Every café owner gets supplier emails, sample boxes they did not ask for, and sales calls during the lunch rush. Almost none of them lead anywhere. The roasteries that win wholesale accounts do something slower and more specific: they show up knowing the café, ask for a small commitment, and make the coffee easy to reorder.

This is the approach, step by step. If you have not built your shortlist yet, start with How to find new wholesale cafés with Roasters.

1. Know the café before you walk in

Ten minutes on the café's Roasters listing and its Instagram answers most of what you would otherwise ask:

Who roasts for them now, and whether they already pour a guest coffee.
What they brew on: the espresso machine and grinder, if listed, and whether they serve filter, cold brew or decaf.
What customers say about the coffee. Reviews that score the coffee low, or mention sour or inconsistent espresso, tell you what to fix.
Who runs it. An owner who replies to reviews by name is the person to ask for.

2. Visit as a customer first

Go in the quiet hour. The café's opening hours are on its listing; mid-afternoon on a weekday is usually safe. Order an espresso and, if they have it, a filter. Drink them. Pay. Only then ask whether the owner or head barista is around, and if not, when would be a good time.

You have learned how they dial in, how busy the bar is, and what the house coffee tastes like in their hands. You have also shown you are a coffee person first and a salesperson second.

3. Offer a guest slot, not a switch

"Would you try our Ethiopian as a guest filter for four weeks?" is a much easier yes than "would you replace your roaster?". A guest slot costs the café nothing to undo, does not upset its current supplier, and gives your coffee a month in front of its customers. Many long-term house contracts start as a guest coffee that customers kept asking for.

Cafés that already list more than one roaster are used to this. For a café with a single house roaster, a decaf, a filter or a retail shelf of beans is often the gap you can fill without touching the espresso.

4. Bring the right samples

Enough to dial in. A couple of 250 g bags is a tasting; a kilo is enough to put on a grinder and serve for a day.
Roasted for their setup. If you know their machine and whether they run milk drinks or black coffee, choose the coffee accordingly.
Labelled with the roast date and a starting recipe.
Offer to come back and dial it in with them. This is where roasters win: most supplier relationships end over a coffee the café could never make taste right.

5. Leave a price list with the terms written down

The café will want to know what it costs and how ordering works. Leave one page with prices without VAT, the price per kilo, any volume break, the minimum order, delivery days and the cutoff for them, the delivery charge, and payment terms. Most arguments with a wholesale account come from something that was never written down.

If you do not have one yet, this wholesale coffee price list template, from Order Book, the wholesale ordering tool from the team behind Roasters, has every line and term, a CSV to download, and a calculator for pricing a kilo from your green cost and roast loss.

6. Follow up within a week

Call or stop by, and ask about the coffee, not the order: how did it dial in, what did the baristas think, what did customers say? If it did not work on their setup, offer to adjust. If it did, suggest a small first order with an easy exit: a month, a couple of kilos a week, no contract.

7. Make the second order easier than the first

A new account is won on the visit and lost on the reorder. If the café has to find your number and send a WhatsApp on Sunday night, it will order late, order less, or order from whoever is easier. Make it effortless:

Agree a delivery day and a cutoff, and remind them before it.
Offer a standing order for the coffee they buy every week.
Send invoices to the right person, the same way every time.
Notice when they go quiet. A café that orders a few days later than usual is telling you something; here is how to spot it early.

This is the part we built Order Book for, from the team behind Roasters: each café gets one link that opens on its usual order at its own prices, with a standing order it can change itself and no login, and the roastery sees which accounts are drifting before they are gone.

What not to do

Do not email every café in the city. A generic pitch to a list is spam to the café and a waste of your samples.
Do not criticise their current roaster. The owner chose them. Talk about what you would add, not what is wrong.
Do not lead with price. A café that switches for a cheaper kilo leaves for a cheaper kilo. Win on the coffee and the service, and price fairly.
Do not visit at the rush. Nobody behind a bar with a queue out the door wants to taste samples.