How we collect and count this

Catalogue collected 6 November 2026. Rules version 2026-11-06.1.

Quick answer

We read the public shop pages of 1471 roasters and record what they publish about each coffee. We counted 18,403 listings, of which 12,793 are a bag of coffee and 8,610 can be priced per kilo. The price we show is the cheapest bag the roaster sells, worked out per kilo, because that is what a kilo of their coffee actually costs — usually the 1 kg bag. Where a coffee is compared with similar ones, that comparison uses the standard 200 g to 350 g bag instead, so every coffee is compared on the same size, and the page says so wherever the two differ. We have not verified any roaster’s claims.

What counts as a coffee

A bag of roasted coffee beans or ground coffee. We exclude 5,610 listings that are something else, and we say which:

Gift boxes, pods and capsules, instant coffee, subscriptions, barista courses, multipacks and sets, equipment and merchandise are not coffees for our purposes. The rule is a judgement and it will be wrong at the edges, so nothing is deleted: excluded listings are kept and counted.

A further 40 listings are waiting on a human. These are names we are not confident about, usually a “collection” that could be one producer’s lots or could be a multipack. They stay in the catalogue until someone decides, because deleting a real coffee is the worse mistake.

Which price we show

The cheapest bag the roaster sells, worked out per kilo, with the bag price beside it at equal weight. We do this because a shelf price cannot be compared across bag sizes: a £8.50 bag and a £29.99 bag tell you nothing about which is better value.

We withhold any price that works out below £10.00/kg or above £150.00/kg, because at those levels it is nearly always a sachet priced per gram, a year’s subscription or an espresso machine rather than a bag of coffee.

Across 8,610 priced coffees: £26.00 to £116.00 per kilo, median £41.20. That is the figure quoted as the median price of a UK speciality coffee.

Comparisons use a different bag. Where we say a coffee is below or above similar ones, both sides of that comparison are measured on a standard 200 g to 350 g bag, so that a roaster who sells kilos is not made to look like a bargain against a cohort built from 250 g bags.

On that bag, across 7,208 coffees that are sold in one: £34.00 to £110.00 per kilo, median £49.00. It is dearer than the figure above because the bigger bag is nearly always better value, and the two are never interchangeable.

33% of the catalogue — 4,183 coffees — has no price we can use. The largest reason is a published price we will not repeat: 2,308 work out beyond the band above or repeat unchanged across bag sizes. A further 252 are our own failure to read a price off a shop that publishes one, and 0 are priced in euros, which we do not convert. Each coffee’s page says which of these applies to it rather than calling it all the roaster’s silence.

What “below similar” means

We compare a coffee against others of the same type and bag size, and show the difference from that group’s median. We only show it when the group has at least 20 coffees in it and the difference is within 60%. Outside that, the number is far more likely to be a data fault than a bargain.

Cheaper is not better. We do not rank coffees by quality, and we have no tasting data.

What we have not checked

All of it. Every fact on this site is the roaster’s own statement, linked back to the page it came from and quoted wherever what we kept can be quoted. Nothing has been confirmed by us, by a certifier or by any independent register. Where we show a certification or a membership, we are reporting that the roaster says so.

We also cannot always tell you when a fact was last true. Prices carry an observation date, which we print, and it is the only check date in this dataset. From 5 November 2026 the evidence behind other facts carries a read date too; we do not print those yet.

What the quotes are, and what the dots mean

When we record a fact about a coffee or a roaster, we keep a stretch of the page text it came from. That stretch is cut to a fixed length rather than to a sentence, so most of the 64,420 we hold behind coffee facts begin and end in the middle of one. Printing those inside quote marks would tell you the roaster wrote exactly that, from exactly there, which is not true. So we show three different things, in these proportions:

• In quote marks, 61.4% of them — a whole sentence, which begins and ends inside what we kept. These are real quotations and you can read them as such.
• Between dots (…like this…), 14.6% — part of a longer passage. The words are the roaster’s, but we cannot see where the sentence started or finished, and the dots mark each end we cannot see.
• Nothing, 24.0% — what we kept turned out to be a menu, a breadcrumb or a product grid rather than a sentence. The fact still stands, and the link still goes to the page it came from, but there is nothing there worth quoting at you.

And 3,443 of the 12,793 coffees have no stored passage at all, so their pages show none of the three. Those facts are still the roaster’s own and the link still goes to the page they came from; we simply kept no window of the text. The same three classes, counted the same way, are in why so many coffees say “not stated”.

We also check that a quote mentions the thing it is evidence for. A roaster’s page about Rainforest Alliance certification also carried “Can I buy your beans wholesale?”, and without that check it is the second sentence that gets printed under the certification.

Review scores

We do not show review scores, and we have stopped trying to collect them. Not for any coffee and not for any roaster.

This is a decision rather than a gap. The scores worth having are the independent ones — Trustpilot, Google, Feefo, Reviews.io — and those sites forbid automated collection in their robots.txt and return an error to anyone who tries anyway. Taking the data would mean working around a refusal that was stated plainly in machine-readable form, which is not something a site built on where-did-this-come-from should do.

The alternative was the roasters’ own widgets — Judge.me, Yotpo, Stamped — which a roaster installs, controls and can moderate. A score a seller can edit is marketing, and showing it beside coffees from the 739 roasters here who have no score at all would rank one shop above the rest for having bought a plugin. We also checked whether roasters publish a rating in their own page markup, where reading it would be entirely fair: of 60 sampled, none did.

So there is nothing here to rank by, filter on, or average — and nothing taken from anyone who asked us not to. What this site compares is price, traceability and what the roaster says, all of it linked back to the page it came from.

We also hold no verified certifications.

A coffee with nothing published about its origin is not a worse coffee. It is a coffee whose roaster has not published that, and we say exactly that.

How we are funded

Nobody pays to appear here and nobody pays for position. We take no commission on the links out to roasters. If that changes, paid placements will carry a visible Sponsored label, will sit outside any ranked list, and will not affect any figure on this site.