How to start a coffee roasting business in the UK

Most people who start a roastery start with a love of coffee and a small roaster. The ones who are still trading three years later usually started with a customer list. Roasting is the easy part to learn; selling enough coffee at a margin that pays for premises, green stock and your time is the business.

This guide sets out the steps in the order that costs least when you get one wrong. Each step links to a deeper guide.

The steps, in order

1. 1Decide who you sell to. Wholesale to cafes and offices, retail online, subscriptions, markets or private label. Each has a different price, volume and cash cycle. Write down your first twenty named prospects before you buy anything.
2. 2Write a one-page plan and a cash forecast. Volume per week, price per kg, cost per kg, fixed costs and the month you break even. See the business plan guide.
3. 3Choose a legal structure. Sole trader is quickest; a limited company separates your personal assets from the business. See choosing a business structure.
4. 4Find premises and check planning use before you sign. Smoke and odor are the issues neighbours and councils care about. See premises and planning.
5. 5Pick a roaster sized for year two, not week one. Batch size, fuel, extraction and an afterburner if your site needs one. See choosing a coffee roaster.
6. 6Register as a food business with your local authority at least 28 days before you start trading. It is free. See registering a food business.
7. 7Write your food safety management system, based on HACCP principles, before the inspector asks for it. See HACCP for coffee roasters.
8. 8Arrange insurance: employers' liability is compulsory once you employ anyone; product and public liability are what your wholesale customers will ask for. See insurance for roasters.
9. 9Buy green coffee in small, deliberate quantities. Three to five coffees cover most menus: a blend base, a single origin or two, and a decaf. See how to buy green coffee.
10. 10Design labels that meet UK food labeling law and order packaging with one-way valves. See coffee labeling in the UK.
11. 11Sell, invoice and log every batch from the first day, so pricing, traceability and roast consistency rest on records, not memory.

Start with customers, not the machine

A 5 kg roaster running four batches an hour can produce well over 100 kg of roasted coffee in a working day. Very few new roasteries sell 100 kg a week in their first year. The constraint is almost never roasting capacity; it is demand.

Before spending on equipment, test demand: visit cafes in your area, ask what they pay per kg, what they dislike about their current supplier and what would make them switch. If you already roast at home or on a sample roaster, offer to supply a staff coffee or a guest espresso for a month. A handful of paying wholesale accounts tells you more than any market report.

Home roasting or a unit?

Some roasteries start at home on a 1 kg to 2 kg machine. It is legal to sell food made at home if you register the business with your local authority and meet food hygiene law, but roasting creates smoke and odor, and your mortgage lender, landlord, insurer and neighbours may all have a view. Many councils will also want to know about extraction. Check your tenancy or deeds, tell your insurer, and speak to your council's environmental health team before you sell anything.

A small industrial unit gives you room for green stock, a packing bench and an afterburner if you need one, and it removes the domestic question. The trade-off is rent, business rates and a longer lease commitment. Small business rate relief may reduce or remove rates on a small unit in England; check with your council.

What it costs to begin

The range is wide because the roaster dominates the budget. A realiztic first budget for a small unit with a used 5 kg to 6 kg roaster, extraction, scales, a sealer, initial packaging and green stock sits in the tens of thousands of pounds. A new 12 kg roaster with an afterburner can cost more than that on its own. The startup costs guide breaks the budget down line by line with a worked example.

The legal minimum before your first sale

Common first-year mistakes

• Pricing from competitors' websites instead of your own costs. Work out your cost per kg including roast loss, packaging and labor, then price. See pricing wholesale coffee.
• Buying too much green coffee. A full bag of each of eight origins ties up cash and ages in your unit. Buy what you can roast in two to four months.
• Giving equipment on loan to win a cafe without a contract. A grinder or espresso machine on loan needs a minimum purchase commitment and a recovery clause. See cafe account terms.
• No records. Without batch logs you cannot trace a complaint, reproduce a roast or know your true roast loss.

None of this needs to be complicated. A roastery with three wholesale accounts, a small online shop and clean records is a real business. Build the habits on day one and they scale.