The Ternary Coffee Exchange is a collaborative effort focused on strengthening independent coffee businesses through shared resources, knowledge, and opportunity.
What We Do
By creating connections between coffee professionals, the exchange is already helping its members access the tools and support they need to grow while contributing their own strengths back to the community.
Our current goal is to help cafes escape wholesale. This not only improves margins, but it also gives you more control over your product.
Ternary does not offer wholesale and never will . We expect our partners to manage their own inventory, roasting, packaging, etc. By doing things this way, our partners save an average of $6/lb on bean costs while at the same time benefiting further from the marketing boost that comes from cafes roasting their own coffee.
Ternary is proud to host Lima Coffee importers as our preferred direct trade partner. They maintain an inventory of green coffee from their family farm in Puebla, Mexico, right here in our roastery.
It is pre-portioned into batches that can be purchased directly from Lima and roasted by you just a few feet away. This low-friction option is ideal for café owners who want high-quality, ethically sourced beans, but don’t have the time or infrastructure to make direct trade connections themselves.
Our roasting partners are free to use the beans of their choice from the importers of their choice, but having Lima on site cuts out the middle man and only brings you closer to your product.
About those beans…
Yes, there’s a catch.
This is a pay-it-forward system. Ternary is uniquely positioned to offer its infrastructure to the NE Ohio coffee community for free, but only under the condition that our partners have or are willing to implement something that benefits their local community.
We’re not here to help anyone expand into a grocery store brand or start wholesaling out of our roastery. When roasting with us, we’d encourage you to reinvest your savings into your business, be it through wages, infrastructure, equipment, or whatever else a savings of ~$6/lb could go to.
Don’t think of it as an expansion, but rather a new, more affordable way to do what you already do.
We just ask that you find a way to pass it on somehow.
Some of Our Partners
For these partners, their kindness was in place before Ternary opened its doors to them and was an integral part of their mission well before we became acquainted.
You can thank them for inspiring the kindness forward approach of our Exchange!
AffoGATO Cat Cafe
Since opening, AffoGATO has cared for and facilitated the adoptions of over 1700 cats, with many more to find great homes in the future.
Cafe
Street Brew Coffee
Every bag of Street Brew Coffee sold helps fund programs that directly support people experiencing homelessness in Toronto, Canada.
Roaster and Coffee Trailer
CafeAna’s Attic Coffee and Books
Along with serving as a community hub for underrepresented groups, Ana’s has a Kindness Wall where people can buy a stranger a cup of coffee or receive one.
Everyone wants their cafe to be a place of community and collaboration, but that’s not always possible when just keeping the lights on gets more expensive every day.
While our exchange is primarily focused on roasting at this time, we’d like to create more opportunities for members to learn and support one another. That could mean training, consulting, pallet sharing, collective purchasing, warehousing, or whatever else comes up in the voluntary nightmare that is entrepreneurship.
Let’s Work Together.
If you're interested in the exchange, please fill out the form here. We’ll reach out to ASAP to answer any questions or schedule a time where you can come in and learn how this all works.
We look forward to hearing from you!