How Much Coffee Does a Café Use? Sizing Your Coffee Program
The math isn't complicated — grams per drink, drinks per day, convert to pounds — but most new cafés either over-order and serve stale coffee for weeks, or under-order and run short on a Saturday. Here is how to size your coffee program before you place a single order, with real numbers from accounts we actually work with in Colorado.
A café doing 150 drinks a day uses roughly 10 to 14 pounds of coffee a week. That’s the number most small independent shops land on, and it’s the number that determines almost everything downstream: how often you order, what format makes sense, how much storage space you need, and whether you’re throwing stale coffee at your customers on Friday afternoon. Get the math right before you’re in business and you avoid the two common failure modes — running short on a Saturday and over-ordering so much that your coffee is three weeks off-roast before it hits a portafilter.
This is part of the Starting & Running a Coffee Business series. The numbers below are standard industry brewing math combined with what I see in wholesale accounts here in Colorado.
The Gram-Level Foundation
Every calculation starts with dose — how many grams of coffee go into a single drink. The numbers vary by brew method, but they’re consistent enough that you can plan around them.
Espresso-based drinks (lattes, cappuccinos, Americanos, straight shots): A double shot uses 18 to 20 grams of ground coffee. Most specialty shops land at 18–19g; some dial in at 20g for a fuller extraction. Call it 18g for planning purposes — it’s on the conservative end and rounds cleanly.
Batch brew / drip coffee (auto-drip, airpot service): A standard brew ratio is 60 grams per liter, which is roughly 2 oz per 34 oz of water. A full 64-oz airpot uses about 113g of coffee — call it 115g. If you brew 8-cup pots, that’s roughly 60–70g per pot.
Pour-over (V60, Chemex, individual): A single 12-oz cup at 1:16 uses around 22g. A larger 16-oz pour-over runs 28–30g. If you’re running a bar that does significant pour-over volume, budget 25g per cup.
Cold brew concentrate: This is the outlier. Cold brew uses 100g–200g per 32 oz of finished concentrate depending on your ratio and dilution. If you’re doing cold brew in-house, track it separately — it can easily double your ground coffee consumption in summer.
From Grams to Pounds: The Daily Math
There are 453.5 grams in a pound. Round to 450 for easy mental math. Here’s how daily drink volume translates to daily coffee weight:
| Daily drinks | Mix assumption | Grams/day | Lbs/day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 drinks | 80% espresso-based, 20% drip | ~1,050g | ~2.3 lb |
| 100 drinks | 80% espresso-based, 20% drip | ~2,050g | ~4.5 lb |
| 150 drinks | 80% espresso-based, 20% drip | ~3,050g | ~6.8 lb |
| 200 drinks | 75% espresso-based, 25% drip | ~3,900g | ~8.6 lb |
| 300 drinks | 75% espresso-based, 25% drip | ~5,800g | ~12.8 lb |
The mix assumption matters. A café that does a lot of drip service — say a counter inside a hardware store or a grab-and-go spot — will use more coffee per drink on average because drip is brewed in large batches where some always gets poured out. A pure espresso bar is actually more efficient per drink because you’re dosing to order.
Weekly and Monthly Volumes
Most cafés don’t operate seven days a week at full steam, and weekday vs. weekend traffic is rarely even. A common pattern: Saturday and Sunday each do 30–40% more volume than a weekday. Plan your weekly number around 7 days but weight it realistically.
| Shop size | Daily drinks (avg) | Lbs/week | Lbs/month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small neighborhood café | 75–125 | 8–15 lb | 32–60 lb |
| Medium café, good foot traffic | 150–250 | 15–25 lb | 60–100 lb |
| Busy café, high-traffic area | 300–500 | 28–50 lb | 110–200 lb |
| High-volume shop (drive-through, tourist strip) | 500+ | 50–100 lb | 200–400 lb |
A shop doing 100–150 drinks a day — which is a realistic number for a healthy small café in a mid-sized Colorado town — lands squarely in the 10–15 lb/week range. That’s 40–60 lb per month, or roughly one to three bags depending on what size you’re ordering.
“Most small cafés I work with are in the 10–20 lb/week range. The ones that think they need more than that in a first order almost always end up brewing stale coffee for a month.”
