A guide for wholesale roasters: how to judge an agency on serving cafe buyers and online shoppers at once, reorder follow up, and real cost per account.
Why a general marketing agency gets a wholesale roaster wrong
A wholesale coffee roaster is really two businesses sharing one brand. There's a B2B wholesale program selling beans by the case to cafes, restaurants, hotels, and offices, and there's a direct-to-consumer online store selling bags and subscriptions to home brewers. A general agency usually builds for one and ignores the other, because it's never had to plan a homepage that serves both a cafe buyer sourcing fifty pounds a month and a home brewer buying one bag.
The wholesale side doesn't sell like an impulse purchase either. A cafe owner runs a considered, relationship-driven evaluation: a sample bag, sometimes a cupping, clear pricing tiers and minimums, proof the beans taste the same batch to batch, and occasionally a question about equipment or lease support. That's a completely different sales motion from someone picking a coffee shop for a latte, and it's why a generic “local business” template usually skips the pricing tiers and sample-request form a cafe buyer is actually looking for.
There's also a location quirk most agencies miss. Even though a roaster ships bags nationally through its online store, “wholesale coffee roaster near me” is a real, common search, because many cafes actively prefer a nearby or regional roaster so they can market “locally roasted” beans and keep freight costs down. Treat the wholesale side as a purely national B2B sale and you miss that local intent entirely.
The first question to ask: can they build for two buyers on one homepage?
The one question worth asking before any other: how would you build separate paths on our site for a cafe owner sourcing fifty pounds a month and a home brewer buying one bag? If the answer only describes an online store, or only describes a wholesale landing page, they've missed half your revenue. The single competence that matters most here is knowing these are two different funnels that happen to share a roastery.
A strong answer describes a wholesale program page with visible pricing tiers, minimums, and a simple sample-request form, running alongside a clean online store built for subscriptions and single-bag purchases, with each one getting its own tracking. A weak answer describes a single generic site meant to “showcase the brand” without a clear next step for either buyer.
A related question worth asking right after: how do they plan to follow up with a cafe that requested a sample but never placed an order? Winning the account is only half the business. The real margin lives in the account that reorders every month, and an agency that only talks about new leads, without a plan for reminders and account follow-up, is planning to lose the harder-won half of your revenue.
Which channels actually grow accounts and bag sales, and in what order
Local SEO and your Google Business Profile earn their place first for the wholesale side, because “wholesale coffee roaster near me” and “coffee roaster for cafes” are real searches a cafe buyer runs before they'll ever request a sample. Google Ads should split cleanly into two campaigns from there, one aimed at cafe and restaurant buyers actively comparing suppliers, and one aimed at home brewers shopping for a bag online, since sending both to the same landing page wastes half the click.
AI search now sits alongside both of those. When a cafe owner asks an assistant for a good wholesale roaster nearby, or a home brewer asks for a great single-origin bag, you want your roastery named in that answer. SEO and content for the online store follow a familiar ecommerce pattern: origin stories, roast-profile detail, and brew guides are what actually bring home brewers back to buy again, distinct from the wholesale side entirely.
Email is where the real margin gets protected on both sides. Reorder reminders timed to a cafe's usual order cycle keep an account from quietly drifting to whoever follows up next, while subscription and restock emails do the same job for online buyers. Reviews round it out, since online shoppers read them before buying a bag, and cafe buyers ask around before switching suppliers.
Two revenue lines, two different rhythms
Wholesale accounts don't really move with the seasons the way retail does; a signed cafe account tends to reorder on a steady monthly cycle regardless of time of year, which is exactly why a missed reorder reminder is such an expensive leak. The online store is a different story, since gift-season demand around the holidays is a well-known bump for direct-to-consumer coffee sellers the same way it is for most consumer goods brands, and a plan that doesn't build content and email around that window is leaving an easy seasonal lift on the table.
What a customer is worth also looks different on each side. A single wholesale account, once it settles into a reorder rhythm, is worth a recurring monthly case order for as long as the relationship holds, while a one-time online sale is worth exactly one bag until a subscription or a repeat purchase turns it into something more. Treating a sample-bag inquiry the same as a single online order badly understates the wholesale side's real value.
There's one number worth pinning down before you sign anything: how do you separate cost per new wholesale account from cost per online order? A roastery running one blended number can't tell whether its marketing spend is actually filling the wholesale pipeline that carries the real margin, or just moving a few extra bags online.
Red flags, and the ownership questions that protect your roastery
The clearest red flag is a site built to sell one bag at a time with no visible wholesale path at all, no pricing tiers, no sample-request form, no way to become an account. If a proposed site redesign doesn't include that page, real wholesale leads will simply never convert, no matter how much traffic arrives. The opposite mistake is just as real: a site built only for wholesale buyers that ignores the online store entirely walks away from a whole line of revenue.
Get a straight answer about who holds the keys to your online store, your Google Ads account, and your customer and wholesale records. Your company's name should be on every one of them. An online store built on a platform you can't export from, or campaigns run through an account you can't log into, is set up to keep you dependent, not to keep winning your business fairly.
No agency worth hiring will promise you a fixed count of new wholesale accounts or a dollar figure for online revenue, because that number depends on each cafe's own switching timeline and each shopper's own buying habits, not on anyone's media plan. Look instead for one that reports cost per new account plainly and keeps adjusting the mix toward whatever's actually working, month over month.
Six questions to ask before you hire
Run these six questions past every agency on your list and lay the answers next to each other. Anyone can sound sure of themselves; the difference shows up in how specific the answer actually gets.
One: how would you build separate paths on our site for wholesale buyers and online shoppers? Two: how do you plan to follow up with a cafe that requested a sample but never reordered? Three: do you track cost per new wholesale account separately from cost per online order? Four: how would you use the holiday season for our online store without ignoring the wholesale side? Five: whose name is actually on the website, the ad accounts, and the customer records, ours or yours? Six: name one specific thing you'd change on our site right now, and explain why it's the priority.
SearchPod is set up to run precisely that combination: your website, Google Ads, SEO, AI search, and email under one roof, built for both the wholesale side and the online store at once. The rate card is public, not something you have to book a call to find out. Ten percent of your monthly ad spend covers Google Ads management, with a $600 floor and nothing added on top. Ten pages a month, billed at $50 each, covers the content side of things, and a fresh roastery site is priced under one of eight fixed packages, laid out for you at /pricing. No setup fee, no contract locking you in, just month to month with a 30-day guarantee sitting behind the first stretch. /get-proposal answers within a business day. Whichever agency you pick, make them answer the six questions above first.
