The cost of roasting coffee in 2025.
We’ve always believed in being upfront with our customers, so I want to explain why we’ve had to increase our prices in August 2025.
Like every small business in Ireland, our costs have gone up significantly. You only need to look at the price of a coffee in a coffee shop to see how much prices have risen in the past few months. Everything from raw coffee to shipping, energy costs, staff costs, insurance, and packaging has become much more expensive and we have been trying to keep our prices as keen as possible. But we can’t sustain it any longer without a price rise.
No compromise on quality or ethical approach
We could have compromised on quality, or cut some corners on how we treat the growers and the co-ops to keep prices the same, but that’s just not how we do things. Apart from the ethical and considerations, it just doesn’t make sense. Dreambeans Coffee benefits from the great relationships Greenbean’s Pat and Deirdre Grant have fostered over nearly four decades in the coffee business. These relationships, the trust, the reciprocity in our dealings and the goodwill we have generated over the years means that Dreambeans has access to the the best beans and the most sought-after origins, especially when supplies of the good stuff are scarce and other companies can’t get them. We value the growers, the co-ops and the brokers and they value our custom and our approach. It’s symbiosis at its best.
We’re still much better value than our competitors
I did a price comparison of the best of the other Irish coffee companies, to get an idea of the prices they are charging for coffee. Even without our “buy 3 bags, get a 4th bag free” offer, our prices are still significantly lower than the eight most prominent specialty coffee companies in Ireland. This means that (including the free bag) our prices are at least 25% lower than our competitors, and in most cases more than 30% cheaper.
The average price of the companies I looked at ranged from €12.20 for 250g to €15.80. Our average price was €11.49, and that didn’t include the 4 for 3 offer. This isn’t sustainable in the current environment. Prices are rising every day and all our input costs are increasing too, staff costs, energy, packaging, Insurance, couriers, transportation, promotion, the list goes on. All our inputs have risen significantly and we have only ever increased prices to reflect the rising cost of raw coffee on the international market. We have always resisted factoring the rising production costs into our prices until now.
New bags coming soon.
We are also in the process of upgrading our coffee bags, switching to a bag that is reccclable in any recycling station. You simply put it in your recycling bin. These are great bags but they’re more expensive than our paper bags which needed specialist recycling that isn’t available everywhere. We will be rolling out the new bags very shortly. More about this soon.
So, reluctant as we are to raise our prices, it had to happen . We wouldn’t be able to continue it we didn’t. We’re still great value and it’s still great coffee!
By Pat McArdle
18 August 2025