Black curtain in the coffee industry: there is something wrong with the price, and buying beans depends on luck.

Mr. Qian Zhongshu wrote a profound sentence in besieged Fortress: "Marriage is like besieging a fortress. People outside the city want to go in, but people in the city want to get out."

In fact, this is a perfect description of the coffee industry. But outside the siege of the coffee industry, there is a moat that makes many newcomers fall into it.

Moreover, the water is extremely deep.

From beans to finished products, the industrial chain structure of the coffee industry

To make a cup of coffee, people like to mention a key word of fine coffee, from seed to cup, to emphasize the importance of the source of coffee.

In fact, as a shopkeeper, you need to think the same way when making a cup of coffee.

Opening a coffee shop is not just a matter of coffee beans. Make coffee, look back, refer to the picture below, you need to put in a variety of professional equipment, and then find their own coffee beans and related supplies, for example, what kind of milk to use, and so on.

Further up, there are ripe coffee beans, and this piece is roasted, but on this floor, not many cafes are also equipped with baking at the same time. For many coffee shop owners, they also expect to have this ability at the stage of development and show it to the guest industry. Can also achieve the so-called personality production.

The rise of ripe beans is a plate that many people in the industry have not been able to figure out-coffee raw beans. Now the domestic situation is not very good, all sizes of raw bean companies are hidden tricks, raw bean quality is uneven, even if the same name of the same bean, may not be the same.

Finally, it is in the place of origin to do procurement and producers, buying and selling, as many as cattle. Coffee farmers have always been an exploited class.

With this layer-by-layer analysis, the interest relationship is very clear. Among the levels, we can break down them as follows.

In fact, apart from equipment manufacturers, it is often the middle part of the industry that ensures profitability, and only a few make money at both ends of the industrial chain.

There is no integrity in trading, and people in the trade fish in troubled waters.

1. The selling price of equipment is unclear.

Many shopkeepers, when they first entered the coffee industry, did not know the prices in the industry, their coffee shops were not clear, and they were often exhausted in choosing bar equipment.

As far as the author is concerned, a few weeks ago, a friend asked me for advice on the same question, hoping to buy a coffee maker for his own shop, but because the volume of the cup was not high and the budget was relatively low, it was very troublesome to choose.

So the author still recommended the arcade in the industry, Nuova simonelli appia2.

For the sake of helping people in the end, the author is looking for equipment distributors in the circle. At about the same time, I received several quotations from different suppliers.

To my surprise, the market price of this coffee machine should be between 16000 and 18000. But the quotations received are 19000, 20000, and even more outrageous, and the asking price is 22000.

If you were a newcomer, faced with these prices, it would be like this--

It is really a headache whether these prices are true or false. Which equipment supplier ensures the after-sale quality of the equipment?

There is no transparency in the internal equipment of the industry, including the official website, it is difficult to find the suggested retail price of this coffee machine. Such a chaotic sales environment is indeed not benign for the industry.

If you don't touch and roll for a few years, these walls will probably be fixed.

2. There are many tricks in coffee roasting

After the purchase of the equipment is completed, the shopkeeper will start to have a headache about what coffee beans should be used for the product, and some cafe owners who enter the industry because of "feelings" are even more at a loss.

The production of espresso, need what kind of coffee beans, do not know, can only slowly grope, find someone to buy.

And for bakers, these people's money is the best to earn, a clear example--

The owner of a restaurant in Chengdu asked me for help about whether the coffee spaghetti mix had been ripped off.

And the roaster swore to the owner that the spelling of your coffee mix costs 120 yuan a pound outside, and now I only charge you 90 yuan per pound without free delivery. Anyway, it's just a lot of talk about telling each other that you're making a lot of money.

Some readers may be confused about this unit, 1 pound, about 454g, the overall cost, that is, the price of 1kg Italian beans is about 1988.How expensive Italian beans are about 200yuan / kg, not to mention how expensive they are, not to mention that they sell for 120yuan a pound, or 264g / kg. To which I would like to say--

Assuming that we only consider the price of raw beans, here are the lifetime bean merchants' data for your reference. Coffee raw beans from 2015WBC champion Sasa Sestic's Project Origin, high-quality Ethiopian Kongjia G1 and Aricha G1 1kg's raw beans retail at 169 yuan per kilogram.

This kind of coffee raw bean cup is about 88 points.

A cup tests the quality of raw beans 90% Columbia Sotara Cauca washed Kaddura (yes 90% in the coffee circle, are the best), such a raw bean price, 1kg retail price is 230 yuan.

