Buying Wholesale Green Coffee Beans: How to Get Started
Whether you’re starting a coffee roasting business and roast green coffee beans professionally or coffee roasting is your side hustle, you’ll need to buy green coffee beans. Here’s some good news: getting started doesn’t have to be difficult.
When the time comes to start roasting, you’ll need to buy unroasted coffee. Fortunately, part of Genuine Origin’s (GO’s) mission is to make green coffee buying effortless. With GO, all it takes is a few simple clicks to buy green coffee like everything else you buy online. You don’t need to download a pdf, hunt for prices, or call a broker during business hours who doesn’t want to deal with “small” roasters.
On GO’s website, pricing for specialty green coffee, including micro-lot green coffee, is transparently available on each product page. There is no minimum order quantity, and green coffee ships free within the continental US. Additionally, every coffee we carry ships in food-grade lined 65lb boxes, so you don’t have to worry about dragging around 60-kilo jute bags.
Raking green coffee beans in Brazil
Ready to Purchase Wholesale Green Coffee Beans? Here’s What You Need to Know
In the art of roasting green coffee beans, the only limit is your imagination. If you’re roasting coffee for family and friends, you can even use a cast iron skillet or a popcorn machine. For more consistency, however, you’ll want to consider upgrading to an Aillio Bullet, a Hottop, or a Mill City Roaster – unless you’re thinking of spending a lot. Larger roasters can cost you $15,000-$45,000 and can require ventilation systems and full compliance with state or city ordinances.
While you get your roastery equipment set up, you can start exploring options for wholesale green coffee sourcing. Many importers operate on a contractual basis, which means it takes a few rounds of communication and negotiation to finalize prices and logistics. Green coffee prices are usually listed as exclusive of delivery costs. When buying pallets of coffee in 60kg jute bags, get ready for some heavy powerlifting every time you do inventory management.
Fortunately, GO’s on-demand retail model makes purchasing wholesale green coffee beans much simpler – taking a load off your back in more ways than one. With visible prices right on our website, no minimum orders, free shipping, and sturdy 65lb box packaging that keeps your coffee fresh in food-grade liners, buying green coffee from GO is a great way to get started with your coffee roasting adventure.
Green coffee beans drying
Wholesale Green Coffee Prices
GO supplies wholesale green coffee beans to start-ups, hobbyists, and established roasters who roast millions of pounds of coffee per year. No matter what stage you’re at along your coffee roasting journey, we’re here to help make it happen.
Many coffee roasters visit our website to comparison shop – because we actually publish our prices. However, our prices do change from time to time. This is because the price of green coffee is ultimately tied to the Coffee Futures market and the differentials in buying from different origins. (For more on the Coffee Futures market, take a look at our blog post.)
The great thing about GO is that when you look at the price, that’s all you’re going to pay. Since we ship everything for FREE to any roastery in the continental US, the price is the price! You can forget about dealing with freight forwarders, liftgate charges, fuel surcharges, and the rest – GO has people who deal with those headaches for you. Ultimately, we just want coffee roasters to have more time to work on growing their coffee business. Why? Because you will probably need more coffee from us!
Storing Green Coffee Beans
If you’re just starting out, then you should know that the freshness of coffee is everything. It affects the price of raw green coffee to some extent and can definitely impact the final cup profile of your roast. So, if you’re buying larger amounts of coffee, try to keep it in a cool, dry place, away from direct sunlight.
If you’re buying jute bags (and you have the stamina to drag them into your roastery successfully), get them up off the ground – i.e., save those pallets! The nice thing about GO’s packaging is that our 65lb boxes are liftable and stackable.
You need inventory space if you’re going to buy a pallet of jute bags. If you’re just starting out, definitely consider our boxes. The investment won’t be so steep, they’re easy to store, and because we offer free delivery, there’s no pressure to buy more than you need for roasting right now – more on that below.
Jute bags full of green coffee beans in our Antigua, Guatemala mill
Buy Green Coffee Beans…but Only What You Need
Some coffee roasters have a business plan for building their wholesale coffee roasting program and will buy from an importer to get a great deal on a pallet of coffee. We’re talking 1,300-1,500lbs of green coffee beans here. These coffee roasters might spend several thousand dollars on their first unroasted coffee purchase and find that it takes months or even years to roast (and sell) all of it.
It’s a simple concept: the quicker you can roast your green coffee beans, the quicker you can get cash for your business. Being green coffee rich and cash-poor is not the position you want to be in when it comes time to pay your bills.
Fortunately, you can order one or two boxes of specialty green coffee beans from GO at any frequency you’d like. You can also reserve and schedule your coffee to ship out from our warehouse up to 90 days from the date you place your order. The big bonus here? We won’t charge you until the day before your shipment goes out. With GO, you get to reserve your coffee and keep your cash where it belongs.
Do You Need Jute Bags to Buy Coffee in Bulk?
The bulk of green coffee sold across the globe is delivered to roasteries in jute bags. Jute bags themselves don’t affect the flavor of the coffee beans, but jute bags that are not lined with GrainPro or other food-grade hermetic liners might not keep green coffee fresh as long and expose beans to air and oxidization.
When you buy green coffee beans, you’ll notice that most high-quality unroasted coffee is now transported inside a jute bag with a food-grade liner (just like how GO does it). The only difference with GO is that our green coffee beans come in cute green boxes. Are jute bags better? Nope. It does cost us a little more to repack the food-grade liner bag from origin into our 65lb boxes, but this goes back to our mission: we want you to buy green coffee effortlessly.
Why Are Other Green Coffee Importers Talking About Contracts?
Most of the green coffee that’s traded is sold by the container load. The trade contract ensures that the importer will deliver the quality of coffee they promised and that the buyer will take possession of the coffee they contracted. With GO, our on-demand retail model is much easier to understand. We publish the price of the green coffee beans alongside the flavor notes that our Q-graders tasted in the pre-shipment sample. We can also send you samples of our spot coffees if you’d like to try before you buy.
Our sales team is here to provide tailored customer service and a streamlined coffee-buying experience for roasters of all sizes. We’re always happy to answer any questions about our inventory, your order or even help you set up a shipping schedule, so your roastery is always stocked with fresh green coffee when you need it. Shop green coffee on our website or get in touch for more information about what we do.
