How Dilworth Coffee arms its wholesale cafes with recipes
Most recipe libraries are written for home cooks. Dilworth Coffee writes for its baristas working a morning rush. This wholesale-first story joins the Recipe Kit case study library, where we track how food and beverage brands put recipes to work.
How does Dilworth Coffee use Recipe Kit? Charlotte's original specialty roaster gives its wholesale cafe accounts a library of more than 100 ready-to-run drink builds they can put on a menu board. They have been publishing on Recipe Kit since 2024.
The challenge
Dilworth Coffee opened its first coffeehouse in 1989, in the historic Dilworth neighborhood of Charlotte, North Carolina, founded by Don and Alyene Keen after a trip to Milan convinced them the city was ready for real espresso. Over the years the business shifted its center of gravity from the retail cafe to roasting coffee for both home consumers and wholesale coffee shops and other businesses, and today it roasts and distributes nationally while licensing the Dilworth name to independent coffee shops.
That shift changes who a recipe has to serve. The Dilworth Pro storefront supplies wholesale coffee, tea, syrups, and cafe supplies to the shops that carry the Dilworth name, and the actual customer reading a recipe is not a home cook browsing for dinner. It is a cafe owner and a barista behind a busy counter, who needs a drink build that survives a rush, not one written for a kitchen at home.
We spoke with Kati Casella at Dilworth Coffee about how the library gets built and where it goes after it is published.
The system: recipes as a merchandising tool
For a wholesale roaster, a recipe is closer to merchandising than to content marketing. The drink builds are menu ideas a cafe account can adopt tomorrow, and they are assembled from products Dilworth sells and most likely already has behind the bar: the beans, the tea, and especially the syrups.
The Cherry Coffee Soda is a clean example of the pattern. It is built around a Monin cherry syrup and a house espresso blend Dilworth already sells, and turns them into a finished, marketable drink a cafe can drop onto its menu board. The Cherry Vanilla Iced Coffee and Cherry Almond Dirty Soda run the same play with the same syrup line, and the Coconut Cloud Cold Brew and Matcha Frappe with Strawberry Cold Foam extend it across the rest of Dilworth's product catalog.
The drink recipe library on the Dilworth Pro storefront, where a cafe account goes looking for a specials-board idea (live, August 2026)
This flips the usual recipe logic. Most brands publish recipes to help a shopper use a product they already own. Dilworth publishes recipes to help a business owner sell more drinks, which in turn moves more syrups and beans out from Dilworth's warehouse.
Written for the bar, not the kitchen
We asked how wholesale accounts actually use the builds. The answer put two constraints ahead of everything else, and both of them are commercial as much as editorial.
We build these recipes to be easily replicable in a cafe setting. We focus on using syrups most cafes already have behind their bar, but also work in seasonal syrups with the changing seasons (all of which we sell on Dilworth Provision Co).
Building on what a cafe already stocks removes the reason not to try a drink. There is no minimum order standing between reading the recipe and putting it on the board that afternoon. The seasonal syrups do the opposite job: they are the reason to place the next order, and the calendar supplies a new one every quarter.
The builds are also written for volume, simple enough that a team can repeat them fifty times back to back, since a drink that photographs beautifully but takes four minutes to assemble is useless in a Saturday morning rush.
The recipe does not stay on the recipe page
The part of the system we had not seen from the outside is how far each build travels once it is published. The recipe library is where each build starts, and much of the distribution happens elsewhere.
We also pair our Featured Recipes blog section with Instagram Reels to bring the recipes to life in an easy-to-digest visual format, as well as working the recipes that we've created in Recipe Kit into our wholesale newsletters. In doing this, it gives our customers more opportunity to see and utilize these recipes in their shop.
A cafe owner is not browsing a supplier's blog for inspiration on a Tuesday. Meeting them in the newsletter they already open and the feed they already scroll is what gets the build in front of them, and the recipe page is where it lands when they want the actual measurements. We asked what is moving the needle for the business more broadly, and Casella described the same split audience.
We are advertising with Google Ads to increase wholesale growth, while also utilizing social media to increase brand awareness for the home brewer crowd (and wholesale). We send monthly newsletters, sale campaigns, blog spotlights, event invitations, and other content to both our wholesale and retail crowd too.
How Recipe Kit supports the system
Recipe Kit gives Dilworth a structured, browsable library instead of a stack of one-off blog posts. Two things about the recipe card matter more here than they would on a consumer site, and both are about what the reader does next.
