I feel like we’ve had to work really, really hard to get national recognition. What’s been one of the biggest challenges since starting this venture? In fact we support our people opening their own coffee shops so much we are usually willing to provide some of the initial investment for them to get started and help with sourcing and purchasing equipment. Puritan Coffee was the first one to do it – they’re in Fayetteville. It allows them to do something more, and actually, we highly encourage people to open their own roastery, open their own shops. Has the training lead into any new coffee shops springing up? Once they pass knowledge courses they’ll move up. … We have about 10 classes we’ll start people with – lectures on farming, logistics of coffee, milk chemistry, extraction period – things like that. I think in having really good baristas we create a place that’s safe for people who come in and decide they want to have a career in coffee. … Onyx has really changed how we do things. It’s a six-month training process for baristas. We hear you guys take your barista training seriously. Plus, they are willing to wait a little bit and not have that fast food mentality. I think the craft movement in general helps a lot, because at the end of the day you still have people willing to pay a certain amount for your product. Even in high-end specialty coffee, growth has been real slow around the Midwest. Do you think that has helped your mission? You guys seemed to grow around the same time the craft cocktail movement hit Arkansas.
… We just look at coffee as a culinary item. I mean, it’s kind of a generic speech, which I guess all chefs would say, but it’s fighting this uphill battle of what coffee is supposed to be. Personally I’ve always been into culinary stuff in general, and I like the movement in coffee of taking a serious approach – whether it’s plating or design or the quality of ingredients or what we’re doing with those ingredients. Where did the decision come for Onyx to push into more experimental things? We figured if it works in Springdale it will work in the rest of the state. We moved our smaller roaster in there, changed the menu and the coffee. … At a certain point I kept thinking, “We’re helping all these people find these really nice coffees, and they’re cutting them and blending them to a bad product and we should just be buying them ourselves.”īut we didn’t really have the capital, so we took a year of planning what Onyx was going to be, and then we rebranded the Springdale Arsaga’s that we built to Onyx. We had bought a couple of Arsaga’s cafés we were running out of, more of a financial thing than anything else. I got to the point where we would develop these things that we thought were phenomenal, and our clients would answer us and essentially say, “This is awesome, this is exactly what we need, and now we need to take it and we need the price point to be cut in half.” And I kept getting so frustrated. … Coca Cola hired us to develop a specialty coffee blend for a small, boutique roastery, and wanted a really good coffee blend.
… I was doing private label roasting and a lot of consulting. That’s really where we cut our teeth learning the in’s and out’s of coffee and the industry. We had this company called Anonymous Coffee Roasters – it’s still around today. This week it’s Jon Allen, owner and operator of ONYX Coffee Lab.
#Onyx coffee lab locations professional#
Whether they’re in the kitchen, managing a storefront, farming land or running a food truck … we’ll delve into both the professional and personal side of these dynamite people. Ever wonder what makes some of Arkansas’ food personalities tick? Food Insider takes a look at individuals who are helping change the landscape of our city’s culinary scene.
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