About a billion people drink coffee every single day. That is about one eighth of the earth’s population. In the USA the average person spends $4.11 on coffee spread out across coffee purchased at the store and prepared at home and coffee purchased at coffee shops. Millennials average $7 a day. According to the National Coffee Association, Americans spend $110 billion a year or 301 million a day on their coffee according to the National Coffee Association in an article about the economic impact of coffee.
Coffee as a Beverage Versus Coffee as Way to Make Money
Although your only interest in coffee may be the morning wake-up effect or thr taste and aroma of a fine Arabica from Colombia, one might be forgiven for thinking about ways to make money from coffee based on a couple of things. One is the sheer volume of coffee and amount of money spent on coffee. The other is the current high price of green coffee beans due to the continuing drought in Brazil, the world biggest producer year after year. The high price of green coffee beans is a boon to coffee farmers who all too often suffer in what is a feast of famine world of coffee prices. The fluctuation that has driven coffee to roughly twice its price of a couple of years ago has been profitable for many who trade coffee futures.
What Are Coffee Futures?
Futures are what is called a derivative contract. Commodities like coffee, oil, gold, or winter wheat trade of markets like the NYMEX or New York Mercantile Exchange. With a futures contract one promises to buy or sell a specific quantity of a commodity on a future date at a set price. Depending on whether the price goes up by the settlement date a futures trader may make money or lose. Coffee futures are commonly traded by coffee roasters who use the futures contract to make certain than they don’t get caught in a price squeeze at times like these when prices are so volatile. Additionally, speculators trade futures contracts purely in search of profits. Another option for futures traders is to trade options on futures contracts. This is done to limit risk as well as to seek profit. These can be ways to make money on coffee without being in the coffee business.
Growing Coffee
When we think about the coffee business we typically think of the coffee farmer. Coffee is grown in a wide band around the equator where the weather allows for growing coffee plants that are perennial and do not tolerate a frost. The only place in the USA where coffee is grown is in Hawaii. Coffee farming tends to run in families just like farming in the USA where corn wheat and soybeans are major crops. Kids grow up working on the family farm and learn their trade from the ground up, so to speak. Thus if you want to make money growing coffee as a coffee farmer you had best have a strong background or be willing to pay someone to do all of the work for you and be certain to take the time to learn what is important and keep a close check on the books.
Coffee Farming Risks
A perfectly run coffee farm can lose money due to the weather, like the drought in Brazil right now, or in a banner year when supply is plentiful and the price of green coffee beans falls below production costs. The sad story of coffee growing in many parts of the world is that hard working farmers lose their farms due to successive bad low price years. The unreliability of coffee prices is only one more issue stacked on top of coffee plant diseases like leaf rust that can wipe out whole farms.
Coffee Roasting Businesses
If you like to roast coffee you might think about doing it as a business. It is scalable, which means that you can start small and learn the trade and then expand with your market. The typical profit margin in the roasting business is about 35% which makes it much more protected from green coffee price swings than coffee farming. Plus, you can do coffee roasting in places like Alaska as opposed to having move to the Colombian coffee growing axis and learn Spanish along with all of the details of coffee farming.
Aside from making good roasted coffee, one will need to learn how sell or place their product where it sells which means working with retailers of doing a direct mail business. These things take time and effort but entail less risk then with coffee farming or trading futures contracts.
Starting a Coffee Shop to Make Money From Coffee
Coffee shops average a fifteen percent margin over cost of operation. They are labor intensive and require that you are able to provide good service and keep customers happy. The price of coffee beans is not so important as hiring, training, and managing your staff, supplies and costs.
As the graph shows, the market price of green coffee beans has fluctuated between $2.50 a pound and $4.30 a pound between September of 2024 and August of 2025.
Savvy futures trades who purchased options at the September 2024 price and sold at the peak in February of 2025 experienced tidy profits.