellent machine and a hope of demand is an expensive way to learn about coffee.
Our decision report on setting up an artisan roastery in Spain models four archetypes end to end — unit economics per sellable kilo, effective capacity, sourcing, channels, the legal framework and a full financial model — and closes with an explicit verdict for each. The framing above is the part we are happy to give away; the thresholds are what the report is for.