The Cost of a Cuppa: What Goes Into the Price of Coffee?

Ever looked at the price of your morning coffee and wondered where it all goes?

Spoiler: it’s not just beans, hot water and a bit of fancy milk.

There’s a whole chain of costs behind every flat white, long black and latte, from sourcing quality coffee beans in NZ to roasting, packaging, milk, wages and simply keeping the lights on.

And lately, those costs have been moving pretty quickly.

Let’s start with the coffee beans.

Coffee beans have gone up by around 50% in the last year, with some origins more than doubling in price.

For us, green coffee beans from the importer currently cost around $19.49 + GST per kg.

But buying the green beans is only the beginning.

Before those beans become the coffee you know and love, they need to be roasted.

That means skilled labour, gas and electricity, packaging and one easily forgotten detail: coffee beans lose roughly 20% of their weight during roasting.

Here’s what goes into a kilogram of roasted coffee:

• Green coffee beans: $19.49 + GST
• Roasting labour: $1.72/kg
• Power and gas: $0.50/kg
• Weight lost during roasting: $4.85/kg
• Coffee bag: $0.80 

That brings the cost of the finished roasted coffee to around $28.18 + GST per kg, before all the other costs of running a coffee business enter the picture.

So when you’re searching for the best coffee beans in NZ, there’s quite a bit happening behind that bag before it reaches your kitchen bench.

What does that mean for one cup of coffee?

Now for the important bit: the cuppa.

For a small milk-based coffee, the ingredients and packaging alone look something like this:

• Coffee shot: $0.73
• Milk: $0.36
• Cup and lid: $0.15

Total: around $1.24

And that’s before we’ve paid the barista who makes it, the rent on the building, power, equipment servicing, EFTPOS fees, cleaning, insurance and all the other exciting things nobody has ever Instagrammed alongside their latte art.

Alternative milk? That can cost roughly twice as much as standard milk, too.

Turns out oat milk is an expensive taste.

Then there’s the person actually making your coffee.

A good coffee isn’t just good coffee beans and an espresso machine.

There’s a person behind it. 

Skilled baristas know how to dial in a grinder, adjust for changing conditions, extract espresso properly, texture milk and serve hundreds of coffees consistently throughout the day.

That knowledge, experience and time are all part of the price of your cup. And the same applies before the coffee even reaches the café.

Quality coffee roasters spend time sourcing beans, developing roast profiles, testing batches and making sure each coffee tastes the way it should. 

Good coffee takes a few more steps than pressing a button.

Coffee prices don’t move in isolation.

This is really the big one.

When coffee prices increase, it’s rarely because one single cost suddenly changed.

Green bean prices rise. Freight changes. Exchange rates move. Milk gets more expensive. Power costs increase. Wages change.

All of those costs eventually meet in one little takeaway cup.

For an independent coffee roaster or coffee supplier, even small increases across several areas can make a noticeable difference.

So, what are you actually paying for?

When you buy a cup of coffee, you’re paying for more than the ingredients in the cup.

You’re helping cover the journey from green coffee bean to roasted coffee, the people who roast it, the people who prepare it and the many costs involved in keeping great coffee available every day.

The same goes when you buy coffee beans online.

Behind every bag is sourcing, roasting, packaging, quality control and plenty of coffee-fuelled attention to detail.

So the next time you take that first sip of your morning coffee, spare a thought for everything that happened before it reached you.

A lot goes into a cuppa.

Thankfully, most of it tastes pretty good.

Want to see what all that sourcing, roasting and coffee-fuelled attention to detail tastes like? Explore The Coffee Store’s range of freshly roasted coffee beans and find your next morning brew.