For food and beverage managers, café owners, and hospitality professionals, choosing the right coffee beans isn't just about flavour – it's about ensuring consistency, meeting customer expectations, and supporting a profitable operation.
With so many options available, and so many great roasters available to work with, it can be difficult to know where to start. In this guide, we break down the key factors to help you make a confident, informed decision when it comes to choosing the best coffee beans for your business to help you delight customers, turn a profit, a build a truly successful coffee brand.
Key things to Consider Before Choosing your Coffee
Before we get into the details of selecting the right coffee, it's important to start on the right foot. Take your own coffee preferences out of the equation, and firstly consider:
What do your customers actually want?
In the UK, espresso-based drinks dominate coffee sales. Lattes are the most popular, followed by Americanos, cappuccinos, flat whites, and espressos. These drinks – especially the milk-based ones – favour smooth, chocolatey, and caramel-toned coffee profiles with low acidity.
Trends show a strong preference for medium roasts that taste comforting and familiar, especially in milk. If your customers are adventurous, a rotating single origin can add interest and showcase something unique, but your main espresso offering should align with everyday expectations.
Consider your service type
- Espresso: Fast extraction under pressure favours medium to medium-dark roasts that offer body, sweetness, and clarity.
- Filter coffee: Slower brewing benefits from lighter roasts that highlight subtle, complex flavours.
- Bean-to-cup machines: Best suited to medium roasts that are lower in oil and consistently roasted. Very dark roasts can clog grinders, while very light roasts often under-extract.
Price, and getting great value
The price you'll pay for your coffee depends on a huge number of factors, some of which we're about to discuss like single origin coffees vs blends. There are other operational influences on the price you pay such as the amount of coffee you order, delivery requirements, stock holding etc. that depend on both your business and which company you work with.
With so many different factors influencing price, it's important you ensure you get a great quality of coffee for the price you pay. Typically, you can expect quality coffee to cost between £12–£25/kg:
- £12–15/kg: Standard blends, sometimes with Robusta.
- £16–20/kg: Quality Arabica blends and single origin coffees.
- £20–30+/kg: Highly traceable single origins or limited lots with unique flavour characteristics.
Most businesses find the sweet spot around £14–18/kg for their house espresso. This balances quality with cost-effectiveness, offering a great cup with healthy margins. If you’re selling high-end black coffee or retail bags, single origins in the £20–25/kg range can justify premium pricing.
Consistency vs seasonality
Some businesses stick with a consistent house blend year-round for ease and reliability. Others rotate coffees seasonally to create excitement and tell origin stories. The best approach might be a mix: a dependable blend for milk-based drinks and a seasonal single origin to showcase variety. This keeps your offer fresh while maintaining operational simplicity.
Cupping: Taste Before You Buy
Cupping is the industry-standard tasting method used to evaluate coffee flavour and quality. It’s how you compare multiple options side-by-side before committing. Whether you’re selecting a new house blend or rotating guest espresso, make sure to schedule tastings with your roaster to find your perfect bean. Invite your team, take notes, and choose based on how the coffee tastes in the format your customers actually drink.
Most coffee roasters will have a large menu of coffees to choose from with new origins coming in regularly, and they may even be able to source something bespoke for your business if it makes sense commercially. Once you have chosen your ideal coffee supplier, make sure you taste a range of their coffees as part of a cupping to find the best bean for your business.
Choosing The Perfect Coffee For Your Business
Let's quickly discuss the most important factors to consider when choosing your coffee, and how each will impact the flavour in your cup and the experience of your customers.
Two Main Coffee Species - Arabica vs Robusta
When choosing coffee for your business, it helps to understand the two main types of coffee beans: Arabica and Robusta.
- Arabica beans are known for their smoother, sweeter flavour with notes of chocolate, nuts, and fruit. They typically contain less caffeine and are considered higher quality, which is why most specialty coffee blends – especially in UK cafés and restaurants – use 100% Arabica.
- Robusta beans are typically stronger and more bitter, with higher caffeine content and a heavier body. While they’re often seen as lower grade, good-quality Robusta can add boldness and crema to espresso blends. Many traditional Italian-style coffees include a small percentage of Robusta to enhance strength and texture.
For most coffee lovers and hospitality businesses, Arabica is the go-to for its wider appeal and refined flavour – but a small dose of Robusta in a blend can offer a useful edge in strength and crema, especially in high-volume or bean-to-cup settings. Robusta also typically has been the more affordable of the two coffee types, and can be used to 'bulk out' a blend in a way that reduces costs.
