Function Coffee Co.

Tony Dossat has a theory about how to open a coffee shop: you don't start with the shop. You start with the brand.

It's almost like I wrote a book and then made the movie. You've got a built-in fan base, then you do the high-risk seven-year lease.

For Tony, the book came first — build the brand, grow the audience, prove the product. The café — a former pharmacy space in Northlake, Texas, about 20 minutes north of Fort Worth — is the movie. And it's opening with a fan base already in place.

That sequence was made possible by one decision: roasting in-house from day one. Tony pre-ordered the Bellwether Shop Roaster, put it in his home office, and started building Function Coffee Co. as an e-commerce and pop-up brand while keeping his day job in design and user experience. Since March 2025, he's roasted over 1,000 pounds of coffee. The café lease is signed. Permits are in process. The roaster is coming with him.

Two decades of coffee, one business plan that kept getting closed

Tony's coffee background runs deep. He started as a barista in New York City around 2006–2007 at Oren's Daily Roast, where he first learned what serious coffee looked like. A stint at Starbucks followed, and then a move to Los Angeles where he worked at what he describes as the first café outside the Bay Area allowed to serve Blue Bottle — before the brand's acquisition and national expansion.

Through all of it, he kept a business plan open on his computer. Every year he'd revisit it — and every year something closed the book. Kids, a move, another job, the math not quite working.

"After COVID and just moving around a lot, I was like: I'm kind of done with this whole corporate thing."

His wife's advice cut through the hesitation: you know how to build a brand, you know how to do design, you love coffee — start roasting. He'd been following Bellwether since the original larger machine, but the price and footprint kept it out of reach. When the Shop Roaster launched, that changed. He pre-ordered it, set it up in his office, and started.

The barrier to entry, gone

Every coffee-industry veteran knows what the traditional path into roasting looks like: apprenticeships, gas lines, ventilation, buildout, a room in the back that used to be for something else. It's a wall a lot of would-be roasters never make it over.

When getting into roasting, I was most nervous about the barrier to entry. You hear about apprenticeships and needing infrastructure and gas lines and ventilation and all of these things. When you roast on the Bellwether you don't have any of those barriers, you can literally just plug and play. And that for me and my company has been game-changing.

The Shop Roaster went into a home office. An electrician set the outlet. A profile got selected from the screen. Coffee came out of the drum. The apprenticeship Tony had been quietly worried about turned into a menu-driven interface.

The café math: paying off the roaster before the doors open

Function Coffee sells a 300 g bag for $19.99. Landed cost from the Bellwether Marketplace runs about one-third of that — roughly $7 per bag for green coffee. Fully loaded COGS on a shipped bag, including the bag itself, label, box, custom printed tape, die-cut stickers, custom tissue, and a thank-you card with a 15% discount on the next order, comes to $8.87 per bag shipped.

That means net on the first bag is $11.12. Net on two or more bags in the same order climbs to $12.18 per bag. At markets, where the box, stickers, and tissue aren't part of the equation, that net climbs to $12.19.

Wholesale roasted coffee in the Dallas–Fort Worth area runs $12–$18 per pound, typically $13–$14. Tony's green coffee costs roughly half that. He white-labels at $13–$14 per bag for wholesale accounts — and that margin only exists because he's roasting himself.

I can't imagine starting a cafe without roasting, to be honest with you. It would be too expensive.

The café math works the same way. A moderate-paced café using 50 pounds of coffee a week, 52 weeks a year goes through 2,600 pounds annually. At a $7-per-pound savings from roasting versus buying wholesale, that's ~$18,200 a year — roughly the cost of the roaster itself, paid back in year one of café operations. By the time Function Coffee opens the doors, Tony will have already covered the roaster cost through e-commerce and pop-up volume alone.

He's also planning ahead for scale. When the roaster moves to the café, he'll add the continuous roasting kit — top loader and extended barrel — to handle espresso service, wholesale accounts, and retail bags simultaneously.

Having the option for the machine to scale with me is priceless.