Freshness vs. Over-Ordering
Coffee peaks between 4 and 21 days off-roast for espresso, and 7 to 28 days for filter/drip depending on the origin and roast level. After that, you’re losing sweetness, losing aromatics, and serving a drink that’s noticeably flatter than what you’re paying for.
This means your order cadence is a freshness question as much as it’s a logistics question. If you’re using 12 lb a week and you order 50 lb at once because the per-pound price is better, you will still be serving coffee that was roasted six weeks ago by the time you get to the bottom of that bag. The savings are real; the freshness hit is also real.
A practical framework:
- Under 20 lb/week: Order weekly or every two weeks. Keep 2–3 weeks of supply on hand maximum.
- 20–50 lb/week: Order every 1–2 weeks. Bag-in-box starts making sense here because you can cycle through a box in a week or two before freshness degrades.
- 50+ lb/week: You should be on a standing weekly order with your roaster. At this volume you want consistent supply more than anything else — running out on a Saturday morning is a worse outcome than a slightly wider freshness window.
We cover the bag-in-box format in more detail in bag-in-box coffee for high-volume accounts, but the short version: a 20–50 lb box works well for accounts that cycle through it in 7–14 days. If it’s going to sit for a month, stick to smaller bags.
How Format Affects Your Math
Retail bags (5 lb): Best for shops under 10 lb/week, or for specialty/single-origin offerings where you want to rotate and showcase different coffees. Easy to store, easy to rotate.
Bags (10–12 lb): The workhorse format for small independent cafés. Order two or three at a time, cycle through in a week to ten days.
Bag-in-box (20–50 lb): Once you’re consistently above 20 lb/week, this is often the better choice. Lower per-pound cost, less packaging, easier to run a standing order. We offer 20 lb and 50 lb bag-in-box formats for wholesale accounts.
Custom labeling: If you’re running your own brand or building toward a house coffee identity, this is available at these volumes. Worth thinking about from day one rather than retrofitting later.
Seasonal Swings Are Real
In Colorado especially, don’t plan your annual coffee budget around July averages. Seasonal variation at a mountain-town café can be 3× — a shop in Breckenridge that does 200 drinks a day in February might do 600 a day in March during ski season. A Salida café that’s quiet all winter gets crushed in June and July with river traffic.
The implication for ordering: establish your off-season baseline carefully, and have a plan with your roaster for scaling up quickly when volume spikes. We work with accounts to flex up for a busy season without requiring them to lock into volume commitments that don’t fit their reality. That’s the model that works for Colorado’s tourist economy.
Whatever your peak looks like, plan to hold no more than two weeks of coffee at peak volume. More than that and you’re either throwing money at freshness problems or you need more freezer capacity (which works — whole-bean coffee freezes well in sealed bags for up to a month without meaningful degradation).
Starting Out: How to Estimate Before You Open
If you’re still in pre-opening mode — reading this article before you’ve served your first drink — here’s a sensible starting approach.
Build a drink menu and estimate your ticket mix. A neighborhood café without a drive-through is typically 70–80% espresso-based, 15–20% drip, and a small percentage of specialty drinks. Apply the gram numbers above to your projected daily drink count. For your opening order, target two weeks of projected supply, not one month. You will recalibrate quickly once you have real traffic data.
Don’t lock yourself into a large order before you know what you actually use. Almost every new account I talk to overestimates opening volume and underestimates how fast stale coffee turns into a flavor problem. Start lean, track your pounds-per-week, and build a standing order cadence once you know what week two and week three actually look like.
For a deeper look at the full planning process, see how to start a coffee shop — it covers equipment sizing, staffing ratios, and the supplier conversations you want to have before you sign a lease.
Getting the Numbers Right From Your Roaster
The best thing you can do before you finalize your program is talk to your roaster with actual numbers in hand: projected daily drinks, your expected drink mix, and how many days a week you’re open. A good wholesale partner will work backward from those numbers to recommend a starting order size, an order cadence, and a format that doesn’t leave you stale or short.
That’s the conversation we have with every new wholesale account at Contour. If you’re sizing a new program or rethinking an existing one, we’ll give you a straight answer on volumes and formats — no sales pitch, just math. We can also send a sample packet so you can taste the coffee before you commit to anything.
Visit our wholesale page to start a conversation. Tell us where you’re located, what you’re brewing, and roughly how many drinks a day you’re doing. We’ll come back with a volume estimate and a sample recommendation.