I also think something helpful about Recipe Kit is the Print icon on the recipe card that allows the viewer to bring it into their shop for their baristas to use behind the bar. The clickable product links are also definitely a major benefit to Recipe Kit, as they allow our customers to quickly grab the ingredients they need to build the drink.
The print button is the least glamorous feature in the product and it is doing real work here. A build that gets printed and taped inside the hatch keeps getting used long after the browser tab closes, which is a different bar than a home cook has to clear.
The print icon sits directly under the title, so the build can leave the browser and go behind the bar. Prep time on this one is three minutes (live, August 2026)
The product links are the commercial half. Every one of the 104 published builds has at least one ingredient wired to a Dilworth product page, and across the library those links point at 136 different products. On the Berry Purple Refresher, the first ingredient is a link to the Purple Lotus concentrate the build runs on, rather than a plain line of text. A shop owner scanning the full recipe library for a specials-board idea can go from build to buy list in the same session.
On the Berry Purple Refresher, the Dilworth product is the linked line and the pantry items are not (live, August 2026)
That structure compounds over time. Every new drink Dilworth adds joins an organized and searchable library instead of getting buried in a blog archive, and the additions have not slowed: 26 builds in a part-year 2024, 46 across 2025, and 32 already published in 2026.
The home barista is a second library
We asked whether the wholesale account is always the reader, or whether a second set of recipes for the customer buying a bag for their own kitchen had ever been on the table. It turns out that started earlier this year, on the retail side of the business, and outside Recipe Kit for now.
We actually have started doing this, as of earlier this year. However, I haven't utilized Recipe Kit for these yet, as the format is a bit different and we sometimes include multiple recipes in the drink blog (example: How to Make Cold Foam at Home). I do think that using Recipe Kit on our retail site is something we could move to though, and we will look into testing that soon.
Wholesale is definitely our main focus, however we are working on growing our retail base.
The format problem is real, and the example shows it. How to Make Cold Foam at Home is a technique guide built around a 3-2-1 ratio with three variations inside it, closer to a lesson than to a single build, and it lives on a separate retail blog written for the home brewer. A barista-facing drink spec is one recipe with one product attached. A home guide is a method with several. That difference is why the retail blog has not simply inherited the wholesale system.
What the recipes are really for
Asked how recipes fit into growing the business, Casella started with search and ended somewhere less obvious.
We've seen Recipe Kit help strengthen our Google authority and SEO efforts and love its clean, easily-digestible format. It also brings backlinking functionality to our product catalog, allowing viewers to explore our diverse products and how to utilize them in their shop through these recipes.
Recipe Kit provides us with more ability to support cafes holistically. Instead of simply selling products, we can support their ever-changing menus with inspiring recipe ideas and new products to try.
The first half of that is the ordinary case for recipe SEO, helped along by the structured schema that lets a drink build be read as a recipe rather than a blog post. The second half is less ordinary. A wholesale supplier competes on price and delivery, and a competitor can match both. Handing an account a menu it can launch this week is a form of support a price list cannot copy, and it sells the syrup at the same time.
Our goal as a roaster and distributor is to not only provide them with the products they need, but to support them in every aspect of their daily operations in providing their communities with great drinks and memorable experiences.
Lessons for coffee and tea brands
A few of Dilworth's moves that another wholesale or B2B beverage supplier could copy:
- Write recipes for your buyer, not the end consumer. If you sell to cafes, publish drink builds a cafe can put on its menu. The recipe becomes a merchandising tool that pulls your product through their business.
- Make the build runnable at volume. A recipe a barista can repeat fifty times during a rush gets used, and a fussy one does not, so keep the builds simple.
- Build drinks around what you already stock. Dilworth designs recipes around the syrups and beans it wholesales, so a popular drink an account adopts also sells more of its own catalog.
- Start with what is already behind their bar, then sell the season. Familiar syrups make the first build free to try. The seasonal ones are what the next purchase order is for.
- Push the recipe into the channels your buyer already uses. Dilworth runs its builds through Instagram Reels and the wholesale newsletter, and the library is where a buyer goes back for the measurements.
- Keep feeding the specials board. A steady stream of new seasonal builds gives your accounts a reason to keep launching drinks, and a new launch is another chance at a reorder.
More drinks stories from the case study library: how Full Moon Tea built a tea mocktail library fast. For the fuller playbook, see the recipe content marketing guide, or how Recipe Kit works for coffee brands and beverage brands.
What comes next
The wholesale library keeps growing on its seasonal rhythm. The open question is the retail one: Dilworth has a second audience it is deliberately building, a blog already publishing for it, and a decision pending on whether that side of the business runs on the same system. Casella said they will look into testing it soon.
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