This calculator is designed as a simple reality check. It helps you estimate what it might take to reach your financial goal by selling roasted coffee. It also gives you a rough idea of what size roaster you may need to produce enough coffee to support that goal.
This is not a business plan. It is intentionally simple, and yes, a little naive. For now, it assumes you sell your coffee directly at retail prices, not wholesale. Wholesale changes the math significantly, and I plan to add that section in the future.
Use this calculator to get inspired, but also to get grounded. Maybe the numbers will show you that your dream is more possible than you thought. Or maybe they will show you that coffee roasting is harder than it looks, and that is useful too. Better to learn that early than after spending money on equipment, bags, labels, rent, websites, and green coffee.
When entering your desired income, be generous. In coffee, there is always “one more cost”: packaging, shipping, samples, equipment maintenance, software, taxes, marketing, mistakes, and time you forgot to charge for.
You will also see fields for roasting days and roasting hours. That is important because roasting is only one part of the business. Especially in the beginning, you may roast only one or two days a week for a few hours. The rest of your time will go into sales, marketing, customer service, bookkeeping, deliveries, packaging, ordering green coffee, fixing problems, and trying to get people to buy again.
If your financial dream can be supported by roasting one day a week for four to six hours, that is a very healthy starting point. It means you have room to grow. If the calculator shows that you need to roast every day just to survive, that is not impossible, but it is a very different business.
Use the fine-tuning section to adjust the numbers to your own situation. Your costs, prices, efficiency, and goals will be different from someone else’s.
This calculator will not tell you whether you should start a coffee roasting business. But it can help you ask better questions before you do.
Because this calculator is designed for an international audience, taxes are not included.
Some roasters can operate close to full capacity, while others cannot. We added a 20% wiggle room to keep the estimate more realistic.
To truly test the dream, try entering a wholesale-style price, such as $11.95 per 12 oz bag, and see where the numbers take you.
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ncie calculator, however – it is in ounces and kilograms.. can it be one or another, otherwise its confusing, im from EU and dont to ounces, but then the folks from US do ounces but dont do kilos… thanks!
Hi Alex, thank you for your feedback. Good point. I fixed the calculator. Now you can do metric and imperial and added some other features like wholesale etc.
This is a really helpful calculator. One suggestion: I found the “Take-home income / month” field a little confusing. Since the calculator ultimately works backward to estimate the required coffee sales, I wasn’t sure whether I should enter my desired personal take-home income or the business’s monthly revenue target. A brief tooltip or one-line explanation next to that field would make the intent much clearer.
Hi Jeff, thank you for your feedback. The goal is to give you an idea what does it take to do a coffee business. Many of my students never run the numbers so basically I am asking “How much money do you need to be happy”. This will give you a slight idea how many bags is it per month. This is not intended to be a business plan or create a precise estimate, but gives you a hunch. I usually have 2 major outcomes. 1. I know what to do and let’s start the hard work or 2. This is not for me and I will not waste my time. Either is a great result for an educator 😃