How Much is too much?The Coffee Roasters’ offering sheet.
“Sometimes, you might only find one coffee on our offering sheet while other times you might find four or five. “
I wrote those words on our website when we launched in October of 2024. When I kicked this business off, I offered only one coffee for sale for the first several weeks. And, while there have been times over the past 20 months when one could find five or six options on our website, lately we have only offered two coffees. Both of these coffees are superb and as a pair, they work extremely well together as we are offering a sublime washed coffee and a huge process-forward fruit bomb, and both made up of varietals you don’t see every day.
Certainly, a limited offering sheet of roasted coffee goes against the norm. Including blends and espresso, it is not uncommon to find coffee companies offering more than 10 options to buyers and in many cases roasters seem to be offering close to 15 or more options. At this writing, Prodigal Coffee is offering 14 coffees, Hydrangea at least 15 not counting their “rested” options, Bird Rock Coffee has 21 while Black and White is offering staggering 25 options; this is a lot of inventory to manage and can present a nightmare roasting schedule.
But there is a reason for coffee companies to offer several roasted coffee options: cast a bigger net of options and get more sales. While a big selection does not indicate that all the options are exceptional, each option could appeal to a different customer, or a customer could be enticed to buy multiple coffees. It is all about capturing an audience— a smart retail move. A profitable coffee company needs to sell a lot of coffee in order to remain profitable and the more options presented to a customer, the greater the chances that the customer will buy something instead of moving on to another website.
The danger in offering a broad selection of coffees, is the risk of diluting your brand because a coffee roaster will start buying green coffee to fill “needs” instead of buying only quality. It is not uncommon for a coffee buyer to accept a green offering not because the quality is remarkable but because they need to fill a space on their menu. “Yeah, this Sumatra is just OK but it is the best of the Sumatras I have tried so I am going to offer it because I need a coffee from Sumatra on the menu.”
While a company’s stellar reputation could be built upon offering special coffee, sometimes the big offering sheets can represent a mis-alignment of values. Sure these companies still offer great coffees, but you cannot tell me ALL of the coffees they offer — especially with an offering sheet of ten plus coffees — are truly remarkable because, simply, they are not.
The other big risk of a large offering sheet is that unless you have an outlet for all these coffees, robust on-line sales and/or a retail outlet or two it is easy for coffee companies to fall into the trap of building a menu with coffees that don’t move as quickly as hoped, leaving the business with too much slow-moving inventory. (All of the companies I listed above have robust sales either on-line and/or through a brick and mortar making it easier to push through a large inventory. These companies generate enough sales and have enough customers to rotate through all their offerings at a good rate.)
But overall, coffee companies seem to think more is always better when it comes to options for roasted coffee shoppers.
So, how does limited offering sheet impact sales?
For most of this year and almost all of 2025, we offered between 4-6 options at all times on our website. There may have been a few days here and there when we offered only 3 options but for the most part on average we had around five coffees to choose from at all times.
Starting on May 10th we were down to only the Finca El Mirador Washed Aji and the Advanced Fermentation Sidra from El Encanto — both Colombian coffees but very different flavor profiles. Because my wife and I scheduled a vacation from May 19-June 1, it did not make any sense to add new offerings at that time given that production would be on hold for a couple weeks. This was not an intentional experiment but by default, the limited offering allowed me to assess the benefits (if any) of offering many coffees vs just a few.
When looking at comparable months, months we offered 5-6 coffee options but generated similar sales numbers, March 2026 was similar to May 2026 in gross sales and we had at least five roasted coffee options on the website during all of March. While this is not really scientifically based because the gross sales only tell part of the retail story, I did remove the coffee education income for both months and just focused on bean sales over a two week period for each month.
March 2026 had more income with coffee sales the two week period from March 10th-April 1st, however, we sold more units of coffee from May 10th - June 1st by a slim margin, a margin of one unit actually.
Certainly, a lot of other variables could have led to this finding. For starters, maybe a different two coffees would have led to fewer units of coffee being sold in May. But, the results are intriguing.
Handingly a very limited green coffee inventory is easier for a variety of reasons but for sales a limited offering sheet helps move the products faster. We sold out of the Sidra in just a few weeks and just about sold out of the Aji. Normally, it would take longer to move similar coffees. On roasting days, I just had to work with two roasting profiles instead of 4-5 and I had a lot less “leftover” coffee at the end of each order fulfillment day.
This does not mean that the small coffee roasting business should change what they do but I do think this can demonstrate that we should not worry too much about offering fewer options to our customers at times — especially between seasons when we are awaiting fresh crop coffees and we are tempted to find “filler” coffees. As long as the coffee is exceptional and roasted with care, an occasional tiny offering sheet should not be viewed as a disadvantage or as a detriment to sales.
Given that our fresh coffees from Kenya, Ethiopia, Panama and Guatemala are arriving, holding our offering sheet at two options, won’t continue for long. In fact, it will be up to three by Thursday. But, I think I will keep the offering sheet as tight as possible for the remainder of the year and approach this whole idea more scientifically. If sales remain strong, I believe the business will run much more efficiently with only 2 to 4 options but we shall see.
We will be collecting the data with the hope of a more detailed report in January 2027 that may shed more light on this issue.
Since we are on the topic offering sheets, this is probably a good time for a little sneak peak into what we have in store for you over the next several months:
We will be saying goodbye to our current-crop Colombians over the next month or so but you wil start seeing the results of our Panama sourcing trip roll in very soon. We will kick things off this Thursday with a natural, darkroom-dried Geisha from Chevas coffee and from there we have two different coffees from Mil Cumbres, both new direct trade partners for us.
Finca La Bolsa in Guatemala is prepping their wonderful anaerobic natural Pacamara coffee for us again this year. With luck we should have that in the next couple weeks and all our pre-booked Kenyas from the 2026 harvest have arrived on the East coffee. Once I get the approval samples, we should have those very soon . (Yes, the Kii is returning pending approval!)
We have some fantastic micro-lots from Ethiopia this year and will be offering a broader selection of processing styles — naturals, anaerobic naturals, anaerobic washed and a red-honeyed. The first coffee from Ethiopia should be arriving any day now and the rest of these coffees will arrive in July.
Look out for some suprises sprinkled in through the end of 2026 so stay tuned for some remarkable coffee!