The Essential Private Label Coffee Suppliers Guide

 

I wrote a Twitter thread about coffee accessories a while back. These have a huge opportunity in organic social right now, as do coffee bean and cold brew products.  This is your guide to private label coffee roasters and their brews, and the private label coffee suppliers who keep their inventories fresh.

Let’s do this…

 

 

The #1 question I got after my Twitter thread? “How do I sell actual coffee?” Bingo!

I thought this niche would be saturated… But after some SEO research, I realized it’s not. There’s plenty of space in your local markets to get in on the ground floor and establish a name for your brand, and I’ve got just the list for you.

Terms you should know in this post:

• Small-Run Coffee Beans: Suppliers who specialize in small-batch roasts and small private label runs for brands or in-house labels.
• Dropshippers: Pick your brew, design your packaging, and they ship and send, with a ton of options.
• Private label (or white label): Choose from existing products in a manufacturer’s portfolio and brand it as your own.
• Contract manufacturing (also co-manufacturing or co-packing): Get involved in the process from start to finish, including formulation, packaging design, labeling options, and logistic considerations.
• Ready-to-Drink: Beverages that are typically sold in cans, bottles, or similar containers and require no preparation to enjoy. Examples here include iced teas and cold brews, which you will find mention of down below.
• MoQs: Minimum order quantities, meaning the least amount you can order of a given product. MoQs are one of my main selection criteria when choosing suppliers to buy from, and you’ll hear this term a lot in my posts and TikToks.

 

Get all the intel – in a nutshell – in my TikTok short below, or scroll to keep reading the expanded version.

 

 

Private Label Coffee Roasters

Established in 1840, this brand is said to be the oldest coffee merchant in the US. Gillies Coffee is a small-run coffee bean supplier with a low MoQ of just 72 units to start.

Plus they have a bunch of cool and fun old packaging that you can use. There’s plenty of options to choose from, lots of flavors, and green beans (a nice term for SEO and popular on social).

 

 

Gillies Coffee is an easy way to get started, especially if you want to test selling it in-person.

 

Private Label Coffee Dropshippers

Dripshipper charges a monthly fee and they take care of everything,

The perfect solution for those who want to wake up tomorrow morning and process 1,000 orders by sunset.

• 12oz-5lb bags
• 12 or 60 pack pods

 

 

If you truly want to do the minimum amount of work possible, Dripshipper lets you add your logo, choose from their existing coffee options, and sell but you’re going to get a much lower margin. So, the lowest profit option, but least work and upfront cost.

 

Start your coffee business in one day!

If dropshipping sounds like your best bet, here’s another private label coffee supplier you can take a look at. Calioh Coffee offers the whole spectrum of options, including:

• Single origin, fair trade, and decaf
• Bags, k-cups and Nespresso

No monthly fee here so they’re a little different to Dripshipper above. However, this one needs more time to set up. You need to take this one seriously because it’s going to take more of your time to get it just right.

 

 

With 100% satisfaction guaranteed, this is probably the one I’d choose if I was going to do a brand. 

 

Supliful is another privatecoffee dropshipper where you don’t have to hold inventory  or pay anything on a monthly basis. Simply send them your designed label, and integrate with Shopify. You’ll be able to sell right away. 

 

 

Ready-to-Drink Private Label Coffee Suppliers

Berner Food & Beverage is a private-label co-manufacturer with a large selection of ready-to-drink coffee and tea beverages. 

 

 

Choose from four flavored cold brew coffee profiles: caramel, coffee, vanilla, and mocha.  The iced latte product line includes more flavors, such as peppermint mocha, pumpkin spice, and s’mores.

They also have many other customizable solutions, like:

• Coffee (cold brew and milk alternatives)
• Energy (blends, including those with added caffeine)
• Tea (extracts and lattes)
• Functional (protein-enhanced and vitamin blends)
• Innovation (mocktails and bespoke flavors)

The R & D team at Berner’s can also assist you with rapid market deployment. They collaborate with multi-packaging service providers to get your product canned, bottled, jarred, and custom-labeled with catchy designs.

 

If you want to do bulk cold brew, SOS Cold Brew is a noted cold brew white labeler.

 

 

Hailed as the better, healthier alternative to iced coffee and sweetened drinks, cold brewed coffee products from SOS Cold Brew contain no added sugars or preservatives.

• Classic – Original recipe, balanced flavors, strength, and drinkability, an everyday cold brew. A 12oz serving provides 174mg of caffeine, and costs you just 7 calories.
• Bold – 50% stronger than Classic but with the same base recipe, great over ice. A 12oz serving provides 247mg of caffeine, and gets delivered with only 10 calories.
• Kona – A Hawaiian blend that’s rich and delicious. Serving and calorie info same as the Classic blend.

All products available in 12oz glass bottles, or 5-gallon “Corny” kegs (Still or Nitro pours).

 

JAVO MASTERS OF EXTRACTION

Javo Masters of Extraction are another super whitecoffee supplier option, with a natural cold brew.

 

 

Private label product solutions include developing custom bags-in-a-box or hand-mixed cold brew coffees and teas with either own-brand proprietary blends or using existing small-batch, in-house, craft-roasted coffee blends with your own brand.

 

Custom Coffee Beverages

If you want to do your own fully-custom beverage — whether that’s like a hard coffee, or you want to do a cold brew can or something like that — and actually do like a formulated consumer packaged goods, I’d recommend Tex-Bev in Texas to be your partner for that.

 

 

They’re a great kind of small business with an excellent approach to having a good packer.

They do alcohol, too

 

Overall, coffee is hyper competitive to actually compete in but there’s still tons of people that sell and consume it everyday with subscription services, and new flavors and any number of things. If you want to get started, this is a pretty darn authoritative list of different ways to do that with different price points.

With any brand or product, it will be a sliding scale. The less work you do, the less you make. Dropshipping means you can expect 10-20% margin.

Buying in large bulk, getting custom packaging in bulk, all custom done, you can make closer to 50%, but with a more up-front cost.

 

Thanks for reading. Let me know in the comments below how you’re doing, or if you think there’s a private label coffee supplier that needs to be on this list.

– Oren

 

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