What does learning coffee cost before opening a café?

Opening a small private café takes roughly 100,000 to 150,000 yuan for a 30 to 40 square meter space, covering rent, renovation, equipment, and ingredients. Coffee education fees sit on top of that outlay, and the course cost range is a recurring expense that anyone planning a shop should budget for early.

Beyond the opening investment, the business depends on the margin of a single cup and on operating strategy. Two workable models are a takeout-focused shop and a home-roasting café, and both rely on steady communication with customers. Rent and labor cannot be avoided, so the numbers decide whether the artistic dream survives.

How much startup capital does it really take to open a small private café? And how much does it cost to learn coffee-making? This article breaks down the costs of opening a shop item by item, from upfront rent and mid-stage renovation to later-stage equipment and ingredients, and uses a 30-40 square meter small shop as an example to give an overall investment reference of 100,000-150,000 yuan. It also analyzes the cost and profit margin of a cup of coffee, and, combining two models—a Guangzhou takeout shop and a home-roasting café—explores operating strategies and the art of communicating with customers. Finally, it introduces the course fee range for learning coffee. Suitable for coffee enthusiasts who have ideas about opening a shop.

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Tired of clocking in for work day after day, fed up with the overt and covert power struggles in the office, and even less willing to guess your boss's mood every day. So you grit your teeth, hand in your resignation, and your mind begins to repeatedly picture that café of your own.

Afternoon sunlight slants through the floor-to-ceiling window, spilling onto the wooden tabletop, the sound of turning pages interweaves with the aroma of coffee, soft piano music relaxes your whole body, and a few faded old photos hang on the mottled wall. A quiet, gentle girl sits in a rattan chair beside the bookshelf, with a lazy Scottish Fold cat curled up on her lap. She reads an English novel with her head lowered, as if shutting out all the noise outside.

Suits, high heels, bosses—say goodbye to them all!

Next, full of enthusiasm, you start looking for a storefront and learning the craft, personally handling everything and pouring in all your effort. But in order to choose a satisfactory shop, you run through every street and alley in the city; either the rent seems too high, or the location is not ideal, and more than half a year passes without anything settled.

Only then do you gradually realize that behind the artistic dream of a café is actually a complete set of business logic—raw materials, rent, renovation, labor—none of it can be avoided.

When income and investment remain inverted for a long time, if you lose money for one or two months, you can still hold on with the passion of chasing your dream. But what if you lose money for six months? Eight months? When you have been losing money for ten straight days, sentimentality still works; but when you have been losing money for one month, two months, three months in a row, can that sentimentality still hold you up? Based on my limited industry observation, quite a few small shop owners begin to waver after enduring two months of losses. The shop may still be open, but their mindset has already changed; anxiety and worry spread to employees and customers, service standards decline accordingly, revenue falls further, and ultimately it falls into a vicious cycle.

If you have not thought these questions through clearly, then it shows you are not yet qualified to call yourself a competent entrepreneur. A truly competent entrepreneur asks themselves before taking the first step: Can I accept failure? So, before you make up your mind to open a café, I want to first talk with you about what it is really like to open a café.

1

How much does it cost to open a small café?

How much does it cost to open a small café?

(30-40 square meters)

Upfront costs : rent + transfer fee + rental deposit.

Mid-stage costs : renovation costs.

Later-stage costs : equipment costs + ingredient costs.

Operating costs : wages + reserved operating funds.

Cost analysis:

Upfront costs: rent + transfer fee + rental deposit.

Rent control: when opening a café, first choose a good storefront; of course, the better the foot traffic, the better , but high foot traffic also means high rent. Personally, I suggest that if you open a small café, rent should be controlled within 10,000.

Transfer fee: it is best if this can be saved; if a transfer fee is required; it is recommended to control it within 30,000 .

Rental deposit: generally one month's rent.

Mid-stage costs: renovation costs.

Renovation budget: after all, you are renting someone else's property, so it is not advisable to invest too much in renovation; personally, I suggest light renovation and heavy soft furnishings.

Later-stage costs: equipment costs + ingredient costs.

Equipment costs: a set of ordinary café equipment (coffee machine, grinder, ice machine, smoothie machine, refrigerator, etc.) can all be fully equipped for within 50,000.

Ingredient costs: coffee beans + milk + other ingredients: generally 5,000 is enough.

Operating costs: wages + reserved operating funds.

Wages: if the shop is 80 square meters, 2-4 staff members are enough, and it is recommended that you reserve 6 months of budget from your own funds for wages.

Reserved operating funds: generally reserve no less than 6 months of expenses: rent + staff wages + utilities, etc.

For a shop of about 30-40 square meters: the overall investment needs 100,000-150,000 yuan.

Rent 30,000 (3 months' rent plus deposit) + renovation 50,000 (basic renovation and storefront plus soft furnishings, tables and chairs) + equipment 50,000 (bar equipment category) + other expenses 20,000 = 150,000

Note: every city is different, and the specific investment varies; the above is only for reference.

2

How much do coffee and other drinks cost? How much profit?

Cost?????

Coffee cost :

Assume a cup of coffee has a volume of 300 ml; we generally use 2 shots of espresso; if a 500 g bag of espresso beans costs 60-70 yuan, and a double shot needs 18-20 g of powder, then it can make 28 double shots, so the espresso cost is 2-3 yuan.

Milk cost: assume one carton of milk is 10 yuan per 1 liter. To make one cup, you need 250 ml of milk to steam milk foam, so the milk cost per cup is 2.5 yuan.

