Our Pricing, Explained

I always appreciate transparency and I know a lot of you are interested in how our pricing works. Because it's relatively easy to reverse engineer if you wanted to figure out how much we make, I wanted to give you a straight, no-nonsense breakdown of how we price coffee - and explain a little bit about why we exist in the first place.

How we started

The Green Coffee Collective came about because we wanted to give home roasters and startup roasters access to the same quality of green coffee that established, full-scale roasters were already getting. Read more about how we got started here.

How we buy coffee

We buy from our partners the same way any roaster does — we go through offer lists, talk through options, taste samples, and make calls based on what we think will work best for our customers. Simple as that.

That said, our prices can shift over time. When we reserve coffee, external factors like the C-Price can mean that from one delivery to the next, the price we need to charge to keep the business viable changes. It's an unfortunate reality of buying an agricultural commodity - and something we write about regularly on the blog.

What it costs us to get it to you

Once we've purchased coffee, there's a lot that happens before it reaches your door: shipping to our warehouse, storage, insurance, repackaging into smaller quantities, gathering information from partners, listing it on the site, promoting the coffees, then picking, packing and dispatching your order when it's sold. That all adds up pretty quickly.

Our pricing across different bag sizes reflects these costs - smaller quantities carry a higher price per kilo because the cost of preparing a 0.5kg order is pretty much identical to a 5kg order. The more you order, the more we can spread those costs, which is why the per-kilo price drops with larger quantities. This is also why we can reduce the price for small quantities with our Small Batch Bundles.

All in, our prices sit at around a 30% premium over what you'd pay directly from an importer or exporter. After everything is paid for, anything left goes straight back into the business to keep expanding our offering and making great coffee accessible to roasters across Europe.

For our customers within Europe: Due to varying VAT rates across the continent, prices shown while browsing may exclude tax. The final price, including the specific VAT rate applicable to your country, will be calculated at checkout once your shipping destination is confirmed.

What buying direct actually looks like

To give you a sense of the economics: if you wanted to access a single 60kg bag direct from one of our partners, you'd typically be looking at the cost of the coffee (say £600 at £10/kg), plus a warehouse picking fee (~£50), plus a quarter-pallet delivery (~£75). That's £725 before it's even arrived and then keep in mind you're working through 60kg of the same coffee, potentially for months, while freshness drops and you're not getting to try anything new, this can be a really big issue if you're a smaller-volume roaster.

When you're ready to go direct, we'll help

If you ever reach a point where buying full bags makes sense, we're genuinely happy to introduce you to the partners we source from. We've made 40+ introductions over the past two years alone - it benefits everyone. You get a trusted contact, and it strengthens our relationships with partners who've supported us from the start.

It's also why we show exactly who we sourced each coffee through. There's nothing to hide.

Until then - explore our current coffees and find something worth roasting.

Cheers

Dale