Choosing who roasts your coffee is one of the highest-leverage decisions you'll make as a café owner. Get it right and it barely crosses your mind again, consistent beans arrive on schedule and your baristas just make great coffee. Get it wrong and you're troubleshooting flat flavour, chasing late deliveries, and quietly wondering if it's time to look elsewhere. After two decades supplying cafés across Australia, here's what I'd actually look for.

Freshness and Roast-to-Door Time

Ask any supplier directly: how long between roasting and it landing on your doorstep? Coffee starts losing its best qualities within weeks of roasting, so a roaster holding large pre-roasted stock is already working against you. Look for someone who roasts to order, not from a warehouse.

Consistency, Above Almost Everything

Your customers don't want a surprise in their flat white. They want the same drink they had yesterday. Ask how a roaster manages batch-to-batch consistency, and better yet, visit a café they already supply and taste it yourself. A good roaster will happily point you to existing customers.

No Minimum Order Shouldn't Be Rare, But It Is

A lot of established roasters lock wholesale pricing behind a fixed weekly minimum. Seven Miles, for example, publishes a minimum of 5 x 1kg bags a week. That's a real barrier if you're a new café still finding your feet, or a small operation that simply doesn't move that much coffee yet. Ask any supplier directly whether there's a minimum, and what happens if you fall under it some weeks. Some will quietly cut you off or bump you to retail pricing.

Training and Ongoing Support

The best roasters don't just drop off beans. They help you dial in your machine, train your staff, and answer the phone when a shot suddenly starts pulling wrong at 7am on a Saturday. Ask directly what support is included, not just what's in the bag. Almost every established Australian roaster now offers some version of training, so treat it as the baseline, not the differentiator.

Who Actually Owns Your Supplier?

This one rarely makes it onto anyone's checklist, but it should. A number of well-known specialty roasters in Australia have been bought up by large multinational beverage groups over the past few years. That doesn't automatically make the coffee worse, but it does change who's actually picking up the phone when something goes wrong, and whether the person roasting your coffee has ever met you. It's worth simply asking: who owns this business, and who will I actually be dealing with day to day?

Traceability and a Story Worth Telling

Increasingly, your customers want to know where their coffee comes from. A supplier who can tell you the origin, the farm, the process, gives you something genuine to put on your menu board, not just a blend name.

Communication and Reliability

Before you sign anything, test it. Call with a question and see how fast you hear back. Ask about a schedule change and see how they handle it. This is the single best predictor of what your relationship will actually feel like once you're relying on them every week.

A Quick Checklist

  • Do they roast to order, and how fast does it reach you?
  • Can you taste their coffee at a café they already supply?
  • Is there a minimum order, and what happens in a slow week?
  • Do they offer training and equipment support, or just delivery?
  • Who owns the business, and will you have a direct line to a real person?
  • Can they tell you where the beans actually come from?
  • Are they easy to reach, and do they follow through?

At Mahalia Coffee we've been roasting in Robe, South Australia since 2003, and we're still independently, family-run, not part of a larger group. We don't set a minimum order for wholesale customers at all, wholesale pricing unlocks instantly through a live ABN lookup, no waiting on approval, and a flat $29.95 shipping rate keeps things sensible without locking anyone into a weekly quota. If you're currently weighing up suppliers, have a look at our wholesale page, or just give us a call and ask the questions above. We'd rather earn it than assume it.