gotters what’s interesting is if you search for UK roasters with it you see such a disparity in pricing, the Manco is quite reasonable at £6.50p a bag, you can pay anything up to double that. Wondering how much difference a roaster can make (of course some will be their location, pricing strategy etc).
There can be quite a big difference in coffee pricing, recently there was a coffee doing the rounds which was about £4.50 more expensive for 500g from one source (supposedly at a discount), than it was from a roaster called Teeside Coffee, that’s quite a difference.
The truth of it is, as the bean rises in price, the % margin it can sustain reduces. So a non coffee example might be, if a widget costs:
- 5 = margin of 300% - 400%
- 10 = margin of 250 - 350%
- 15 = margin of 200 - 300%
- 20 margin of 150 - 250%
Of course the money made changes like this:
- £12.50
- £20
- £22
- £20
There are two ways a small roaster can go, high volume and smaller margins, the only way to make more money is to increase the size of their market. Or buy more expensive coffees, make less margin, but more money. Of course, there is more risk because of the value of stock holding and having to sell older coffees at a discount, often because consumers are led to believe a coffee 1-month-old isn’t any good. It’s why most roasters roast to order a few times a week, with a couple of set despatch days.
Sometimes roasters for whatever reason, new, staff change, business consultancy whatever…get it into their heads that they must make a fixed margin…but for coffee, that really doesn’t work and either leads to consistently cheap coffee because consumers won’t pay super high prices, or the price disparities you see, So I might buy a green bean at £12 per Kilo, but a lot of roasters won’t, especially if they are in the high volume relatively fixed margin roasting.
So a long preamble to get to the recommendation that coffee is a bit like wine. The more you pay, the more of your £ is going into the coffee quality (as most roasters to take a smaller margin).
