Where to Buy Green Coffee for Your Roastery: Importers, Brokers and Direct Trade

If you roast for a living, where to buy green coffee is your first supply decision. It is also the one you revisit most. Most roasteries buy green coffee three ways: from importers, through brokers, or by direct trade with farms and exporters. Online green coffee marketplaces now sit across all three. The right route depends on three things: how much you roast, how much risk you can carry, and how much time sourcing gets.

Below, we walk through each route, what minimum orders look like, and how roasters judge a lot before committing. It also covers the part supplier guides skip. That means the equipment that makes buying green coffee safer, and how your buying volume ties back to your roaster and storage.

Quick Answer: Where Do Roasters Buy Green Coffee?

Most small and mid-size roasteries buy green coffee from specialty importers. Importers hold coffee in US or European warehouses, sell from a single bag, ship samples, and handle shipping, customs, and quality claims. Larger roasters add brokers for volume and build direct trade relationships for signature lots. Online platforms let smaller roasters buy importer stock or farm-direct lots with low minimums.

• Starting out: buy from specialty importers, one or two bags at a time.
• Growing past a few bags a week: add a second importer and ask about forward contracts.
• Steady volume and a clear quality target: build one or two direct trade relationships.
• Always: sample roast and cup before you buy, and check moisture when the coffee lands.

The Three Routes: Importers, Brokers and Direct Trade

Green coffee passes through a lot of hands between the farm and your roaster. The three buying routes differ in one big way: who owns the coffee, and who carries the risk while it travels.

Importers

An importer buys coffee from exporters or producers. It ships the coffee, clears customs, and stores it in a warehouse near you. You buy coffee that already sits in the country (spot coffee) or coffee still on the water (afloat). The importer owns the coffee, so it also owns the problem if a lot arrives damaged or tastes off from the pre-shipment sample.

Well-known specialty importers include Royal Coffee, Café Imports, Genuine Origin and Trabocca. Most publish an offer sheet, a live list of available lots with origin, process, cupping notes and bag counts. Ask for samples from the offer sheet, roast them, and buy what passes your cupping. Trade shows such as SCA Expo and World of Coffee put many importers in one room, so you can cup their offerings side by side.

Brokers

A broker connects buyers and sellers but usually never takes ownership of the coffee. Brokers represent farms, cooperatives or exporters and earn a commission on each deal. Large commercial roasters use brokers to source volume across origins without building their own buying team. For a small roastery, a broker makes sense once you buy by the pallet and know exactly what you want.

Direct Trade

Direct trade means you work with a farm or producer group directly. You agree on quality and price together and buy from them year after year. No single certification body defines direct trade, so the term covers anything from a handshake deal to a multi-year contract. The coffee still needs an exporter, freight, customs and storage. Many roasters run direct trade lots through an importer that handles the logistics while the relationship stays with the roaster.

Direct trade gives you traceable, distinctive coffee and a real story for your bags. It also asks for travel, larger commitments and more risk. Most roasters treat it as a later step, not a starting point.

Online Green Coffee Marketplaces

Online platforms have lowered the barrier for small roasters. Some are importer stores that take orders online. Others link roasters to producers directly.

• Importer portals. Most large importers now take orders online. Trabocca, an Ethiopia specialist, moved from a one-pallet minimum to a single 60 kg bag when it launched its ordering portal.
• Producer-to-roaster platforms. Algrano and TYPICA let roasters buy from producers with shared shipping. TYPICA groups several roasters' orders into one container, so a roaster can buy directly from one bag. Without that, direct trade usually starts at an 18-ton container.
• Small-lot sellers. Coffee Shrub and Royal's Crown Jewels program sell boxes well under a full bag. They suit sample roasting, menu testing and limited releases.

Platforms make discovery easy. They don't replace your own evaluation. Every lot still needs a sample roast, a cupping and a moisture check.

Minimum Order Sizes, From a Single Bag to a Container

Green coffee ships in jute or sisal bags, often with a hermetic liner such as GrainPro inside. Bag weight depends on origin. Brazil and Ethiopia use 60 kg bags, most of Central America uses 69 kg, and Colombia uses 70 kg.

Here is how volume usually steps up:

1. Sample and small boxes: a few pounds to about 20 kg. Good for testing a new origin.
2. Single bags: the standard importer minimum and where most new roasteries buy.
3. Pallets: roughly 10 to 12 bags. Common once a roastery commits to a core offering.
4. Containers: around 275 to 320 bags. Production roasters, brokers and direct trade programs buy here.

