What It Actually Costs to Start Your Own Coffee Roastery

What does it actually cost to open your own coffee roastery? Ingo from Roast Rebels walks through every real expense involved in building a roastery from scratch — and lays out a much cheaper way to get started before you commit six figures.

Building a full setup around a 10–15 kg roasting machine lands most people somewhere between €80,000 and €100,000. The roasting machine itself, plus its add-ons, typically accounts for €60,000 to €70,000 of that — with the machine alone running around €30,000. On top of that come smoke and chimney solutions (€8,000 to roughly €18,000 combined), a destoner (€3,000–€8,000), and a loader for handling green coffee (€4,000–€7,000).

Then there's everything around the machine: a sample roaster such as the Nucleus LINK or Kaffelogic Nano 7 for about €1,000–€2,000, a cupping and lab setup — including a grinder like the Mahlkönig EK43 and measuring tools such as the DiFluid CoffMeter A1/M1 or DiFluid OMIX Plus — for roughly €700 to €3,000, plus warehouse, office and legal costs that each add a few thousand euros.

But you don't need €100,000 to start roasting professionally. Ingo breaks down a much lower-risk path using the Aillio Bullet, a machine Roast Rebels sells across Europe. More than 17,000 Aillio Bullets are in use worldwide, and roughly 8,000 of them belong to people who started their own coffee business with one. It roasts up to 1.2 kg per batch in about 8 minutes — enough for around 5 tons a year on your own, or up to 10 tons with two machines. At a margin of about €10 per kilo, that's €50,000–€100,000 in potential revenue before ever touching a larger machine. Co-roasting and contract roasting come up too, as ways to test the market with close to zero investment.

Links mentioned in this episode:
Shop: roastrebels.com/en
Aillio Bullet R2 Pro: roastrebels.com/en/aillio-bullet-r2-pro
Roastery Founder Kit: roastrebels.com/en/roastery-starter-set
Full tools checklist (blog): roastrebels.com/en/starting-a-roastery
Academy: academy.roastrebels.com

Roast Rebels is Europe's platform for specialty coffee roasting, selling small-scale roasting machines — including the Aillio Bullet, Kaffelogic Nano 7 and Nucleus LINK — alongside curated green coffee sourced from around the world. Service centers in Germany and Switzerland mean local support anywhere in the EU, with free EU-wide shipping. The Roast Rebels Academy (academy.roastrebels.com) offers in-depth roasting courses, including the Aillio Bullet Masterclass — 11 chapters, 30 videos, 4+ hours — for €249, free with a hardware purchase from Roast Rebels.