Coffee Roaster

A coffee roaster runs the machine that takes raw green beans and roasts them to an agreed profile. Most roasters work for a wholesale roastery supplying cafes and shops. The job mixes machine work with tasting and record keeping. You set a profile, watch the temperature curve, drop the batch, then taste a sample and adjust the next one. In a small roastery you may also blend, pack, label and help with despatch. This is food manufacturing, so Australian food safety and labelling rules apply. One caveat on the data. The ABS does not give coffee roasting its own occupation code. It is counted inside Food and Drink Factory Workers nec, a residual category that also covers other food and drink production work, so any employment, pay or outlook figure on this page belongs to that wider group rather than to coffee roasting.

Set up the roaster, check the gas or power, and bring the drum up to charge temperature. Weigh green beans against the batch sheet and load the hopper. Watch the bean and air temperatures through the roast, and adjust heat and airflow to hold the profile. Listen for first crack and drop the batch at the target time and temperature. Cool the beans, pick out defects, and rest them before packing. Cup a sample from each batch against the reference, and note what changed. Log every batch, including the green lot, the weight loss and the roast curve, so a customer complaint can be traced back. Blend roasted lots to a recipe and pack into valve bags with roast dates and labels. Clean the roaster, empty the chaff collector, and keep the maintenance log up to date.

There is no licence and no set qualification for roasting in Australia. Most roasters start in a cafe, in a packing room, or as a roaster's assistant, and learn on the machine. The ABS files this category at skill level 5, which is Certificate I or secondary school, and that reflects the category rather than roasting specifically. A Certificate III in food processing or a food safety unit may help, and it could be subsidised through a state fee-free TAFE place. Course cost and job outcomes vary a lot by provider and by state, so check the current options at dewr.gov.au/skills-reform/free-tafe and yourcareer.gov.au before you enrol, and ask a roastery what it actually hires on.

Roasteries are small businesses. Many run with fewer than 10 staff and a single roasting seat, so a job may only open when someone leaves. Starts are early, often before 6am, and the room is hot, loud and dusty. You lift green coffee sacks that often weigh 60kg, usually with a trolley or a hoist, and your back will notice. Software that holds a roast profile automatically already does part of the machine work, and that could reduce how many people a roastery needs, although tasting, blending and fault finding still sit with a person today.

The work is on site. Green coffee, a roaster and a packing bench do not travel, so there is no version of this job you can do from home.

Published for ANZSCO unit group 8311, the wider group this job sits in, not for this job on its own.

This is the median for full-time employees who are not managers and are paid at the adult rate, before tax and salary sacrifice. It is a guide to what the work pays, not a wage rate.

Source: ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025, customised report.

• Administer ingredients in food productioncore
• Attention to Detailcore
• Basic Arithmetic and Numerical Accuracycore
• Check quality of products on the production linecore
• Clean food and beverage machinerycore
• Continuous Learning and Upskillingcore
• Inventory Trackingcore
• Policy and Procedure Adherencecore
• Problem Solvingcore
• Process Documentationcore
• Process Improvement Identificationcore
• Quality Assurance and Checkingcore
• Risk Identificationcore
• Team Collaborationcore
• Time Management and Prioritisationcore
• Act reliably
• Adaptability and Flexibility
• Adhere to organisational guidelines
• Carry out checks of production plant equipment
• Goods Receipt Processing
• Record Management
• Regulatory and Legislative Awareness
• Stock Counting and Stocktake
• Supplier Communication
• Verbal Communication
• Workload Self-Management

• ABS OSCA 2024, occupation definition and task statements
• ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, May 2025, customised report.
• ABS, 2021 Census of Population and Housing based on usual place of residence (Custom Report). OSCA Experimental Estimates.

Role data is drawn from official Australian Government sources, and each figure names where it comes from. Where a role is not in the ABS classification, the page shows no government figures for it. Data may not reflect every local variation.

Where our numbers come from.

What Coffee Roaster workers move into, from ten years of tax records.

Last updated: 30 October 2026