Coffee has the best-looking margin in the building until you count the milk you poured down the sink. This is the arithmetic, done properly, with the line items most people leave out.
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Bean cost per cup is the one line everybody knows, and it is usually calculated wrong — by dividing the bag price by a number of cups somebody remembered.
Do it from the dose. A double shot uses somewhere around 18 to 22 grams depending on your basket and your recipe, so weigh yours rather than assuming. Then a kilogram of beans is simply 1,000 divided by your dose.
In most cafés milk costs more per cup than coffee does, and it is the line nobody measures because it is poured by eye.
Work it out per millilitre: the price of a litre divided by 1,000, multiplied by what goes in the cup. Then add what goes in the sink, because milk is not poured to the millilitre — it is poured to the jug, and what is left over is thrown away.
| Drink | Typical milk | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Piccolo / macchiato | Very little | Cheapest milk drink on the menu. |
| Flat white / cappuccino | Around 150–200 ml | Depends entirely on your cup size. |
| Large takeaway | Roughly double a regular | Same beans, twice the milk. |
| Alternative milks | Same volume, higher price | Often charged as an extra — check the extra covers the real difference. |
A cup, a lid and sometimes a sleeve can approach the cost of the beans in the drink. For a dine-in coffee that cost is zero, which means the same flat white has two different costs depending on where it is drunk.
If most of your trade is takeaway and you priced from a dine-in cost, your margin is thinner than your spreadsheet says. Cost both versions separately and see which one you are actually selling.
Cost per cup calculated from the recipe is the best case. Real cost includes everything that did not become a sale, and in a café that list is longer than it looks.
Add the lines, then compare the total to what you charge. The gap is your gross margin on that drink, before any labour, rent or power — which is why coffee margins that look enormous on paper still have to cover a barista standing there all morning.
The useful move is rarely to raise the price of a flat white. It is to find which drinks on the menu are quietly poor, and to notice when an input price has moved.
Alternative milks are the usual finding: the surcharge was set when the price gap was smaller and has not been looked at since. Re-run the numbers when a supplier price changes, not once a year, and the menu stays honest without a general price rise customers notice.
Put the dose, the milk and the cup in once and Cost Builder keeps the cost per cup current as prices move — so a bean price rise shows up as a margin, not a surprise.