Coffee & Subscription: POAS, COGS and margin benchmarks
Coffee subscription brands pay to win a first box and earn their money on the renewals after it. In Recharge's data, 99.3% of new coffee and tea subscribers reordered once, but only 9.3% reached a sixth reorder, and 20.7% of renewal cycles ended in cancellation. Meanwhile the price of the main ingredient moves with harvests and markets: the International Coffee Organization's composite price for green coffee averaged 287.29 US cents per pound in August 2026. The pages below cover where ROAS overstates a subscription campaign, what belongs in a coffee brand's cost of goods, and how to scale spend on the subscribers who stay.
The questions, with sourced numbers
- What's a healthy POAS?
What POAS coffee and subscription box stores need on Google Ads when the first box is discounted and profit depends on how many boxes follow.
3.18Median Google Ads ROAS - Why does optimising for ROAS overspend?
Why subscription brands overspend on ROAS: the first box is counted at full value while churn decides whether the customer ever pays back.
20.7%Renewal cycles that end in churn - What counts as COGS?
Green coffee, roast loss, packaging, box contents and per-box shipping: which subscription box costs belong in COGS when measuring POAS.
287.29¢/lbGreen coffee price (ICO composite) - How do you scale spend profitably?
How to scale Google Ads for a subscription brand on profit: set targets from cohort payback, cap first-box discounts, and plan gift subscriptions.
9.3%Subscribers who reach a 6th reorder
Background reading
- What Is POAS (Profit on Ad Spend)? Full Definition
- ROAS vs POAS: Which Metric Should You Actually Use?
- ROAS vs POAS: The Metric Killing Your Shopify Profits
- How to Calculate Break-Even ROAS (With a Worked Example)
- Shopify COGS Setup: How to Track Cost of Goods Sold
- Google Ads for Shopify: The Complete Profitability Guide
- Wasted Ad Spend in Google Ads: How to Find and Fix It