How the roaster saved the lease

After three months scouting locations, Tony found the right spot: a high-traffic street frontage, no drive-through, positioned between two fast-growing new-build neighborhoods with thousands of homes in each. The space is a former pharmacy being split into two units. It checked every box.

Then came lease negotiations — and a complication. The property owner knew Tony intended to roast on-site and was concerned: about ventilation, about smell, about what commercial roasting actually entails. She assumed the answer was no.

"I said, I'm gonna send you the link. This is the roaster I have. Here's all of the information on it."

An hour later, the lease was approved.

The ventless, ductless design — no gas lines, no afterburner, no holes in the wall — turned a potential deal-breaker into a non-issue.

"Bellwether kind of saved my ass."

Your brand, day one — a marketer who happens to be in coffee

Tony describes himself as a marketer that happens to be in the coffee business. That framing is deliberate. The roasting enables the economics. The brand drives the growth.

I am a marketer that happens to be in the coffee business. If you aren't marketing yourself, it's like you invite people to a party and no one got the invite.

Function Coffee's packaging reflects that design-first thinking. Tony designed his own bags, moved from domestic printing to overseas production at one-third the cost, and treats every element of the customer experience as intentional — the custom printed tape, the die-cut stickers, the tissue paper, the 15%-off thank-you card. His UX background extends all the way from the screen to the mailbox.

The best thing about roasting your own coffee in-house is that you get to actually have your hand in every step of the customer journey. Not just serving the coffee, but being part of that entire life cycle of the product. Being able to say, this is my brand, this is what we're standing behind, this is what we're serving. It's not somebody else's coffee. It's our coffee.

Community is built the same way as the packaging: on purpose. Free coffee for PTA volunteers at a school event. Cold brew cans for 50 moms on a volunteer day. Pop-ups in the neighborhood. Two elementary schools flank the new café location — and those relationships are already in place before the doors open.

Roasting in a home office, around a day job and two kids

Tony roasts in his home office while on Zoom calls. The machine runs in the background — no supervision required during the roast. A typical batch starts with pre-weighed green coffee (usually 1,300 g), loaded in, profile selected from the screen, and confirmed. First roast of the day takes about 27 minutes to heat; each subsequent batch returns to temperature in around 6 minutes.

"Yesterday I was roasting, and that's the beauty of it — I can be on a Zoom call at my day job while I'm saving and building up a shop. My kids can be homesick from school. I can have a roast going."

Maintenance is minimal. Every four roasts or so, a shop vac clears the pre-filter — 30 seconds. The chaff container gets dumped, the water drained into a nearby sink. Around every 50 roasts, the porthole gets scraped clean of carbon buildup. The machine prompts each cleaning step. No heavy lifting, no specialized knowledge required.

On energy: as an all-electric operation charging a Tesla and running a roaster, Tony's monthly electricity bill has barely moved. The Shop Roaster uses about 0.17 kWh per pound — and it shows up that way on the utility bill.

Coffee people can taste

The difference in serving and experiencing fresh coffee versus coffee that has been roasted and sitting on a shelf for months is night and day. I can't tell you how many people have told me, I didn't know coffee was supposed to taste like this.

The freshness shows up in the cup, and customers notice.

There is a richness and a deepness to the cup that you just can't experience whenever you're drinking something that has been sitting on the shelf for a few months.

Margins that only exist because he roasts

Roasting in-house with the Bellwether has really unlocked a lot of margin for us because we're saving 40, 50% on what we would have otherwise spent, had we gone with third party beans for our cafe. And that type of margin in this industry is make or break for coffee companies and cafes.

At the end of the year, we're able to actually see profit that we would not have been able to unlock had we gone with the third party wholesale vendor.

Function Coffee, open for business

Function Coffee Co. has since opened its brick-and-mortar location at 101 Plaza Pl, Suite 150, Northlake, TX. The roaster made the move with it. Function's e-commerce site is live. The Instagram handle is @functioncoffeeco. And the theory — brand first, then café — is playing out.

It has truly meant that I can realize my dreams with Function Coffee Co and bring to life something that I have been wanting to do for over a decade.