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The best coffee shop in the world is right here in Arkansas. At least that’s the opinion of some 800 professional judges and the voting public.
Onyx Coffee Labs in Rogers holds the distinction after this year’s CoffeeFest, a global celebration of specialty coffee.
The Arkansas-based roaster and café operator earned the top spot in the annual industry recognition of the World’s Top 100 Coffee Shops.
These lists are just marketing fodder, I know, and the evaluation process is opaque. But I’m happy to take the opportunity to recognize an absolute gem in our state, one that I don’t think enough Arkansans recognize.
I think most Arkies know Onyx as the trendy roaster and group of coffee shops in northwest Arkansas. That is true, and no trip to NWA should go without a stop to try a pour-over brew and grab a bag of beans.
However, in less than 15 years, Onyx has grown into something much more than a hip café. The company’s beans are among the most sought after by enthusiasts from around the world, people who treat coffee more as a hobby than a morning ritual, grinding their own beans at home and experimenting with brewing variables to extract different tasting notes from the coffee.
They are a favorite of baristas who compete in international coffee brewing competitions. Yes, that’s a thing.
Owners Andrea and Jon Allen have created an enterprise that is excellent at its craft. They’ve also created a company that changed a mature industry as well as many lives.
Onyx in its early days embraced a radical form of transparency around the sourcing and pricing of its coffee beans. The company was among the first to publish the amounts it was paying farmers for unroasted coffee beans, transportation costs and more.
This was so disruptive to the broader coffee industry that Onyx found itself blacklisted by most importers. Now it’s hard to find a specialty coffee roaster that doesn’t publish this information, and most coffee importers are desperate for Onyx to buy their coffee. Irony.
This has been transformative for coffee growers in places like Ethiopia and Colombia.
Even some commercial coffee companies are being forced to embrace a bit more transparency.
Jon Allen gave a podcast interview to Startup Junkie in 2024 that I think of often. He noted that Onyx had to learn to resist the constant pressure to grow.
“The idea of starting companies only to create an EBITDA so you can get acquired … I think it’s hard to have any heart in a company that way for very long, and there’s a lot of pressure to do that.”
Onyx married mission with passion, and it has stayed Arkansas owned and operated. Our cups are full because of it.
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