Hello Admin, afraid I have to respectfully disagree as I do happen to think all this about profits has gone right off topic from my understading of the original post asking what retail clients are paying for coffee. Secondly, individuals who wish to question others about their financial affairs should first reflect upon how they might react if a total stranger came to their own door and demanded to be allowed to take a peek at **their** financial affairs or make uninformed judgements about the level of profitability in their profession. I think I know what the reaction might be. Thirdly, it would serve no purpose to generalise about the perceived running costs and resultant profitability of an "ideal" roasting business. Individual businesses, in individual markets, sustaining individually differing costs and competition, being run by individual directors with individual levels of available start up and running capital, with individual levels of turnover, and individual leves of DEBT, require individual levels of profitability to be able to continue to function and rightly, earn a decent living for the owners. You cannot generalise that. Lastly, coffee roasters with huge turnover can afford to work with much lower levels of gross profit on the cost of the raw beans but generally speaking are not always well thought of in these "coffee head" type circles in terms of quality. Much smaller companies with generally very small coffee turnover require to make much higher gross profit otherwise they simply cannot earn a living and remain viable....there is no point in having made 10,000% percent gross profit on the initial cost of the beans if you only sold 1 kilo for the whole week. Did you pay your rent? So, clients make a conscious decision to pay more for what they perceive to be a fresh roasted high quality product which is usaully purveyed to them by smaller, "specialty" roasters. If you therefore want to continue to be able to get your really good fresh roasted hiqual coffee from the nice local bloke with the specialty roasting business, rather than have to make your selection from the vastly smaller range, cheaper but nicely staled and lower quality offerings packaged for you by the very large supermarket brand roasters and made available down on the supermarket shelf, you will have to find something other than the nonsence of the perceived level of profitability of your friendly supplier, to worry about. Cheers, FC.
