I've been a home roaster for years now, often bringing my home roasted beans into the cafe and offering them up to customers. I worked in a roasting facility for a while and got a great understanding of everything from green to roasting to packaging to marketing. These are all things that I have come to love about roasting coffee beyond the actual roasting itself.

Now, the cafe that am I working for is looking to purchase our first roaster and get things underway. The one thing that my boss keeps asking me is (basically), "How does this benefit our numbers? (profit)" I know that roasting your own is cheaper, obviously. But by how much? I have only ever purchased greens in small quantities, what can I expect to pay for a 150lb burlap bag of greens? Obviously it's going to depend on quality, so I'll just say, when starting out, we won't be purchasing any C.o.E. coffees, but we are not about to serve up poor quality greens. I plan on spending a lot of time going through samples finding the best quality that I can afford (and eventually I do plan to offer COE coffees). What should I be expecting? $6/lb? $3? Less... more? Has anyone worked the numbers to the point of knowing what the beans cost per pound after gas, weight loss, roaster wage, packaging, etc are factored in? I know there are a few different roasting calculators out there that give you this information, what I am wondering is what categories do I need to be factoring into the "cost" section? Things I can think of are: gas, wage, weight loss, initial cost of greens and packaging. Anything else? I just need help organizing how the numbers will look. If someone could give me a sample with example numbers I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks guys,
-bry