One of the best opportunities for generating sustained revenue for a coffee roaster is selling to grocery stores. With just a handful of wholesale coffee customers, you can increase sales volume, spread your realm of influence, and capture more customers in new markets.

During the pandemic, global retail e-commerce traffic skyrocketed a mind-blowing 22 billion monthly visits, as consumers shopped online for everyday household items like coffee.

Along the journey of opening and growing a coffee shop, every owner wonders at some point, "Should we roast our own coffee?" Making the transition takes passion, patience, and skill-but before anything else, it has to make financial sense: is coffee roasting profitable?

Let's explore the research and break down coffee roasting profit margins vs coffee shop margins, dive deep into the financials, and analyze whether starting to roast coffee is a good move for you.

In this exploration, we'll take a look at:

• Research on average profit margins for roasters vs cafes

• What to expect for startup costs (+ how to save big in the beginning)

• Reasonable expectations for coffee roasting ROI

• How to start a coffee roasting business

Let's get into the numbers.

2023 was another exciting year at Bellwether—we proved the future of electric roasting by roasting completely with solar power in the desert of California, contributed thousands of dollars to farming communities, curbed millions of pounds of carbon, and more.