The Plan: From a Honey Table to a Coffee Stall

I keep bees, I sell the honey at farmers markets, and I am saving to open a shop. The shop will sell coffee I roast, baked goods, honey and other things from the hives, house jams sweetened with honey and maple syrup, and shirts. The markets come first. This section of the Coffee pages is the homework for that first stage: a small, complete coffee stall that one person can run from a ten-foot canopy.

This would not be my first coffee business. Around 1990, when I lived in Beaufort, South Carolina, I bought my first business: a coffee shop and ice cream shop together. I baked the desserts and cookies and made sandwiches as well. Almost all of the coffee that shop sold was ground on site and brewed in French presses. Who knew it would go this far.

So far I have roasted coffee by the simple home methods, and I own and use a burr grinder, a pour-over kit, a French press and a phin. Everything about the stall itself is a plan, and the pages say so. Where the research could not answer a question, they say that too.

What the stall sells

• Bags of coffee, roasted that week, whole bean and ground, with the roast date on every bag.
• Tastes of each coffee, free.
• Cups: a house coffee, a pour-over, Vietnamese iced coffee from a phin, iced coffee, and coffee sweetened with honey from my own hives.
• Honey, as now.
• Cookies and scones, wrapped, and house jams.
• Grinders and brewing gear, and shirts.

What the research changed

Four research passes went into these pages: Michigan’s rules, the roasters and the coffee, how a stall runs without mains power, and what people pay. Several things I had assumed turned out differently.

I had planned	What the sources say	Page
Start on a Behmor 2000AB and sell from it	Its manual asks for an hour between roasts, stops short of dark roasts and voids the warranty for commercial use. It makes about 2½ lb in a four-hour session. It is a learning roaster.	Choosing a Roaster
Move up to a Bullet R2 or R2 Pro	Either covers 20 to 60 lb a week. The Pro needs a 240 V outlet; the R2 needs a 120 V circuit to itself.	Choosing a Roaster
Make my own ice, perhaps big clear cubes	Home-made ice is not allowed in drinks sold from a licensed booth, and a big cube melts fast in coffee that is not already cold.	Iced Coffee and Ice
Sweeten drinks with my honey	Honey will not mix cold; honey syrup will. The syrup has to be mixed at the stall, not at home. Whether my own honey may go into a licensed drink has to be asked.	Honey in Coffee
Run the kettle on the power station	The 858 Wh battery heats only about 7 litres from cold. It will keep already-hot water at temperature all day.	Hot Water and Power
Grind each bag in front of the customer	Grinding a bag at the stall is processing on site, outside the cottage food exemption. Bring sealed bags of both.	Grinders
Brew samples ahead, or brew live	Coffee holds for three hours in a sealed airpot with no loss that professionals could detect. Sample from airpots; brew one pour-over at a time for show.	Sampling
A cup that stands out	A kraft cup, a rubber stamp and a wooden honey dipper cost almost nothing and are the stall’s own.	Cups, and Standing Out

The two businesses

Michigan law splits the stall in two.

Sealed goods from the home kitchen need no licence: bags of roasted coffee, wrapped cookies and scones, and jam that meets the federal standard. They carry the cottage food label, they are sold face to face, and together they are capped at $50,000 a year.

Anything in a cup is food service and needs a licence from the county health department. A licence brings rules that reach back into the kitchen: no home-made ice, no cold brew steeped at home, no syrup mixed at home, and, on a strict reading, no home-roasted coffee in the cup at all. That last point is unanswered in anything published and is the most important question to ask before spending money.

The Michigan Rules has the detail and the list of questions.

Three stages

Stage 1: bags, tastes, cookies and jam. Add coffee to the honey table as a cottage food. Roast small, sell roast-dated bags, give tastes if MDARD confirms that a cottage food seller may. Start-up cost: under $1,000 without a roaster. This stage answers the only question that matters: do people here buy this coffee?

Stage 2: cups. With the health department’s answers in hand, add a short drink menu under a licence. Whether that is worth doing depends on how the licence is charged; at a fee for every market day, forty cups only cover it. Start-up cost: about another $700 to $1,000.

Stage 3: a real roaster. When bags pass about ten pounds a week, buy a one-kilo roaster. About $4,100 to $5,300, paid for by about 410 bags.

After that comes the shop, which removes most of the limits above. The Numbers lays out the costs and a model of a market day.

What would make it this stall and no other

Quaint and endearing are not things a plan can supply. What it can do is point to what is already true and unusual:

• The honey is from the hives of the person pouring the coffee. No other coffee stall found in Michigan can say that.
• The roast date is on the bag. Supermarket coffee is $7 for 12 oz and has no date on it.
• A phin dripping on the counter. Nobody sells Vietnamese coffee at a market in this part of the state, as far as could be found.
• A wooden honey dipper in the cup.
• A stamp, not a logo sheet. Every cup and bag marked by hand.
• Honey, maple, jam, cookies and coffee on one table, each made by the same person, each going with the others.

The pages

1. The Michigan Rules: what needs a licence and what does not
2. Choosing a Roaster: the Behmor, the Bullet R2 and the R2 Pro
3. Green Coffee and the Line-Up: what to buy and what to roast first
4. Bags, Labels and What a Bag Costs
5. Prices and Customers: mid-Michigan markets, roasters and a price list
6. Sampling: letting people taste the coffee
7. Hot Water and Power: a market with no outlet
8. The Drinks: pour-over, press, phin and egg coffee
9. Iced Coffee and Ice
10. Honey in Coffee
11. Cups, and Standing Out
12. Grinders: for the stall, for customers and for a shop
13. The Stall: layout, kit, cookies and jam
14. The Numbers: start-up costs and a market day
15. The Equipment List: what to buy, where, and whether to buy it used
16. Reference Cards: printable one-page charts
17. A Truck or Trailer Instead of a Stall: what a vehicle would change, and what it costs

What is still open

• The answers from MDARD and the health department.
• The name of the business, which is why these pages say “the stall.”
• Which markets. Saturday mornings at the established markets are largely full; weekday afternoon markets have room.
• Insurance: what cover the chosen markets require and what it costs.
• Everything that only a season of selling can show.