How the math works
You buy green coffee by the pound. You sell roasted coffee by the pound. Roasting makes the beans lighter, so every roasted pound cost you more than one green pound. That is the first step: green price ÷ (1 − roast loss). A pound of green at 15% loss comes out as 0.85 of a pound, so the green share of each roasted pound is the green price divided by 0.85.
Then add what it costs you to roast it, bag it and get it to the café, per roasted pound. That gives your roasted cost per pound: the least you can charge for that coffee. Sell under it and each pound loses money.
A tier price is that roasted cost plus the margin you set for the tier. If a tier's margin is under the floor you typed, the tool uses the floor instead and flags the cell, so you can see it and decide. Prices round to the nearest 5 cents so the sheet reads clean, and round up instead if rounding down would go under your floor. The margin percent is the margin divided by the price, not by the cost, so it is a true margin and not a markup.
The bag price is the pound price times your bag size. Nothing else is added. If you charge for delivery or a sample kit, that is a separate line on your invoice, not something hidden in the coffee.
What roast loss is, and how to measure it
Green coffee holds water. Heat drives most of it out, and a little of the bean leaves as gas and chaff. So a batch comes out lighter than it went in. The share it lost is your roast loss.
It changes with the coffee, the roast level and the machine. Darker roasts stay in longer, so they lose more. Royal Coffee's Chris Kornman puts the range at about 10% for a very light roast, dropped at the start of first crack, up to as much as 25% for a roast taken well past second crack (Royal Coffee, 2022-07-14). That is a range, not your number.
Your number is the one you weigh. Put a batch on the scale before it goes in and again when it comes out. Divide the weight lost by the starting weight, times 100. Do it for each coffee you sell wholesale, because a washed Kenya and a dark Sumatra will not lose the same. Then use the "per coffee" setting above.
How to set wholesale tiers
A tier is a price level a café earns by ordering more. The honest way to set one is to tie the lower price to a real saving on your side. A café taking 50 pounds a week fills a whole drum instead of half of one, and takes one delivery instead of three. Those savings are real, so some of them can go back to the café. A café taking 8 pounds a week does not save you anything yet, so it pays the base price.
Two or three tiers is usually enough. One roaster consultancy suggests a base price up to 24 pounds a week, about 5% off from 25 to 49, and 8 to 10% off at 50 and up (In The Black Coffee Co., June 2025). Treat that as one view. Your delivery routes and batch size decide where your steps belong.
This tool asks for margin in dollars per pound rather than percent off. That is on purpose. Percent off hides what you actually keep. A margin in dollars is what lands in your account on every pound, and your floor stops any tier from going under what you can live with.
Set the minimum for each tier as pounds per week, because that is how cafés think about coffee. Round it to something you can check on a delivery slip.
What to send a café
Send the printed sheet from this page. It shows your coffees, your tiers, the price per pound and per bag, and the weekly minimum for each tier. It does not show your costs or your margins, and it should not.
Alongside the sheet, a café wants to know four things: what the order minimum is, which days you deliver, how they place an order, and who to call when something is wrong. Put those on one page with the sheet. If you offer a sample kit, say what is in it and whether it is free.
Keep the sheet dated. When green prices move, print a new one with a new date and send it to every account. Cafés respect a clear date more than a surprise on the invoice.
When you are ready to take those orders online instead of by text, that is a wholesale ordering page, and it is the kind of thing we build.