Our Story

Years ago we started telling each other to “Never Settle for Good Enough.” It felt perhaps like a piece of branding or a slogan, but over the years this mentality has developed into a mantra of its own that permeates every thing that we do at Onyx.

Onyx Coffee Lab was founded in 2012 with the goal of both serving and challenging the specialty coffee industry. Our mantra to “Never Settle for Good Enough” has been with us from the start, and it represents a deeply ingrained ethos that drives everything we do. This mentality demands our own continual evolution as we pursue
our mission – to create a more sustainable and equitable coffee industry through our commitment to excellence, transparency, and innovation. It’s an honor to share our journey and the fruits of our partnerships with you, and we invite you to join us as we seek quality, truth, and accountability in coffee. It all starts with the relentless pursuit of the world’s best coffees. This means traveling across countries, continents, and terrains to connect directly with producers who share our values. These partnerships aren’t just transactional; they’re built on mutual trust and shared aspirations to push the boundaries of what coffee can be. By maintaining exacting standards for quality, taste, and sustainability, we’re proud to bring you coffees that tell a story — of hard work, innovation, and care.

Each coffee we have is accompanied by its pricing and trade data, meaning you can see what we paid for it, what it scored at, who we bought it from, and other details right on its product page. This is not only something we are very proud of but is also a practice that is rare to see in coffee. We want you to see exactly how this coffee came to be one of our offerings. Our producing partners innovate and work hard to grow some of the most amazing coffees, and we want their name to be listed and recognized.

Our approach to serving coffee begins way before there’s a customer in front of us. Teaching the fundamentals of coffee and espresso, from farming to cupping to preparation starts with in depth classes, hands on skillset development, and repetition in our training lab. We are proud of the time and expertise our trainers spend with each of our staff members, and this knowledge extends to our wholesale partners and the coffee enthusiast. We host curriculum for high end cafes and home users alike.

In our cafes, our goal is that you feel welcomed, seen, and heard, and that whatever coffee or pastry you choose fits what you’re looking for. It’s the service at the very end that completes the supply chain. There’s an art to it. We want our cafes to be full of people from our community working, reading, and having conversations. Our staff is made up of some of the best coffee professionals in the states, and every drink, every interaction, every item is cared for, intentionally made, watched over, and executed to be exactly right.

Onyx began as a small specialty roastery in Northwest Arkansas, but over the years it has evolved into one of the most awarded and widely recognized coffee brands in the world, serving a network of flourishing Onyx cafes and hundreds of wholesale partnerships (both nationally and internationally), along with thousands of specialty coffee drinkers who get their coffee from us directly by shopping on onyxcoffeelab.biz or by subscribing to one of our customizable subscriptions.