Coffee Sales to Restaurants

[Musicphan]

Hi All -

I'm in the process of opening a small roasting operation. I'm familiar with the coffee shop market, but need some assistance estimating demand from restaurant clients. For those of you who sell into independent restaurants - how much do they typically consumer in a month. I know each restaurant is going to be different - just looking for some rough averages to help size equipment and build out growth model.

Thanks in advance!

Mike

 

[peterjschmidt]

Can you go pound the pavement and try to get a few minutes time of those you're going to market to? Like you said, each restaurant will be different, and even if someone gives you an accurate average of their clients and that happens to transpose to your clients, the unknown factor is how many clients you can actually land.

Another question I'd ask you is, how many hours in a day or in a week do you plan to devote to roasting?

 

[slurp]

Most restaurants get coffee from their food distributor and that coffee is cheap. You may want to focus on becoming a very good roaster before you worry about selling product. You will gain customers in your learning process. Once you can roast you will have a customer base that last rather than one time customers that buy your product once and never again because they do not like it.

 

[Musicphan]

Thanks guys... I've actually talked with a half dozen restaurants and I get wildly different responses which is why I asked the question. I don't anticipate a huge focus on restaurants but in our market a good percentage of the 'better' restaurants use specialty coffee.