Why it makes sense to engage experts

Any product or service can be out-sourced.

Just look at Apple with their products made in China.

With hundreds of new micro roasters trying to learn the skills of roasting quality coffee consistently, unfortunately the majority of these new brands start their businesses with ultra low-cost, simple setups.

Often, these coffee roasting environments are built by new entrants lacking real experience for what is needed to provide ongoing enterprise grade quality and consistency.

Mostly, these small brands lack sufficient capital to invest properly and resort to cutting corners with small scale and low efficiency, relying upon manual human inputs to complete most tasks by hand.

Of course, you know that's never going to be sustainable, scalable or consistent as manufacturing these days is never "hand crafted" unless it's made in the 3rd world country overseas.

The coffee industry in particular perpetrates a romantic illusion of "artisan" crafted products are somehow more special without really defining how or why.

Roasting coffee by hand is not going to be any better than a computer and quite frankly it's worse than a computer as humans are easily distracted.

Cheap, low-cost roasting systems produce inferior cups regardless of the ingredient quality or operator skill. It's a limitation of infrastructure that is rarely communicated.

These entry-level roasting platforms generate coffees with varying degrees of tipping or scorching. Even a small amount of tipping or scorching will result in cup degradation, e.g. it's tastes worse.

Clearly, it's that sort of product which really struggles to meet the high standards our competitive Australian coffee market demands, yet it's available in almost every city in Australia, including many regional areas - locally roasted and mediocre.

Finding that partner in a crowd

With more than 2,000 roasted coffee brands in Australia, it is indeed a major challenge for buyers to work through lists of coffee brands for selecting a prospective partner.

Making the situation worse are the same stories on repeat claiming how "we do it best with the highest quality ingredients". Same old story infinitely looped.

These days, social media can easily manipulate the narrative, helping to promote and exaggerate capabilities of a brand whether it's actually true or not.

So with everyone looking and sounding similar, how can you shorten the list.

Achieving a truly great coffee, roasted with precision and accuracy, batch after batch with exceptional consistency requires a professional contract coffee roasting provider.

A company with extensive experience, capabilities and the right levels of industrial infrastructure.

It seems that many buyers repeat the same mistakes over and over. They enter the market seeking a contract roaster by starting their search with cafe suppliers. 

Cafe suppliers are not skilled or experienced in contract roasting as they are more accustomed to a single style of roasting and working within a narrow range of ingredients.

Many cafe suppliers also only desire to roast a few days a week because they have their hands full managing the never-ending demand of cafe client relationships. 

So when trying to find a partner for roasted coffee supply, our advice is to looking beyond the digital facade of a social media profiles, or whether they supply a popular cafe by digging a little deeper. 

Using the basic business fundamentals such as evaluating the professionalism of a company, measuring the track record of reliable success in contract roasting and private label coffee.

How contract coffee roasting solves business challenges:

  • Establishes a fixed and controllable cost structure.
  • Avoids large capital investments for plant and equipment.
  • Eliminates expensive costs of ongoing cleaning and maintenance (weekly/monthly/annual).
  • Enables scalability should your business grow and expand.
  • Improves quality and consistency. No more learning or inexperience.
  • Addresses rapidly increasing costs of gas, electricity and scarcity of labor.
  • Benefit from sites with enhanced features such as temperature controlled environment.
  • Frees up time for a greater focus on more important tasks such as sales, marketing and customer satisfaction.
  • Solves conflicts with production priorities.
  • Creates a unique product offering via custom blending or exclusive single origin coffees in the journey towards differentiation.
  • Ability to access additional intellectual property that would otherwise be unavailable, expensive or require considerable time-lag (min. 9 months to commission new plant).
  • Avoids major risks and issues from initial 12 month period following new plant installation. 
  • Removes the requirements for recruiting, training and retaining staff. Labor issues have become a major problem in the hospitality and manufacturing sectors since the pandemic reducing overseas labor pools.
  • Protect your intellectual property.
  • Allowing clients to operate in smaller business premises. No longer needing to allocate expensive floor space to house green beans, cartons and coffee bags.
  • Specialized truck access areas for unloading and loading of bulk quantities. A much harder feature to achieve in many new factory estates these days with limited spaces and parking preventing proper forklift and container access.
  • We provide complete confidentiality for our contract and private label clients - obscuring the identity of the original manufacturer.

How we engage

As a general rule of thumb, contract coffee roasting is only viable for us and you where your brand requiring quantities greater than 5 tons per year.

The service involves development and agreement of defined specifications. We can help with this specification.

Please note the following criteria relating to our services and conditions of supply:-

  1. Contract Coffee Roasting solutions are only available to clients that meet certain requirements. This includes having existing business operations with ongoing demand for roasted coffee beans. We may ask you to demonstrate existing consumption rates or market capabilities before proceeding to develop solutions.
  2. We reserve the right of decline any requests for 1-off arrangements - our services and solutions are not designed or casual or ad-hoc engagement.
  3. These services are not available to new start-up ventures or clients without a proven trading history.
  4. We do not supply online sellers of roasted coffees operating in the Australian market - whether it's new or existing brands. If you have an online business to sell, we can discuss acquisition.
  5. Sorry, we don't stock, use or hold cheap, low grade coffees for applications such as cosmetics or therapeutic products.
  6. If a client requires specialized packaging materials, the client's materials must be of sufficient quality for compatibility with our packaging machines, subject to adequate testing. Cheap, poorly made coffee bags may be rejected or declined if they cause incidents during production, leading to re-work or waste.
  7. Where the client arranges their own raw coffees, these raw coffees will be of basic minimum quality standard. Poor grades with excessive debris are a risk of fire or damage to our equipment as well as increasing the routine maintenance and cleaning costs. We can help customers to understand how this risks assessment works.
  8. We do not provide tours or inspections for customers before signing contracts or establishing a binding relationship. Please respect that our facility is a secure environment used for providing services to our confidential clients.
  9. Privacy policies are meant to protect our client's rights for confidentiality and we treat this topic with utmost seriousness.
  10. Our services can also include ordering, unloading, storing and climate temperature protection of your raw ingredients and packaging within our controlled environment. This may also extend to additional QA services relating to raw coffees.
  11. Credit terms can be established after a proven history of reliable payment that includes a min. 3 months on time payments. No terms exceeding 30 days will be offered without appropriate security.
  12. We do not offer drop-shipping to consumer residential addresses.
  13. Carlini can provide a range of B2B solutions for companies needing fresh roasted quality coffee delivered to cafes, retail chain outlets, offices and workplaces, etc.

For clarity, Drop shipping is NOT the same as contract coffee roasting solutions.

This is not a drop-shipping service for consumers or residential addresses.