Micro-Roastery: Start, Price & Grow a Profitable Coffee Business
The complete operator's course — from green buying and roast costing to wholesale accounts and recurring revenue — built around a kit that runs your business.
68 min · 30 video lectures · quizzes · assignments · workbook
About this course
Most small-batch roasters are excellent at coffee and terrible at the numbers behind it. They undercharge for custom roasts, guess at green buy quantities, skip cupping logs, and watch thin margins disappear before they can grow.
Why it pays for itself:
This course fixes that — lecture by lecture, module by module.
Built for people who are serious about coffee as a business, not a hobby, this is a practical operations course.
You will learn how green coffee is bought, costed, and priced correctly — factoring in the 12–15% moisture loss that every new roaster ignores until it erodes their margin.
You will learn how to run a roast log that catches problems before bags ship, how to build a cupping and Agtron QC workflow that protects your reputation, and how to convert sample accounts into recurring wholesale clients.
Every section is grounded in the ServiceOpsKits Micro-Roastery Operations Kit — an editable spreadsheet included with the course.
The kit contains a green coffee forecast engine with auto RE-ORDER flags, a roast log pre-wired for charge temp, turning point, first crack, drop temp, and DTR, a cupping and Agtron QC log with Pass/Hold/Reject decisions, a wholesale account tracker from sample through booked recurring revenue, and a full income and expense tracker built for roastery economics.
You do not need a background in accounting or food science.
You need a roaster, a source of green coffee, and the willingness to run your business with the same precision you bring to the roast.
By the end of this course you will have a costed product line, a repeatable QC process, at least one wholesale account pipeline underway, and a bookkeeping setup that tells you whether you are actually making money.
That is the foundation every micro-roastery needs before it can scale.
What you'll learn
You'll be able to calculate true roasted-coffee cost including green shrinkage and overhead allocation
You'll be able to build a sourcing plan with RE-ORDER triggers that prevents stockouts
You'll be able to run and log a repeatable roast profile using the kit's roast log
You'll be able to conduct structured cupping sessions and make Pass/Hold/Reject decisions
You'll be able to price retail, wholesale, and custom roast contracts with confidence
You'll be able to convert sample accounts into recurring wholesale clients using a structured pipeline
You'll be able to close your books monthly and know your actual roastery profit or loss
You'll be able to build predictable recurring revenue through subscription and standing-order programs
Course curriculum
Section 1: Welcome & Setup
Welcome: What This Course Will Do for Your Roastery
Legal Structure, Licensing & Food Safety Basics
Equipment Baseline: What You Actually Need to Start
Defining Your Product Line Before You Start Selling
Positioning Your Roastery: Who You're For and Why It Matters
Section 2: Green Buying, Roast Costing & Pricing
Green Coffee Sourcing: Importers, Cooperatives & Direct Trade
Moisture Loss, Shrinkage & True Cost Per Pound
Building a Full Cost Model: Green + Labor + Overhead