How much milk does a café use?

Have you ever wondered just how much milk a café uses a day? Have you ever wondered how much a coffee shop spends on milk?

Whether you’re a prospective café owner looking to optimise your inventory or a curious coffee enthusiast, this is the guide for you. 

We will first examine how many cups of coffee a café sells a day, then examine the amount of milk used in different types of coffees. We will next look at the breakdown of dairy milk vs dairy alternatives like oat milk or almond milk, the cost of milk and finally put our numbers together. We will break down the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly figures, both for use, and for cost.

How many cups of coffee does a café sell a day?

The first question we have to answer is how many coffees a day a café sells. Of course, there is no one answer to this - cafés come in all shapes and sizes, and no coffee shop sells the same number of drinks every day - but we can make some useful generalisations. A very small café with very low overheads might hope to get by on a little over 100 coffees sold per day, while the most successful Starbucks store in the world - located on 5th avenue in New York - serves over 8,000 customers a day, meaning they frequently sell over 10,000 cups of coffee per day. For comparison, an average Starbucks sells 500 cups of coffee a day.

Generally a small independent coffee shop will sell 160 - 220 cups per day. Between 220 and 370 is normal for a medium sized independent coffee shop. Cafés in very busy urban locations can sell upwards of 400 cups per day. Large coffee chain stores average 500 cups per day, and it's not unheard of for large cafés in very busy locations to average 800 sales per day. This leaves a very wide range of cups sold per day, but we can break it down into three categories:

Small - 160 to 220 

Medium - 221 to 370

Large - 370 - 800

How much milk is in 100 cups of coffee?

Smaller milk based coffees like flat whites and macchiato will use 100-120 ml of milk, a cappuccino will use around 150ml of milk, and larger milk based drinks like a latte or mocha use 250 ml of milk. Of course other drinks, like Americanos and espressos use no milk to make. 

According to blue coffee box, the most popular coffee in the UK is the flat white, at 22.3%, with Black Americanos just behind on 22%. Lattes come next at 18.8%, followed by Cappuccino at 11.9%, White Americanos at 10.3%, Espressos at 5.4% and Cortados at 3.2%, and Other at 6.1%. If you are setting up a café in Ireland, you shouldn’t expect Irish tastes to be significantly different. 

This means that per 100 coffees you will use just over 10 liters of milk. 

The amount of milk used to make 100 coffees, based on the UK's most popular coffee types

Selling 200-300 cups of coffee a day means that an average café uses 20.7 to 31 liters of milk per day, 145 - 217 litres a week and 621.9 to 932.85 litres a month. Bear in mind that these figures are just for coffee and a café using milk in the preparation of food will use even more. 

Now we can move on to the proportion of traditional dairy vs milk alternatives used by coffee shops, before moving onto cost. 

How much oat milk does a café need?

So how much oat milk will you need? 28.4% of coffees sold in the UK now use oat milk instead of traditional milk. Depending on the profile and taste of your customers this may be higher or lower, but one quarter is a good estimate. Oat milk is however considerably more expensive than traditional dairy milk, and almond milk is even more expensive. 

Six litres of oat milk costs around £11.50 without vat. With VAT and delivery fees, less a small discount of 5-10% for ordering in bulk, that leaves a price of about £2 per litre. Almond milk is even more expensive, costing around £2.50 per litre. Compare that to traditional dairy milk, which costs less than a pound at wholesale prices.

How much do cafés spend on milk?

Now we can get to our core question, how much will an average coffee shop spend on milk? With an average breakdown between dairy and oatmilk of 71.6 to 28.4, an average usage of 10.365 litres per 100 cups of coffee, dairy milk at a cost of 95p per litre and oat milk at a cost of £2 per litre, 100 coffee cups worth of milk costs £12.94, on average. 

100 cups worth of milk = ((10.365 x 71.6%) x £0.95) + ((10.365 x 28.4%) x £2) = £12.94

We said earlier that a small café sells 160 - 220 cups per day, which means a small café will spend £20.74 to £28.47 on milk a day. 

A medium sized café will sell 220 - 370 cups per day, meaning a spend of  £28.47 to £47.89. 

And a large cafe selling 370 - 800 cups per day will spend £47.89 to £103.52 per day.

That gives us weekly figures of:

Small - a small café will spend £145.18 to £199.29 on milk per week.

Medium - a medium sized café will spend £199.30 to £335.23 on milk per week

Large - a large café will spend £335.24 to £724.64 on milk per week

Monthly milk costs of:

Small - £623.40 to £854.10

Medium - £854.10 to £1436.70

Large - £1436.70 to £3105.60

And yearly costs of - (350 days - 15 days closed)

Small - £7259 to £9964.50

Medium - £9964.50 to £16,761.50

Large - £16,761.50 to £36,232

That's a lot of money!