green bean importing

gerfmurphy

hi all,
not sure if this is more for entrepenurial forum or coffee forum, please move if more applicable.
I seen before a few people asked about importing green bean from various geographical locations worldwide.
I have an option to source Kerinci coffee fom indonesia with the aim to develope a market here in Ireland.
I am very tenativly looking into this as a possible business:
The product seems good and I have time availible to work on developing the idea.
any leads or ideas where to start?
I have a few options as to what is availible.
from green bean to packed roasted and branded.
I have not idea of the business model or strategy to enter the market.
I do have some storage options and distibution options availible if i have a demand.
any insight would be greatly appricated

Krusty_Clown

Not a marketer or a coffee professional, but ordering in packed and roasted will be a difficult market to enter into, as it falls out of that 'specialty coffee' category and more into the supermarket/retail/internet sales space and because it's pre-roasted, it's a perishable product affected by shipping times. As you'll see from this forum, specialty coffee consumers go to great length to get their coffee freshly roasted, so if it's pre-roasted, you're quite squarely in the general coffee consumer space.

Roasting yourself is an option, but a proper roasting setup can cost thousands of euro, but more importantly, takes a huge amount of experience. So the remaining two options are really:
1) Import to sell to coffee roasters (and coffee hobbyists) as green beans
2) Import and partner with a coffee roaster to have them roast your beans for you (on some form of payment/commission agreement) and sell through them or retail.

In both cases you would need to have a really good quality product. Perhaps you might want to import a small batch and then reach out to various coffee roasters to see if there is interest?

Squidgy Black

gerfmurphy wrote: »

hi all,
not sure if this is more for entrepenurial forum or coffee forum, please move if more applicable.
I seen before a few people asked about importing green bean from various geographical locations worldwide.
I have an option to source Kerinci coffee fom indonesia with the aim to develope a market here in Ireland.
I am very tenativly looking into this as a possible business:
The product seems good and I have time availible to work on developing the idea.
any leads or ideas where to start?
I have a few options as to what is availible.
from green bean to packed roasted and branded.
I have not idea of the business model or strategy to enter the market.
I do have some storage options and distibution options availible if i have a demand.
any insight would be greatly appricated

I think your best bet would be to reach out to some smaller roasters who may be interested in purchasing green beans. The main issue you'll have is probably costs, especially for smaller quantities as a lot of places will be importing containers themselves or buying from large distributors.

Roasted and packed would be a no-go unless you were distributing to say supermarkets with a best before date as opposed to roasted on dates, in specialty coffee most buyers would be looking for fresh roasted coffee.

If you really wanted to give it a shot, I'd say your best bet would be to plan out the logistics, in terms of the amounts you would have to order for say a small supply, and have it calculated at scale, and then see what the costs would work out per jute (60kg sack), per pallet and then per container, and what kind of margin you would comfortably need to see what kind of pricing you could offer. From there you could probably try get your hands on some samples and reach out to roasters and see if they want to give it a whirl with a small batch to gauge if it's something that people may want.

Or else you could go down the route of roasting it yourself with a small batch roaster, would require a decent amount of upfront costs and some knowledge too, and it's a pretty competitive market in ireland at the moment for roasters in terms of the number of options available.