How to Buy and Sell Coffee Beans Wholesale

Do you want to start a business buying and selling coffee beans wholesale? If YES, here is a complete guide on how to make money selling coffee beans wholesale. It can be truly challenging starting any business, but one business that you can start with little challenges and wide market coverage is to sell coffee beans wholesale.

Selling coffee beans wholesale involves either cultivating coffee beans and selling them wholesale to retailers or distributors, or importing a wide variety of either raw and or finely packaged coffee from countries where they are cultivated to supply them to retailers or distributors.

If you are considering selling coffee beans as a wholesaler in the United States, the good news is that you can’t get it wrong.

This is because coffee is consumed by a large percentage of the American population and several outlets that are willing to purchase coffee beans from you if you have a better deal. Selling coffee beans comes with its own fair share of challenges, but that does not rule out the fact that it is indeed a profitable business.

An aspiring entrepreneur can either choose to start as a coffee beans farmer or supplying a handful of outlets or covering several cities depending on their financial status.

Before launching this type of business, it will pay you to carry out your due diligence as it relates to market research, economic and cost analysis, and of course feasibility studies. You will need to make sure that you have the real reasons why you want to be in the line of business you have chosen.

That means you would have entered into an agreement with retailers and distributors that deal in coffee beans. If you get things right before selling your product wholesale, it will not take you long before you break even and start smiling to the bank.

If you are truly interested in selling coffee beans wholesale, then you might want to read through the steps discussed below.

Steps to Buying and Selling Coffee Beans Wholesale

• First Step: Learn The Trade

It is one thing to be a coffee beans farmer and it is a different kettle of fish for you to sell coffee. Interestingly, people who are into the business of coffee selling make more money than people who farm the beans, hence the need for you as a coffee farmer to go beyond just farming coffee to selling coffee.

Part of what you need to learn as a coffee bean farmer who wants to go into wholesaling is how to build an efficient coffee mill, an outstanding coffee roasting facility, and a business brand that can distinguish you in the marketplace. So what is expected of you is to learn how to sell coffee beans wholesale.

If you have the time and finance, it will pay you to enroll in a business school and learn all you can before embarking on selling coffee beans wholesale.

• Second Step: Construct Your Coffee Mill and Warehouse

If you are a coffee beans farmer who wants to sell coffee beans wholesale, then one critical thing you need to do is to construct a coffee mill and warehouse; a place where your coffee beans will be processed, packaged, stored, and supplied.

In your quest to construct your coffee mill, you are expected to locate the business in a central location with a good road network, a location that can easily get permits for the kind of business you want to do, secure efficient coffee beans de-pulpers, construct the washing stations, construct coffee bean roaster, set up the sun drying facilities ( or buy coffee drying machines).

Then a big and neat storage facility that can contain the quantity of coffee that you intend processing and of course ensure that your coffee beans are safe. Please note that if you don’t farm coffee but you import coffee beans and want to sell them wholesale, then you should not bother about this step, except securing a warehouse facility.

• Third Step: Secure Supply of Coffee Beans

One important factor that you need to consider before going into the sale of coffee is to ensure that you have been able to establish business relationships with coffee merchants or even coffee beans farmers.

The truth is that even if you are a coffee beans farmer, there are times when you are likely going to run out of stock hence the need to establish a network that can guarantee that you always have a wide variety of coffee beans to supply to your distributors and retailers.

In business, if your customers cannot be certain that they can always get supplies from you, they would naturally look for an alternative and if the alternative supplier treats them better than you do, you will definitely lose such customers.

Fourth Step: Write Your Marketing Plan

Writing your marketing plan is indeed a pointer that will show that you are truly interested in making a great deal as a coffee beans wholesaler. A marketing plan is a business document that clearly captures all the strategies you intend to deploy to generate the sales target you have set for your business.

In essence, all that is expected of you is to hire experts who know how to write a good and workable marketing plan for your business. If you don’t have the finance to hire an expert, you can source online marketing plan templates and then customize them to fit into your business.

• Fifth Step: Conduct a Market Survey

Trust me, you do not want to spend money processing coffee beans, packaging them, and then put them out there for sale without knowing what consumers want from you. So it is very important that before launching out, you need to conduct a market survey.

The results you get from the survey of your target market will inform the decisions and strategies that you can deploy. For example, a standard market survey for a coffee bean wholesale business may contain some or all of the following questions;

1. Are you satisfied with the taste and quality of our coffee beans?
2. If you are not satisfied with the taste and quality of our coffee beans, what areas would you want us to improve on?
3. Which of our assorted coffee flavors do you prefer the most?
4. How would you want us to communicate to you when we have any promo or if we have information that will benefit you or your family members and friends? Text messages, email, or via mobile apps (BBM, Twitter, WhatsApp et al)
5. How much are you willing to pay for a 50-gram coffee bean bag?
6. Is there any flavor of coffee that you would prefer to buy that is not in our offering? If yes please list them.
7. If you are to change one thing in our coffee bean packaging, what would that be?
8. Can you comfortably recommend our coffee beans to your family members, friends and colleagues?
9. Are you satisfied with our customer service delivery? If not what areas would you want us to improve on?

Sixth Step: Go All Out to Market/Sell Your Coffee Beans

If you have a product, the only way to make money out of it is to sell the product. So, if you have coffee beans in large stock in your warehouse, the only way to make money is to sell the coffee beans to coffee retailers and distributors. At this stage, you are expected to put into practice all the sales and marketing strategies that are captured in your marketing plan.

In the bid to market your coffee beans wholesale, you are expected to promote the coffee so as to attract coffee beans retailers and distributors and part of what you should do are;

• Place adverts on community-based newspapers, radio, and TV stations.
• Encourage the use of word of mouth publicity from your loyal customers
• Leverage on the internet and social media platforms like; YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, Google+, and other platforms to promote your coffee beans
• Ensure that you position your banners and billboards in strategic positions all around the city where you intend to attract coffee beans retailers and distributors
• Distribute your fliers and handbills in target areas in and around your neighborhood
• Contact coffee beans retailers, coffee shops, coffee cafés, coffee kiosk and coffee vending machine operators et al informing them that you sell varieties of coffee beans in wholesale
• Advertise your business on your official website and employ strategies that will help you pull traffic to the site
• Brand all your official cars and delivery vans and ensure that all your staff members and management staff wear your branded shirt or cap at regular intervals.

Seventh Step: Get Feedbacks; Create After Sales Service and Support

The fact that you have been able to secure some retailers does not in any way guarantee that they will continue to be loyal to you. The truth is that if your customers realized that there is a competitor that can give them a better deal or even treat them well, they can switch loyalty.

So part of what you need to do to retain your customers and of course increase your clientele base is to always welcome feedbacks from your customers and when you get the feedback, don’t just keep them in the file, but ensure that you work with the feedbacks to serve them better. Feedbacks are part of the information you need to perfect your retention strategies.

What is the use of laboring to bring in customers only for them to leave through the back door simply because you don’t know how to manage them? Just ensure that you open several communications channels such as email, telephone, and social media platforms so as to enable your customers to communicate to you or lodge their complaints.

In conclusion

You should look beyond selling coffee beans wholesale to new customers but also work on retaining your old customers. You must work hard to continue to meet and even surpass their expectations whenever they buy your goods.

The success of any business is directly proportional to the number of repeated businesses they are able to generate. If a company is able to achieve over 60 percent retention, the company will surely experience a huge turnover.