Real cost of grinding coffee beans
The real cost of grinding your coffee beans
For a good part the last decade, we charged nothing to grind coffee and it was only a few years ago that we introduced the 50 cent per pack charge for grinding coffee beans.
There were valid reasons that fee was made part of our offering. Back then, the volume of ground coffee orders was relatively low, or I should say manageable.
These days, we spend upwards of 3 to 4 hours per day processing ground coffee orders. In most cases, this involves more than one person tending to the customised nature of this service.
Grinding coffee is not a simple or straight forward task - a subject we have previously talked about in detail - the grind needs to be precisely matched to your intended brew method. In other words, it makes a world of difference.
Taking a look at what's involved, we start by cutting open existing sealed packs of fresh roasted coffee beans, cleaning and purging the grinders, grinding the beans and then immediately re-sealing the packs.
In almost all cases, we end up throwing away the original bag containing coffee beans which, ironically, is more expensive than the current charge we levy for grinding. That's right, the wasted bags are more expensive than the service.
It's done that way because we worship absolute freshness - our coffee is packed straight after it's roasted and every single bean that is roasted get's packed - there's no left over, no excess, no beans sitting around in open tubs. We also don't possess super-powers than enable us to see into the future, hence nothing is pre-ground until an order for ground coffee is received and being packed for dispatch that afternoon.
What a lot of people may not realize is that grinding coffee is not a fast process. It generates a lot of heat that can affect the quality of the coffee if you attempt to speed through it recklessly. This heat can also alter the resultant grind particle size and ultimately affect your brew, so bulk grinding (500g and 1kg packs) must be performed with a controlled method.
Therefore, we restrict our output to no more than 12x packs per grinder, per hour. Whilst that may appear snail-pace, it's the actual fiddling around with opening, purging, cleaning and re-sealing that consumes a lot of additional time, so the average processing limit of 12x per hour is reasonable when all this transferring of coffee and packs are involved. Larger grinders don't make the throughput faster, it just degrades the quality and involves more waste.
We have high-end commercial grinders that are specifically designed for this task - bulk grinding, and our fleet of EK-43 units are regarded as producing the best particle consistency in the market for the type of grinding duty that suits our customer orders.
The blades on these grinders are expensive and rated at known capacities, so there is also a wear & tear component (consumable) to the overall cost of grinding besides the labour element of having someone manage the task from end to end and the power consumed to grind and re-seal bags.
Our real costs of grinding are closer to $3.20 per pack but if you put this figure to those sitting in the old-school camp of arguing it should be always be free, then it's bound to end in dispute.
Currently, it's fair to say that a majority of coffee bean retailers do not explicitly charge for grinding coffee beans, or they might just charge a small fee.
A key point that is lost on most people is that almost all of these coffee bean sellers are operating from a retail environment charging well over $40 to $60 per kilo equivalent for coffee - yes, that's right, punters are slugged $15+ for a 200g pack.
At those rates, who would dare ask for more $$ to grind the coffee......they already have so much "fat" in their pricing that grinding imposes almost zero commercial impact.
We have also seen many of these retailers in action, grabbing stale coffee from unsealed or poorly arranged bulk containers, or they are re-filling bags without heat sealing by using tin ties or fold-down clips - that's going to go stale before you get home !.
With high costs associated with grinding coffee orders, we have only 2 choices - either lifting the price of all coffees to keep a small handful of vigilant and vocal "free-grinding" supporters happy, or we adjust the cost of the service for grinding to a more reasonable level.
Rather than be driven by minority, we are keeping our coffee bean pricing competitive and will raise the price of the grinding service. This adjustment of the grind component is highly manual process and will take a couple of weeks by the time we update each of our products in the store. The increase from $0.50 to $1.50 per pack remains half the real or actual cost.