How Besa Coffee Roasters wins Houston coffee accounts
Josh Hebert is the founder and owner of Besa Coffee Roasters, a Houston roaster serving cafes and coffee trailers wholesale and home drinkers online. The conversation looks at winning early accounts through tastings, building a dependable wholesale routine, and why a verbal yes is not the same as an order.
Win early customers by getting the product in front of local buyers and asking for a specific first order. Then build a reliable process around that order before spending on marketing to reach more people.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I started Besa Coffee Roasters in Houston while working a full time job, roasting coffee for local cafes and home drinkers, and I am building it account by account toward a full time business. Wholesale coffee roasts with a partner roastery in Houston, and online orders roast in small batches. What makes us genuinely different is simple: we sell a true full pound, 16 ounces, when most roasters sell 12 ounce bags, and we roast after the order is placed, so the bag that arrives is days off the roast with the roast date printed on it. Our flagship is a Colombian Huila medium roast, alongside an Ethiopian Yirgacheffe light medium roast.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Our first wholesale accounts came from conversations with small local coffee shops and trailers around Houston, not from ads. You bring coffee worth tasting, you listen more than you pitch, and you make it easy to say yes to a first small order. Today most new business still comes from that same local outreach and from people finding us online and ordering a first bag or a subscription.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision that changed our direction was committing to wholesale done properly: scheduled tastings, a real ordering portal, and a weekly rhythm of ordering by Tuesday, roasting midweek, and delivering Friday. It turned casual interest into a system a cafe can rely on. The mistake that taught me the most was treating a verbal yes as a win. A cafe can love the coffee, agree in principle, and still never place the first order. A yes is not an order; the count only moves when coffee ships. Now every conversation ends with a specific next step and a date.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Customers have learned to ask when their coffee was roasted, not just where it came from, and a lot of coffee on shelves and in cafes is months old with no date anywhere on it. People also expect to order everything online in a minute, including from a small local roaster. We adapted by putting the roast date on every bag, roasting to order, and building a simple online store and a wholesale portal so ordering takes seconds, not phone tag.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: get your coffee into the cups of the businesses and drinkers near you. Taste it with them, on their equipment, and ask for one small first order with a date on it. Ignore: buying reach before your offer works. Ads cannot fix a product or a page that does not convert, and a small business feels every wasted dollar. Earn the first orders in person, then let marketing amplify what already works.
Thank you to Josh Hebert and the team at Besa Coffee Roasters for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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