How to Choose a Coffee Supplier for Your Café in India
29 September 20264 min read
Written by Tiny Tiger Coffee
Would your regulars notice if Tuesday's cappuccino didn't taste like Saturday's? They would, and they'd blame your café rather than a roaster they've never heard of. So you might be thinking: there are so many roasters out there, so how do you actually pick the right one? Start with what a good café coffee supplier does:
Prints a roast date on every bag
Keeps the coffee tasting the same from one delivery to the next
Lets you taste samples on your own machine before you commit
Holds its price long enough for you to plan a menu
Sends a GST invoice with every order
Judge suppliers on whether their coffee keeps your regulars coming back, not on the price per kilo.
1. A roast date on every bag
Is your roaster roasting your coffee fresh for you? If they are, look for a roast date on the bag, not a best-before date or a packing date.
Coffee for espresso needs about 10 days of rest after roasting. After that, a medium or medium-dark roast kept sealed stays good for 60 to 70 days. Our post on roast dates and expiry dates explains what to look for on the bag.
2. The same coffee, every delivery
Consistency is the hardest thing to judge from a sample, because anyone can send one good bag. What you want to know is how the fiftieth bag will compare with the first. Three questions help.
Where is the green coffee from? Coffee from a single estate is much easier to keep consistent than a blend assembled from whatever was cheap that month.
Is it roasted to a fixed profile? A roast profile is the recipe for a roast: how fast the beans heat up, for how long, and to what colour. A roaster who follows a written profile for each coffee, and tastes every batch against it, will give you far more consistent coffee than one who roasts by eye.
What happens when the harvest changes? Coffee is a crop, and each year's harvest tastes a little different. A good roaster tells you before the change reaches your grinder, and adjusts the roast to keep it as close as possible.
That's how we do it. We grow our coffee on Hoysala Estate in Chikmagalur, Karnataka, process it ourselves and then roast it. Because we hold the stock of every coffee we roast, we can keep it consistent from one delivery to the next.
3. Taste it on your own machine
A tasting at the roastery tells you what a coffee can do on the roaster's equipment. Your bar tells you what it will actually do with your grinder, your machine, your water and your milk, and those can be quite different.
Ask for whole beans, so you can dial them in on your own grinder.
Pull shots at your normal dose, which for most cafés is 18 g for a double.
Taste them in milk, not only as espresso. Some coffees that are exciting black go quiet under 200 ml of steamed milk.
4. A price you can plan around
Menu boards get printed for months at a time, so a supplier who changes the price every few weeks takes money straight out of your margin.
How long is the price held? Six months is a fair thing to ask for. Say you print a new menu in January, and in March your supplier puts the price up by ₹300 a kilo. That's ₹5.40 more on every double shot, and at 60 cups a day it comes to about ₹9,700 a month that you can't pass on until the next reprint.
Small enough that you never hold stale stock: a few kilos, not twenty
GST invoice
With every order, from a registered company
Delivery
A fixed number of days to your city, with tracking
Whole bean or ground
Whole bean for espresso, ground fresh for every shot
Questions to send any coffee supplier
You can copy these straight into a WhatsApp message.
When is my coffee roasted, and is the date printed on the bag?
Where is it grown, and is it from the same source every time?
Can I get whole-bean samples to try on my own machine?
What's the minimum order, and how many days does delivery take to my city?
How long will my price stay fixed?
Do you send a GST invoice with every order?
How we supply cafés
Every bag is grown on Hoysala Estate at about 1,200 metres, and we roast only after you order, so the roast date is days old. Café pricing starts from ₹1,200/kg with a 5 kg minimum order, which ships as a single 5 kg bag of whole beans, and every order comes with a GST invoice. Café orders ship free to metro cities and arrive within three working days, and within about five days elsewhere in India.
Before you commit, you can order a paid Café Sampler: two, three or four of our café coffees, 250 g of whole beans each, roasted just for you.
If you want to become a B2B partner of Tiny Tiger, order a Café Sampler and tell us about your café.
Common questions
How much coffee does a café use in a month?
At 18 g per double shot, a café selling 60 coffees a day uses about 32 kg a month before waste, and one selling 100 a day uses about 54 kg.
Should a café buy whole beans or ground coffee?
Whole beans for espresso, ground fresh for each shot. Pre-ground espresso goes stale within days of opening.