Buying more at once rarely makes sense until you can roast it while it still tastes fresh. Order what you can roast in a few months, and use forward contracts to lock in later arrivals.

Enter your weekly roasted output below to see what it means in bags, pallets and storage, and which buying route fits.

Evaluating a Lot: Sample Roasting and Cupping

Green buying comes down to tasting before you commit. Importers and exporters send samples at three stages. Offer samples help you choose a coffee. Pre-shipment samples let you approve the lot before it ships. Arrival samples confirm it held up in transit. If an arrival sample tastes different from the approved pre-shipment sample, that is the moment to raise it with the seller.

You need a consistent sample roast to judge any of these. A production roaster wastes too much coffee and won't give you repeatable results on 100 grams. That gap is why most buying roasteries run a dedicated sample roaster for green coffee evaluation. Common choices on CoffeeTec include the Probat BRZ-2 and PRG-1, the Mill City MCR-500 and the Ikawa Pro 50 and Pro 100.

Air roasters like Ikawa save a profile and repeat it the same way every time. That makes side-by-side comparisons across a stack of offer samples fair. If you cup ten samples a week, a used Ikawa sample roaster is a practical place to start.

Roast samples light to medium, rest them overnight, and cup them with the SCA protocol. Score every sample on the same form so your notes mean the same thing next month.

Checking Moisture, Density and Screen Size

Cupping tells you how a coffee tastes today. Physical checks tell you how it will hold up and roast over the next few months.

• Moisture: the SCA green grading standard looks for 10 to 12 percent. Wetter coffee risks mold and fades fast. Drier coffee is often past crop. A green coffee moisture meter from Lighttells, Gehaka or AgraTronix gives you a reading in seconds.
• Water activity: a better predictor of shelf life than moisture alone. Many labs want readings below 0.70.
• Density: high-grown, dense beans take more heat and can carry more complexity. Density readings help you set a starting profile.
• Screen size: beans graded through round screens measured in 64ths of an inch, so screen 17 means 17/64 inch. Even size roasts more evenly. Check a lot against its contract grade with coffee sizing sieves.
• Defects: SCA specialty grade allows no primary defects and no more than five full defects in a 350 g sample.

Record every reading with the lot number and arrival date. Months later, those notes explain why a coffee roasts differently than it did on day one. Print the arrival checklist below and keep one with every lot.

Storing What You Buy

Green coffee is stable but not permanent. Heat, humidity and light all shorten its life, and you can see and taste the change as beans fade. The changes green coffee goes through in the roaster also show up less cleanly in tired, past-crop beans.

Keep bags off the floor, away from walls and away from the roaster's heat. Use stock oldest first. For temperature, humidity and shelf life targets, see our full guide on how to store green coffee beans.

Bag storage works well up to a point. CoffeeTec carries food-grade dry storage bins made in the USA. Sizes run from a 66-gallon bin that holds about 342 lb of green coffee to a 320-gallon bin that holds about 1,634 lb. Bins like these bridge the gap between a stack of bags and a full silo system.

Matching Your Buying to Your Roaster's Capacity

Green buying and roaster capacity move together. Roasted coffee loses about 15 to 20 percent of its weight in the roaster. So every pound you sell starts as roughly 1.2 pounds of green.

Run the numbers for a 15 kg roaster. Eight batches a day, five days a week, use about 600 kg of green coffee. That is close to ten bags every week. At that point, bags on pallets turn into a daily handling job. Roasters at that stage start to look at green coffee loaders, destoners and green coffee silos and storage systems.

The pattern also runs the other way. Once a roastery buys by the pallet instead of the bag, the roaster that fit two years ago often becomes the bottleneck. Many roasteries move up a size and sell the smaller machine to a newer roaster just starting out. If that is you, our guide on how to sell a used coffee roaster walks through listing, pricing and shipping.

Equip Your Roastery for Smarter Green Buying

Good green coffee starts with good suppliers. It stays good because of what you do after the samples arrive. A sample roaster, a moisture meter and a set of grading screens let you buy with confidence instead of hope.

CoffeeTec lists used and new sample roasters, QC lab tools and storage equipment from roasteries around the world. Already upgrading and have equipment you no longer need? List your used coffee equipment on CoffeeTec and reach roasters who are buying.