The Merlo family's love of coffee began half a century ago at Luigi Merlo's trattoria in Turano, Italy. Since 1992, that same passion has been roasting in Brisbane, and three decades on, Merlo Coffee is an Australian family-owned business operating 17 flagship cafés across Queensland, supplying over 1,500 café partners nationally, and roasting every bean from a purpose-built facility in Eagle Farm.
Behind the cup sits a serious energy operation. Espresso machines, cold rooms and refrigeration across 17 cafés and roastery running daily. Each location with its own meters, its own retailer, and for some, a regional network where most businesses are convinced they have no choice at all.
Merlo's 17 cafés operate across Queensland, which means some sit in the South East QLD network and others sit in the Ergon regional network. That mix created three compounding problems.
Admin sprawl across 17 cafés. Bills coming from multiple retailers, in multiple formats, on multiple renewal cycles. No way for the operations or finance team to track which cafés were on competitive rates without manually pulling and reconciling every bill.
The Ergon network myth. Most businesses operating in Ergon territory assume retailer choice doesn't exist for them, that they're permanently locked into the regulated rate with no negotiating leverage. For Merlo, that meant a chunk of the network was sitting on rates the team didn't believe could be improved.
No single view of the operation. Without consolidated data, no one could see what the cafés actually cost to run, where the price creep was happening, or how the network was tracking month-on-month.
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Merlo joined Termina's buying group of 9,000+ locations across Australia and New Zealand. All 17 cafés were folded into a single tender, automatically benchmarked across the market, and consolidated onto one supplier and one platform with Termina.
The standout moment was the Ergon network. Where most individual businesses don't have the volume to negotiate, and where most brokers don't have the buying power to make a difference, Termina's group buying leverage unlocked savings most operators in regional Queensland don't know are available. The same buying power that secures pricing for Merlo's South East cafés extends into Ergon territory too.
And because Termina refuses commissions and only earns a share of the savings, the incentives line up with how Merlo already runs the rest of the business: ethically traded beans, fair partnerships, no hidden margins.
With every meter now consolidated, the Merlo team can do what was previously impossible: see what each café actually costs to run, model the energy intensity of the roastery, and see how it's supplier network can leverage the same benefits.
"Everyone in Queensland tells you the same thing about Ergon: you're stuck. The brokers we'd talked to never proved otherwise, and we never quite trusted them to, they get paid by the retailer regardless. Termina only gets paid when we save, and they found us savings in Ergon territory we'd written off."
Unlike brokers who chase commissions, we refuse commissions and only get paid a share of your total savings.
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