It takes a lot to produce a cup of coffee. Someone takes care of the plants plants, dedicates his land and the whole year of his time, hand picks the crop and makes it transportable, deliver here etc etc. Roasting naively seems to be the quickest and least expensive part of the process. Still markup on roasting (at least in my town) is several times higher than everything else combined. Maybe I just do not know good places to buy beans?

Have you purchased a commercial coffee roaster and peripherals recently? Leased a space to roast coffee?

I don't know many coffee roasters that are living in a big mansion on the hill and tooling around in their 90' yachts on weekends.

The obvious answer is that roasting is done in a first world country paying developed wages.

I also suspect roasting has a higher capital investment, and also has to deal with a far more complicated distribution problem because their product has a very short shelf life, which of course limits competition and economies of scale.

Compare Folgers to a third wave roaster and you will see which processes add cost.

keeping in mind that San Diego is obscenely expensive compared to the majority of the US:

As the people said above, first world wages and overhead (expensive real estate, workshop, etc).

Roasters are a significant capital investment, in addition to all the coffee brewing equipment that the roaster needs to buy so they can test cafe applications for their beans.

Supply chain is expensive and a problem that big companies spend a lot of money fighting.

But, what I have to add in addition to the previous posters: you are paying for your bag, but you are ALSO paying for all the extra coffee they had to throw out that either didn't sell before going bad, didn't roast well, or didn't pass QC for whatever reason. Those beans that end up in the trash bin either at the roastery or at your local third wave coffee shop add up.

Almico wrote:Have you purchased a commercial coffee roaster and peripherals recently? Leased a space to roast coffee?

I don't know many coffee roasters that are living in a big mansion on the hill and tooling around in their 90' yachts on weekends.

Nope but I can assure you that leasing a few thousands sq feet of space is less problematic than leasing a few hundred acres of land. And buying and running a roaster is less problematic than buying and running all the machinery required to grow coffee.

To run through some hypotheticals:

in Costa Rica, you can find 100 Acre farms around 400-500k. A 30 year mortgage payment for that at 3.25% interest is ~1700 a month.

In San Diego, it costs about 1.50-2.00 a sq foot for a warehouse in a cheap area. With just a small 1000 sq foot warehouse being 1500-2000 a month lease, you're talking about 100 acres of a high-elevation premium climate for growing coffee. Oh, and that farm is also your home.

What machinery do you think the small coffee farms producing high end coffees are using? Most of these small farms, from what I've seen, are hand picked, hand dried/filtered, and then pay for the milling to be done at another place. Some of the bigger ones keep that onsite, I imagine, but the infrastructure is there to grow coffee with minimal machinery.

Roasting is expensive.

But that coffee is on land outside our country on farms that have been around a long time.

Compare it to coffee grown on US land, and you'll see that it does turn out to be extremely expensive. Blue Bottle farmed coffee with Frinj Coffee, and it sold for $65 per 100g.

https://dailycoffeenews.com/2017/12/11/ ... per-ounce/

karamba wrote:Nope but I can assure you that leasing a few thousands sq feet of space is less problematic than leasing a few hundred acres of land. And buying and running a roaster is less problematic than buying and running all the machinery required to grow coffee.

Then why aren't coffee roasters getting rich?

I ask a very different question -

"How much longer can really good coffee remain an affordable luxury?"

To the OP.

In Finland you can get roasted coffee (not freshly roasted) from big commercial company (=crap) for about 6€/kg.

Good freshly roasted speciality coffee can be ten times more the price.
I can get good green beans for 15€/kg. Those same beans would be double the price if roasted by an artesan roaster. It's not bad if you get the best quality you can get from quality beans.

For reference, I usually like to point to this Youtube video of what's it all about: