Show HN: Kaffee Bitte, specialty coffee delivery for Germany

I'm dpaola2 [at] gmail if you'd be willing to email me :-)

If i go to $healthfoodstore around the corner i have a variety of high quality, dark roasted whole bean espresso from different regions. I would be tempted to say that the store's prices are almost always lower than your offering and i can smell the 250g bag of bliss before i spend 12eu on it. How do you compete with that? (given that you consider people with my level of coffee-affection your target audience)

Fresh roasted needs to be more than "roasted sometime before we ship it" for me to make a difference.

Offer a subscription, where you put a coffee roaster in my kitchen. Every week you send me $amount of high-quality, well sourced green coffee beans from different regions. I put some of them them in my KBRoaster(tm), push the "dark roast" button, kitchen starts smelling like heaven and only 7 minutes later i enjoy my fresh cup of fresh roasted, fresh ground espresso, directly from a farm on the volcanoes of the guatemalan central highlands! Thanks for the little bag with fermented cacao beans you put into this weeks package together with a note that espresso and pure cacao go well together. If you roast it at your place and ship it dark to me, my kitchen does not smell like heaven in the morning.

Lastly, the grinding process is (imo) where most of the freshness gets lost.[0] Fresh ground is way more important than fresh roasted. Freshl-roasted is only a selling point if you show me that you are actually fresher than $healthfoodstore. Example: provide very fast delivery for the region around your roaster, offering "it's still warm when it arrives" quality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_roasting#Packaging

  Roasted coffee has an optimal typical shelf life 
  of 2 weeks, and ground coffee about 15 minutes.

Good point. The coffee they sell is much more upmarket than what you can get at $healthfoodstore, but the site doesn't make it clear. The beans they use are more expensive, and they are probably roasted more carefully. Grocery store brands typically use an industrial high-volume and high-temperature roasting process, instead of small batches and lower temperatures. If you need 2 tons, would you rather do 100 batches of 20kgs for 20 minutes each, or one large batch in only 10 minutes?

Phoenix Coffee Roasters are transparent about their costs [0], they pay up to 4 times of the regular exchange price for green beans:

We purchased this coffee for USD 10,60 /kg through Nordic Approach. At the same time the stock exchange price for green coffee was 2,50 EUR/kg, for Faire Trade certificated coffee 3,00 EUR/kg. Our production costs (taxes, transportation, packaging, etc.) mount up to 7,50 EUR/kg roasted coffee. Our overall costs are 15,80 EUR/kg, plus labour costs and VAT. (These beans sell for 35.30 EUR/kg)

Maybe a line like "coffee from Germany's best roasters" would make some people interested.

I put some of them them in my KBRoaster(tm), push the "dark roast" button, kitchen starts smelling like heaven and only 7 minutes later i enjoy my fresh cup of fresh roasted, fresh ground espresso

Have you done this before? Your kitchen will smell like hell and your fire alarm might go off ;-) Also, you should wait a few days for the beans to release all the CO2 from roasting.

Roasted coffee has an optimal typical shelf life of 2 weeks

Citation needed :-) I'd say it's best between the second and eight week.

[0] http://www.phoenix-coffeeroasters.com/en/red.html