We Finally Bought Green Coffee, and Here Is What I Got Wrong

The pallet showed up on a Tuesday and it was the wrong size. Not the wrong product, the wrong amount of it, and I want to write down how that happened because I think the mistake is a common one and it is an embarrassing one to keep making.

I had done the math on what a pound of roasted coffee sells for and what a pound of green coffee costs, and the gap between those two numbers looked like a business. It is a business. It is just not the business I had pictured, because I did the math backwards and did not notice.

The Math I Should Have Done

Green coffee loses weight in the roast. Roughly fifteen to twenty percent of the green weight turns into smoke and chaff and goes away. So if you buy a hundred pounds of green and sell a hundred pounds of roasted, you have not sold what you bought. You have sold less, and you have to buy more green to replace it.

That sounds obvious when it is written down. It was not obvious to me while I was looking at a spreadsheet where the two numbers lined up beautifully and the gap between them was a margin.

The second thing I got wrong was the minimum order. The minimum is not the minimum you want, it is the minimum that exists, and it is usually enough coffee to keep a small town in business for a month. I do not need that much. I need that much eventually, but I need to sell it first, and selling it is the part I had not done yet.

What I Would Tell Someone Starting Now

Buy the smallest amount that is physically possible, even if the per-pound price is worse. The per-pound price is not the number that matters. The cost of being wrong is the number that matters, and a small wrong order is a cheap lesson.

Rent the roasting before you buy the roasting. There are roasters within driving distance who will roast your green coffee for a fee, and that arrangement teaches you everything you need to know about how much you actually use, how fast you go through it, and whether you like doing it. It is the cheapest possible version of the information.

And do not put your name on the bag yet. I nearly did. The bag is the thing that makes it feel real, and the reason to wait is that the bag is the thing you cannot take back.

Where It Actually Stands

I have a garage full of green coffee and a roaster that is not here yet, which is the correct order for once. The coffee will get roasted. It will get sold. The only open question is whether I will be the person selling it or whether I will have hired somebody by then, and I am genuinely undecided.

The freeze-dried side of this business is the part I understand. The coffee side is the part I am learning in public, and I would rather tell you that now than pretend I figured it out faster than I did.

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC