Melitta to invest over €100 million in Bremen coffee roastery expansion

Melitta Group has committed more than €100 million to its Bremen roasting site, a move that goes well beyond a routine factory upgrade. The company said the five-to-six-year project will lift capacity by about 50 percent and, once complete, make Bremen the largest coffee roastery in Europe, a scale play that could mean steadier supply and faster turnover for coffee drinkers across the region.

The package includes two adjacent land parcels, a new building and the expansion and modernization of existing facilities. Most of the spending will go into new roasting, packaging and silo systems, plus process control and control systems. In practice, that is the sort of back-end investment that can change how quickly beans move from arrival to bagged coffee, and how much flexibility a roastery has when demand shifts between standard ground coffee, whole bean lines and other formats.

Jero Bentz, Melitta Group communications representative and great-grandson of founder Melitta Bentz, said the site is meant to better serve individual customer and market needs while advancing the company’s growth and internationalisation plans. Melitta tied the Bremen spend to Strategy 2033, its plan to at least double group sales by 2033, and said the coffee business in Europe, North and South America is a key growth driver. That ambition already has momentum: preliminary 2025 sales rose 18 percent year on year to €2.53 billion.

Bremen is not just another industrial address for Melitta. The company said the site has been part of the city’s coffee history since 1966 and employs around 270 people. WFB Bremen says Melitta’s roastery there produces up to half a million packs of coffee each year, and that roughly every third cup of coffee in Germany comes from Bremen. The city’s logistics role helps explain why the investment matters: Bremen handled 589,000 tons of coffee imports and exports in 2023, with more than 95 percent of imported coffee arriving as raw beans and around 147,000 tons shipped out each year.

Melitta’s Bremen footprint already includes a specialty coffee operation as well. The company founded the Melitta Manufaktur there in 2020 near the main roastery, where small-batch coffees are made using traditional drum-roasting methods. With this expansion, Melitta is betting that large-scale roasting and specialty production can keep growing side by side in the Hanseatic city, and that what happens in Bremen will shape what ends up on European shelves next.