Green Coffee Minimum Order Quantity: Sizing Your First Import
By Caffé Premium
The green coffee minimum order quantity question usually arrives phrased as a price question. How much do I have to buy to get the good rate. It is a reasonable instinct and it points at the wrong variable, because the cost of buying too much coffee is rarely visible on the invoice.
The better starting point is your own roast volume. Work forward from how much coffee you actually put through the machine each week, and the right tier tends to select itself.
Start from roast volume, not from the price break
Write down how many kilograms of green you roast in an average week across all products. Then decide how many weeks of cover you want to hold for this particular coffee.
Weeks of cover is a judgment call, and for a coffee you have never bought before it should be short. A reasonable range for a new origin is eight to sixteen weeks. That is long enough to justify the freight and short enough that you are not committed to a coffee your customers may not take to.
Multiply weekly volume by weeks of cover and you have a target quantity. Then match it to the nearest tier below, not above.
What each tier weighs
A sample is 350g to 1kg. A trial lot is roughly 60kg, which is one bag. A pallet is roughly 1,200kg, which is around twenty bags. A full container load is 17,000 to 21,000kg.
The gaps between tiers are large, which is exactly why the roast volume calculation matters. There is no smooth curve to slide along. You are choosing between one bag and twenty.
Two worked examples
These are illustrative calculations, not accounts of any particular buyer.
Take a roastery running roughly 40kg of green a week across its whole lineup, introducing a new single origin expected to make up around a quarter of production. That is 10kg a week of this coffee. Twelve weeks of cover puts the target at 120kg, which is two bags. The trial lot is the correct tier, ordered as a double bag if the supplier allows, and a pallet at 1,200kg would represent more than two years of cover on that coffee. Two years is far outside a sensible freshness window.
Now take a roastery running 400kg a week, adding a Robusta component that will make up about a third of an espresso blend. That is roughly 130kg a week. Twelve weeks of cover puts the target near 1,600kg. Here a pallet at 1,200kg lands close and represents about nine weeks, which is comfortable. Container volume would still be premature on a first order from a new supplier, however attractive the per kilogram figure looks.
The green coffee minimum order quantity trade you are actually making
Every step up the tier ladder buys a lower price per kilogram and sells three things in exchange.
The first is cash. Money in green coffee is money not in payroll, packaging, equipment, or a slow month. A pallet at 1,200kg is a real working capital commitment for a small roastery, and the discount does not become cash again until the coffee is roasted, sold, and paid for.
The second is freshness. Green coffee holds well under good storage, but it does not hold indefinitely, and the last bags of an oversized order tend to be the ones a customer tastes.
The third is optionality. Coffee you have already bought is coffee you have to sell. Buying twelve weeks at a time keeps you free to change your mind about an origin far more cheaply than buying a year at a time.
When to skip the trial lot
There is one case where going straight from sample to pallet is defensible. If you are buying an origin and grade you already know well, from a supplier you have already transacted with, and the coffee will slot into an existing blend rather than a new menu position, the trial lot is answering a question you can already answer.
For a first order from a new supplier, or a first purchase of an unfamiliar origin, skipping the trial tier removes exactly the step that was designed to be cheap to get wrong.
Fit the order to the harvest, not only to the calendar
Origins have harvest windows, and fresh crop availability moves through the year. India and Vietnam harvest broadly through the northern winter months, and Ethiopian arrivals follow their own cycle.
A roastery that plans around this buys new crop when it lands and sizes the order to carry through to the next arrival window rather than well beyond it. A roastery that ignores it ends up buying old crop at a good price and wondering why the cup is flatter than the sample was.
What this means for a first order
Most small and mid-size roasteries importing for the first time should be looking at a sample, then a trial lot, then a pallet, in that order, with a real decision at each step rather than a foregone conclusion.
On shipments Caffé Premium arranges, InGain LLC d/b/a Caffé Premium acts as Importer of Record for CBP entry, which is what allows a roastery to import at these volumes without registering as its own Importer of Record. That is a customs role. The US buyer is the FSVP importer under FDA rules, as the party that has agreed in writing to purchase the coffee before entry. Ocean shipments move under CIF plus IOR and air shipments under CIP plus IOR, with FOB and FCA named airport available where a buyer prefers to arrange carriage.
Run the numbers against real landed pricing at caffepremium.com/get-a-quote, or start with a sample at caffepremium.com/request-a-free-sample.
Related Reading
👉 https://www.caffepremium.com/post/green-coffee-sample-program-how-to-test-an-origin-before-you-buy
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