One of the first crossroads when setting up a specialty coffee shop is whether to roast your own beans or buy them from an external roaster. It's not just a technical question: it defines your margin, your differentiation and the operational complexity of the whole business.
In-house roasting gives full control over the cup profile, freshness and, above all, margin: roasted coffee has a much lower cost per kilo than buying it already roasted, and it opens an additional sales channel (bagged beans, subscription, B2B to other coffee shops). On the Spanish competitive map, the operators who control roasting —Nomad, Hola Coffee, Cafés El Magnífico, Right Side— are also the ones with the strongest brand reputation.
The trade-off: a quality roaster is a considerable investment, requires space, training and a minimum volume to make it worthwhile. Roasting badly is worse than buying well.
Buying beans from a good roaster drastically reduces the investment and the learning curve: you concentrate on the customer experience and running the bar, not on production. Many leading coffee shops operate this way, as a multi-roaster, rotating beans from several roasters —as is the case with HanSo in Madrid, which serves coffee from Nømad, Right Side, April or Gardelli.
The cost is lower margin per cup and less differentiation: if anyone can buy your coffee, you compete on experience and location, not on an exclusive product.
Roasting makes sense when control of the bean and margin are your strategic priority and you have the volume to amortise the investment. Buying makes sense when you want operational simplicity, lower initial capital and speed to open — the route of the chains that scale quickly.
In our report we analyse, brand by brand, who roasts and who doesn't among the main Spanish operators, along with their real business size (employees, turnover) — key data to understand which model sustains each type of business.