Essential Items For Your Coffee Roasting Business
Roasting is just the beginning of your coffee journey.
Once you’ve roasted your coffee, you’ll want to make sure you’ve got all the supplies you need to run a successful operation.
When you become a Bellwether customer, we help kick off your production operation by sending you a bagging kit that includes a scale, bag sealer, scoops, a few bags, and more!
While your bagging and production supplies won’t take up much space, you’ll want to take stock of everything you need to get going and set up a small area for storage and production of your roasted coffee. We’re making it easy to start by listing and linking some of our favorite products in coffee production.
Let’s dive into what you need for coffee production!
Please note: any prices listed were the prices at the time this post was published and may change.
A Scale For Weighing Green Coffee
For weighing our green coffee in preparation for roasting, a scale with high weight capacity and a larger weighing platter or surface is ideal. Here are a few scales that are good for this:
A Few Good Scoops
We suggest using separate scoops for your green and roasted coffee because it is best to avoid cross-contamination of green and roasted coffee beans. Green coffee dust can end up on roasted coffee, tainting the flavor. Either a metal or plastic scoop will work. It’s nice to have a larger scoop for weighing out green coffee in preparation for roasting like these:
For bagging or weighing roasted coffee, it’s a little easier to have a couple of smaller scoops handy like these:
A Scale For Weighing Your Roasted Coffee
Scales for weighing your roasted coffee for serving or filing your retail bags are relatively easy to find, and most of the scales listed above will do the trick. However, if you weigh out 5lbs bags of coffee for bulk or wholesale consumption, you might need something with a little more weighing capacity. Please note, making sure you are filling your bags with advertised weight on your packaging is required by law. Here are a few suggestions of scales that are suitable for weighing your roasted coffee:
Accuteck ShipPro Digital Scale $25.99 (110lb weight limit / 2g or 0.1oz accuracy)
Acacia Pearl $140-150 (11lb weight limit / 0.003oz or 0.1g accuracy)
Gator Coffee Scale $27 (6.6lb weight limit / 0.003oz or 0.1g accuracy)
Buckets, Containers, and Bins for Green and Roasted Coffee
Depending on how much room you have and how much you’re roasting, having buckets, containers, or bins around can be very helpful. Whether you are storing and blending green or roasted coffee, roasting a lot of batches in one session, or want to cut down on your single-use coffee bags, having the right size container available can make your coffee roasting operation a lot easier.
Green coffee storage can often be a little easier to organize. Boxes and bags of green often come in Grain-Pro bags, which are perfect for green coffee storage.
You will want to make sure you store your green coffee in a cool, dry place free from cleaning products or fragrant foods. Remember, green coffee is porous and can absorb smells from nearby materials. Also, be sure the green coffee is stored separately from the roasted coffee to avoid cross-contamination.
If you want to transfer your green coffee into a different container than the Grain-Pro bag it is often packaged in, here are a few suggestions:
Rubbermaid Brute 10 Gallon $22.82
For your roasted coffee, it’s convenient to have buckets that you can easily label, stack, carry, and scoop from for bagging. Here are a few that we suggest:
Rubbermaid Brute 10 Gallon $22.82
An Impulse Bag Sealer For Your Coffee Bags
When you start to bag your own coffee for retail, you will need a sealer to seal the bags. A tabletop hand-operated bag sealer works perfectly well. As a Bellwether customer, we provide you with an 8-inch hand-operated impulse sealer to get you started.
If you require a sealer that can handle a little more volume and is a little faster, here are a few options:
IMPAK Foot-Operated Impulse Sealers $205-265
Finally, a few of our favorite partners.
We’ve worked with hundreds of vendors and partners over the years, and these top three are our go-to, life-long partners for coffee-related supplies and more!
PLC Print is our one-stop-shop for anything and everything marketing related. If you can imagine it, they can print it! Seriously, anything is possible with PLC. If you have a fun packaging/printing/marketing/anything idea, Rajiv and PLC can make it happen. This amazing shop is owned and operated by people of color in Berkeley, CA (across the street from our very first office/garage)!
Sticker Mule is a great source for coffee labels, especially if your menu changes often. Their lowest minimum order quantity is 50, but the bigger the order, the bigger the discount! We use StickerMule for most of our stickers and labels. We’re proud to work with StickerMule, a company that wanted to make an industry better, which many said would be “impossible” to do… sound familiar? 😉
SavorBrands is the company that makes our Bellwether-branded coffee bags and a leader for coffee packaging in the industry. Savor Brands is dedicated to innovative packaging solutions for a more sustainable future for coffee, which is totally aligned with our values. We love the team at SavorBrands and are proud to call them a Bellwether partner.
Additional Resources
Now that you have all the essentials for your roasting operation, take a look at our previous Bellwether Blog Posts for more information about How To Set Up Your Wholesale Coffee Business and Setting Up Your Online Coffee Business.
Having these essential items will help to make your roasting operation consistent, efficient, and user-friendly.
Happy roasting!