It is necessary for roasters to make a profit, and they certainly will not use the best raw coffee beans. If some unscrupulous coffee roasters give us what kind of products, we do not know. A bad baker will certainly not give a good one.

3. The cost of the coffee shop is pressing down to death.

There is a hidden rule in the coffee industry. Coffee cooked beans, which are generally not up to the standard of production, are usually reduced to the so-called "pull flower practice beans". Whether he can drink it or not, it's cheap, greasy and can pull flowers.

There is a good saying that there is no coffee that cannot be sold in this market.

What is the price of such a defective product? It can only be said that there is no lowest, only lower, 40 yuan, 35 yuan, or even 20 yuan per kilogram.

In essence, such coffee beans are not used for drinking, high-intensity flower-pulling training, play for fun, look good, for the barista himself is also understandable.

What if you use it to sell it? Usually you may need 100 yuan to buy coffee beans, reduce the cost to 2-30 yuan / kg, a cup of latte coffee beans cost only 0.4-0.6 yuan, milk can also choose some cheap second-and third-tier brands, the cost is less than 3 yuan. External sales go to the price range of 25-35, in which you can calculate how much you make a profit.

"anyway, it's all with sugar and milk. How many guests will drink it?" -- so said a shopkeeper who operated like this.

This sentence not only reflects the extreme deficiency of market culture, but also reflects the poor living environment of cafes.

Finally, it is those who operate in this way, the dark heart.

4. Piracy of coffee utensils is rampant.

Coffee brewing utensils, many enthusiasts and even merchants, will directly choose a treasure. Online sales, it is difficult to trace the source of goods, so the pawn naturally extended to here.

Earlier, the Hario siphon pots given by prizes in a domestic siphon competition were all fake, which was really hilarious, and booed all over the industry for a while.

Even now open a treasure search, a bunch of fakes are in front of us. Even, such fake goods, merchants can also use the name of the original factory to sell these appliances.

The Hario siphon pot pictured above is priced at 1320 at the official WeChat store.

Let's just imagine that if a businessman takes this 180 as inferior quality. The profit of this?

5. The raw bean market is like a gambling stone.

Raw coffee beans are also a headache for roasters in China. As mentioned above, there is no coffee that cannot be sold.

The same is true of the raw bean market-there are no raw beans that cannot be sold.

Maybe the operators will take part in some cup tests and then choose whether they should buy this kind of coffee and raw beans. But the cup test performance may only be temporary. If you get the goods, it may be different.

At this time, the raw bean merchant may say, "your baking is wrong. This curve should be changed."

One of the largest raw bean merchants in China used to do this: a micro-batch of raw coffee beans, 30kg batches, and does not provide samples.

"sometimes buying coffee and raw beans feels like betting on stones," says one colleague. "very often, when we buy certain batches of raw coffee beans, we even don't even have a sample for you, so we can only buy them back and try them ourselves. As soon as there is a problem with the goods, the raw bean merchants will start to play the ball."

The vast majority of raw coffee export packaging will be 60kg specifications, imagine you buy a bag of Yega snow coffee, some of which are picked up and replaced with low-cost batches of Yunnan or Brazil. 3kg has been changed in 60kg, but it is also difficult to detect. Unless the buyer has a golden tongue, you can find the clue in one bite.

3kg is just a hypothetical scenario, and more can't be ruled out. To do the math, each bag of raw coffee beans in a container is replaced by 3kg, which means that there is more room for profit.

With less good replacement of more expensive raw beans, the profit is higher, why not?

Conclusion

As Starbucks told employees, beans that can experience a second explosion are good beans. The author has never denied that the veterans in the industry are probably "blacks" who have experienced the second explosion.

The above deep water areas are only one-sided, in fact, travelers all understand that the existence of these grey areas will greatly limit the healthy development of China's coffee market.

Cultural guidance and the transparency of the industrial chain is the direction that the coffee industry should take. Without culture and audience, coffee will only go down all the way, and the consumers will always be the so-called people in the industry.

With a good market environment, combined with a good business environment. People in the industry have cake to eat.

China's coffee market is growing at a rate of 70 billion a year. This data is very impressive, this is only a starting point, look outside this coffee circle, there is a broader market to tap, this is what coffee people should focus on.

Don't start digging yet, the insiders have already exhausted the insiders.

The coffee man is not easy enough, why bother the coffee man?