Therefore: 2.5+2.5=5 yuan, (the cost of one cup of coffee, excluding the sugar packets you use, labor, and other miscellaneous fees)

Juice : this specifically depends on whether you use concentrated juice for mixing or fresh fruit made to order. Personally, I suggest using fresh fruit; people nowadays pay more attention to health; they really dislike drinks mixed with concentrated juice.

Milk tea : milk tea cost composition = black tea + milk + evaporated milk + condensed milk, etc. But the specific cost depends on what ingredients and proportions you use; generally the cost of one cup does not exceed 5 yuan.

For example, if you want to open a takeout-style café, like Guangzhou .jpg Café, the shop only sells 4 espresso drinks, but in fact it is 4 categories and 6 kinds of coffee: iced Americano, hot Americano, iced latte, hot latte, hot Flat White, and hot cappuccino. Because it only does takeout, the varieties are few but refined. The coffee beans are selected from the famous Australian brand SEVEN SEEDS (one of Melbourne's most famous coffee bean suppliers).

Liuyun Community is a famous coffee distribution area in Guangzhou. To the north are Tianhe City, Tianhuan, Grandview Mall, and other core commercial districts in the city. It is basically located in the core of the Tianhe business district, while the overall location of Liuyun Community appears more mature and lively.

I believe many white-collar workers will come to .jpg at noon to grab a cup of coffee to go. Because it is deep in the bustling downtown area, with large foot traffic and many commercial institutions (crowds), it is a very good supplement to the surrounding business ecosystem, a small green shade that is lively yet quiet.

Americano 15¥ cold / hot

Latte 18¥ hot / 20 cold

Flatwhite / Cappuccino 18¥ hot

It is said to sell 200 cups a day

3

To run a café well, in addition to sentiment that transcends business, you need scientific strategies and methods even more. Many people do not learn the basic knowledge and skills of opening a shop, and as soon as they have a little spare money they want to open a café. This mindset is wrong——this is also why there are fewer and fewer cafés in good operating condition.

To get customers to come to you, you need your own unique business philosophy. You need to give customers a brand-new experience and make them feel surprised; only then will there be repeat customers.

First define your target customer group, grasp the demand, and use your unique philosophy to satisfy that demand. Once this step is done well, please use a powerful sentence to say why your shop is unique; only then can you go far.

For example, if you want to open a home-roasting café like Guangzhou Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee), the shop only has 4 tables. This shop is indeed not big, and if you arrive a little late there may be no seats left; sometimes it even feels slightly cramped. Next to the bar there is a bean roaster, and the blackboard is densely covered with many kinds of beans. The owner roasts beans every day. As soon as the machine is turned on in the morning, the entire Bao'an Qian Street may be filled with the aroma of coffee beans.

“From the roasting oven to the coffee grinder, and then from the coffee machine to the taste, aroma, tasting environment, and coffee-making methods, we need to consider all factors so as to ensure that consumers get the most wonderful coffee experience.”

Today's Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee) mainly sells coffee beans. Compared with a café, it is more like a coffee laboratory. Most of the customers in the shop are also coffee enthusiasts; everyone is a group of people with the same hobby and the same dedication gathered together. Coffee fanatics love to flock together, and this saying is absolutely true, because only they know where those truly delicious specialty cafés are hidden.

In addition to home roasting, they also carefully study various coffee brewing techniques, and will also tell you the differences among the equipment used to make coffee and coffee information, etc., and even help coffee fans improve their professional abilities.

Americano 23¥ cold / hot

Latte 25¥ hot / 20 cold

Single-origin 30 a cup

4

Working in a café is bitter.

Do not think that working in a café is just chatting happily all day long. A shop that sells 100 espressos a day means steaming milk 50 times and washing 100 cups, 100 saucers, and 100 glasses. You go to the café very early to clean and wash the equipment once. By closing time, you also have to put all kinds of items back in their places to prepare for tomorrow. And the most troublesome thing is still communicating with customers. Coffee customers include all kinds of species, expressing different opinions, venting resentment, and treating you with bitterness. To deal with this, you need to activate a high-level confidence mode, as well as a nanny mode, to satisfy customers' various needs.

Repeat customers come because you treat them honestly, and because of your honesty, they introduce other friends to come to you. You do not need to make cake that is world-class delicious at all; you only need to use high-quality raw materials, and people will experience your sincerity and be willing to buy. The same goes for your coffee output: just buying high-quality expensive machines is not enough; you also need to combine with the top roasters (they provide high-quality and stable coffee), and then you can produce high-quality coffee.

Arm yourself and your partners with coffee knowledge, participate in professional coffee training, in order to satisfy customers with high standards as well as your own high standards, and prepare to open a shop.

5

How much does it cost to learn coffee?

Generally, learning coffee has a 7-day course covering practical operation, theory, and other content, allowing you to understand the general picture before going to open a shop. Tuition is roughly 4,000-6,000, varying. If it is some internationally certified coffee courses and obtaining an internationally certified barista certificate, tuition ranges from 4,000-20,000.

Please do not misunderstand; I am not saying that opening a café cannot make money. I can responsibly tell everyone that as long as the methods are appropriate, a café can absolutely achieve the goal of entrepreneurship and realize financial success.

More importantly, due to the unique atmosphere and heritage of a café, this kind of entrepreneurship has a spiritual pleasure that ordinary entrepreneurial projects do not have. But the premise is that you must be professional enough. If you expect that as soon as the café opens it can be valued at tens of millions, that is a dream. Not every café can succeed like Blue Bottle. If there is one, it is also because business experts are operating behind the scenes; they can fully mobilize resources, seize the initiative, and predict trends. If it is your first time opening a shop, as long as you can make a profit every day, you are already successful.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.