We typically only recommend robusta coffees to our customers who are trying to mimic an old-style traditional Italian coffee experience, as the differences in price between arabica and robusta continue to shrink.
Blends vs Single Origins
Something to consider is whether you eventually decide on serving a blend of coffees, or one specific coffee from a singular origin. We've covered this topic in detail in a previous article, but in summary:
- Blends: Coffees from multiple origins to produce a balanced, reliable flavour profile. They offer consistency over time, often tasting of chocolate, nuts, and caramel, ideal for milk drinks and bean-to-cup applications. Blends also allow your roaster to adjust components seasonally while maintaining the same taste profile, which supports operational ease.
- Single Origin: Coffees highlight the characteristics of a specific country, region or farm. They offer complexity and traceability but can vary seasonally and may require more skill to brew consistently. Some are too bright or delicate for milk. Many cafés use a stable house blend for espresso, and then rotate a single origin for black coffee or special offers to appeal to enthusiasts.
Learn more about the difference between blends and single origins, and which might suit your customers, here: What Coffee is Best for your Business? Single Origin vs Blend
Roast Level - Light, Medium or Dark
As a roaster, the main area that we have control over the taste of the final product is the roast profile used to take a coffee from its green, raw state, into a delicious drinkable product. Some argue that the roasting process has the single most important impact on the flavour of the coffee, whilst others will argue that the roaster should instead be aiming to simply highlight the best from every raw coffee bean.
Whatever the mindset, the amount you roast a coffee does have an impact on the flavour in the cup. Typically split into light, medium and dark roasts, with light roasts having the smallest impact on flavour often creating sweet, fruity and acidic coffees, whilst dark roasts taste pick up roasty and caramalised flavours like chocolates, nuts, and bitter notes.
- Light roast: Ideal for filter coffee, showcasing acidity and origin characteristics.
- Medium roast: Balanced and versatile - erforms well in both espresso and filter brewing.
- Dark roasts: Enhanced body, richness and bitterness – well suited to milk drinks and traditional flavour profiles.
Processing Method - Washed, or Natural?
Coffee beans are the seeds of a small fruit, often referred to as a cherry. In order to remove the seeds from the fruit and produce a clean, raw seed ready for roasting, the outer flesh of the fruit must be removed - this step is commonly referred to as coffee processing, and the two main ways this is performed each have an impact on flavour:
- Washed coffees are clean, crisp and bright. They’re consistent and ideal for blends and espresso service.
- Natural (dry) process coffees are bold and fruity, with sweetness, funky notes and a fuller body. They work well in filters and as feature coffees.
Choosing a Decaf Coffee
Decaf coffees can often get a bad reputation, and sadly, decaf coffees are typically not treated with the same care by roasters and cafés. However, even with am often lower quality experience, decaf is more popular than you think.
About 1 in 5 UK coffee drinkers regularly opt for decaf. Today’s decafs can match the quality of caffeinated coffees – if you choose the right one, and treat it with the same care. Common decaf methods include:
- Swiss Water: Chemical-free, preserves flavour well.
- Sugarcane (EA): Natural solvent, often sweeter and very popular in Colombian decafs.
- CO2 Process: Preserves flavour with no chemical residue.
- Methylene Chloride (MC): Common but sometimes avoided due to perception of chemical use.
Decaf coffees should be chosen with the same care, and brewed properly by being ground fresh and to a great espresso recipe that highlights the best out of the coffee.
Origins and Their Taste Profiles
The world of coffee is incredibly vast, and just like wines or fruits, different growing regions are recognised for their coffee's unique flavour characteristics. Make sure, especially if you serve a single origin coffee, that you look for coffee origins that offer the flavour profile you're looking for. Here’s how some origins typically taste:
- Brazil: Chocolatey, nutty, low acidity – great for blends.
- Colombia: Balanced, sweet, and versatile.
- Ethiopia: Floral and fruity – ideal for black filter coffee.
- Guatemala: Cocoa and citrus – great in milk or black.
- Kenya: Bold berry sweetness, stewed fruits - versatile.
Choosing the right origin means considering what your customers expect. Most UK guests prefer comfort and familiarity over intense acidity or wild fruit notes, though coffee shops seeking to offer a unique and high end experience will be comfortable offering unique and surprising coffees to appease their customers.
Need help choosing your perfect coffee?
We work with foodservice businesses across the UK to supply reliable, great-tasting coffee beans that suit your setup and customer base. So, if you want to begin exploring the perfect coffee for your business..' Enquire now for a free coffee tasting and consultation at our roastery or showrooms.
