From Yesterdays cache Hello Tim, It WONT be micro roasters they will be picking up, it will be well established, good turnover, successful (as in properly run & showing good profit indicators), medium sized roasters. They will apply their EBIT calculations to work it out, and as stated they wont be picking up micro roasters because they would have to buy hundreds of them to get the kind of kilo turnover required, that they can get by picking one well run medium sized coffee roaster in each area. So called micro roasters will be left on the side of the road wondering what hit them, because the big boys wont waste time in reducing margins and marketing aggressively to sweep the table of as many cafe clients as possible, in their race for market share in comparison to the other big boys they see themselves competing with. People in business know...its already happening. Despite what is very often said in these special interest coffee forums by those that have no background in actual coffee industry, 95 % of the available market is not made of single retail client coffee nazis. That is not where the real business is. Latest generation micro roasters will be left to eek out a living trying to sell single origins to retail clients and no more than a handful of the smaller cafe clients around them that the big boys dont see any value in. I agree with Jeff in regards to SO's, anyone can buy a bag of SO from a green bean importer and brown it in their new low end roaster, as despite the misguided opinions of internet based coffee nazis, the real artisan skill is in blending. Most micro roasteries "specialising" in SO's will be left to compete it out with each other in selling pretty much the same stuff as browned in their low end roasters where they have virtually no control over what they are doing, and competing for their low turnover on price. That is not really a recipe for growing a business of the type that multi nationals would like to snap up. Roasting Plant manufacturers are currently undergoing boom times. When it stops you will be able to snap up used small sized machines everywhere for a song, their original purchasers long gone back to their much safer original professions. Who among us will have the intestinal fortitude to go into a micro roastery then? Micro roasteries have become the cafes of yesteryear. Do we have the market, population and turnover to sustain them? None of this is written with any bias one way or the other, it is simply how I see it...if you like, its just a general opinion. Good topic. Anyone else? Attilio. very first Crema site sponsor. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ok lets try this again.......ISP problems and time wasted in posting replies that disappeared...aside 😉 Larger companies are not going to snaffle up micro roasteries. They are looking to well established, medium sized, well run coffee roasters turning good volume with good profit. They will apply their various formulas to work out if the profitsbility suits their own models, with a certain return in a certain payback time for their investment. They will be looking to compete for market share with the other companies that are doing the same thing, and who they see as their group competitors. They wont be buying up scores of micro roasters in order to try and build some volume base.....that would be ridiculous. Micro roasters will be left on the side lines wondering why they bothered getting into this in the first place. They will be squeezed by forever decreasing margins in a world of ever increasing costs, and any cafe client they may have of any significance will be snaffled by the big boys with low priced beans and endless freebies. This is not a look into the future, it is happening right now. Yes, consiolidation has already been happening here for some time. There will of course always be room in the market for micro roasters, but its not where the real business is, and unless micro roasteries can really build their businesses in toto, they dont really have much to sell in the end. Other opinions? Rgdz, Attilio very first Crema Site Sponsor.
