Most roasteries find their wholesale accounts the same way: a café owner who already knows them, a friend of a friend, a walk down a street with a bag of samples. It works, and it is slow, because you are guessing which cafés are worth the visit.

The Roasters app, on iOS and Android, lists specialty cafés and roasters in more than 3,600 cities, and it records which roasters each café serves. For a drinker, that answers "where can I drink this coffee?". For a roastery, it answers a better question: which cafés in my city could pour mine?

Here is how to use it to build a shortlist of cafés worth a visit.

1. Read your city's Local Roasters list

Open your city in the app's Explore feed and scroll to Local Roasters. It shows two kinds of roaster:

Roasting in your city: roasteries based there.
Also served in your city: roasteries based somewhere else whose coffee is poured in at least one café there.

The list is ordered by how many cafés in the city serve each roaster. In one screen you can see who holds the market, how concentrated it is, and whether cafés in your city are willing to buy from a roaster that is not local. A long "Also served in" list is good news for you: those cafés chose their coffee, not their neighbour.

2. Open a roaster and look at where it is served

Tap any roaster, yours or another, and open Served at. It lists every café recorded as serving that roaster, with Show all shops and a map.

Do this for the two or three roasters most like yours. You are not looking for cafés to take from them. You are looking for patterns: the neighbourhoods they cover and the ones they do not, the kind of café that buys a roaster of your style, and the gaps on the map where nobody is delivering yet.

3. Find the cafés that already pour more than one roaster

On a café's page, Roasters served here shows the roasters it serves, and Show all served roasters opens the full list. When a café lists two or more, it usually runs a house coffee and a guest.

These are the easiest door in wholesale. Asking a café to replace its house roaster is asking it to retrain its baristas and rewrite its menu. Asking for a guest slot for a month is asking it to try something, which is what multi-roaster cafés already do.

Cafés with no roaster listed are worth a look too. Sometimes nobody has added the roaster yet; sometimes the café roasts its own or buys from a supplier it would rather not name. Either way, you only find out by visiting.

4. Watch for new places

The app marks places that were added in the last seven days as new, and Roasters Pro can sort the map by newest and highlight new places. A newly listed café is often a recently opened one, and a café in its first months is still settling its suppliers. Check the listing's photos and reviews to tell a new opening from an old café that has just been added.

5. Qualify each café before you visit

A café's listing tells you a lot about what it would buy and how to start the conversation:

Espresso machine and grinder. If the café lists its setup, you know what you would be dialling in on before you walk in, and whether an equipment offer is relevant at all.
Features. Filter, hand brew or cold brew means the café sells more than espresso and may take a second coffee. Decaf means a decaf line. Sells beans means a shelf for retail bags, which is extra volume and a place for your brand.
Hours. Plan to visit in the quiet hour, not at the morning rush.
Reviews. Roasters reviews score coffee, service and place separately. Read the ones where the coffee score is low or the text mentions sour, bitter or inconsistent shots. A café whose customers complain about the coffee is a café with a reason to talk to you.
Owner responses. An owner who replies to reviews is paying attention, and easier to reach.
Contact. Website and Instagram tell you the café's style and who runs it, so you can ask for the right person by name.

6. Build the shortlist in a list

Save the cafés you want to visit into a list in the app. Twenty is plenty for a first round. For each one, write down in a line why it is on the list: "pours a guest roaster", "new, no roaster listed", "reviews say the espresso is sour". That line is the first sentence of your pitch.

What the app cannot tell you

Listings are not complete. Places and their roasters are added by the community and from other sources, and a café can change supplier before anybody updates it. Treat the roaster links as a lead, and confirm in person.
Volume. Nothing on a listing says how many kilos a café goes through. Busy review counts and long opening hours are hints, not numbers.
Whether they are happy. A café can pour a competitor and be delighted with it. Your visit is to find out, not to assume.

A note on how to use this

This is a way to choose which doors to knock on, not a mailing list. Cafés get a lot of supplier emails and ignore most of them. A roaster who walks in on a quiet afternoon, orders a coffee, and already knows the café runs a guest hopper on its grinder is having a different conversation. We wrote up that conversation in How to pitch a café for wholesale.

Before you go, have your price list and terms ready. Order Book's wholesale coffee price list template covers what a café will ask about: price per kilo, volume breaks, minimum order, delivery days and payment terms. Order Book is the wholesale ordering tool from the team behind Roasters.