What does a bag of your coffee really cost?
Green cost, roast weight loss, packaging, and labor — down to a true cost per bag and your margin at retail and wholesale. No signup. Computes in your browser.
Cost per bag
$5.34
Coffee, packaging, labor
Retail margin
68.6%
$11.66 on $17.00
Wholesale margin
43.8%
$4.16 on $9.50
Retail is inside the typical 65–75% band; wholesale is inside the typical 40–50% band. Bands are commonly cited gross margins for specialty roasters, before overhead.
Price required
$17.79
Monthly gross margin, retail
$3,498.63
300 bags at $17.00
Monthly gross margin, wholesale
$1,248.63
The same bags at $9.50
Break-even price is $5.34. If green rises 10%, cost per bag becomes $5.74 and retail margin drops to 66.2% — 2.4 points gone.
The link holds every number above. Nothing is submitted or stored.
Tracking this across every lot, batch, and product — with real costs instead of estimates — is what RoastConsole does.
How the math works
Four steps, no spreadsheet.
The same arithmetic the calculator runs, written out — so you can check it, argue with it, or rebuild it in your own books.
01
Roasted cost per pound
Green cost ÷ (1 − weight loss). At 15% loss, $4.60/lb green becomes $5.41/lb roasted. Dividing — not multiplying — is what makes the number honest: the invoice for the water that left is still carried by the coffee that stayed.
02
Coffee in the bag
Roasted cost per pound × the bag's weight. A 12 oz bag holds 0.75 lb, so at $5.41/lb roasted the coffee alone is $4.06 before it touches packaging.
03
Labor per bag
One roast session's labor — roasting, cooling, bagging — divided by the bags a batch yields. A 22 lb charge at 15% loss fills about 25 twelve-ounce bags, so 45 minutes at $22/hr adds roughly $0.66 a bag.
04
Margin at your price
(Price − cost per bag) ÷ price. The same bag can carry a 68% margin at retail and 44% at wholesale — which is why a wholesale program needs its own math, not the retail price with a discount on it.
Questions
The numbers behind the numbers.
- How much weight does coffee lose when roasted?
- Typically 12–18% of the green weight, mostly water. Light roasts sit near the bottom of that range and dark roasts near the top; very dark roasts can pass 20%. The loss compounds into cost: at 15% loss, a pound of roasted coffee costs about 17.6% more than a pound of green, because you divide by what remains rather than multiplying by what left.
- How do I calculate the cost of a bag of roasted coffee?
- Three parts. Coffee: divide your green cost per pound by (1 − weight loss) to get roasted cost per pound, then multiply by the bag's weight. Packaging: the bag, label, and any per-bag consumables. Labor: the cost of a roast session divided by the bags it yields. Add the three and you have the cost of goods for one bag.
- What margin should a coffee roaster aim for?
- Commonly cited gross margins are 65–75% on bags sold retail and 40–50% at wholesale, before overhead like rent and equipment. Where you should sit depends on your volume and channel mix — the point of computing your own number is that a rule of thumb is not a price.
- Why divide by (1 − weight loss) instead of multiplying?
- Because the cost of the weight that evaporated does not evaporate with it. If 100 lb of green becomes 85 lb roasted, the full green invoice is now carried by 85 lb — cost per roasted pound is green cost ÷ 0.85. Multiplying by 0.85 instead understates the true cost of every bag you sell, which is the most common error in homemade costing spreadsheets.
- Does this calculator store my numbers?
- No. Everything computes in your browser and nothing is submitted or stored. The share link encodes your inputs in the URL itself, so the only place your scenario lives is in that link.