The Best Coffee Shop in the World Is in Rogers, Arkansas

I put "Bentonville" in the title of this video and that is wrong. Onyx Coffee Lab is headquartered in Rogers, at 101 E. Walnut Street in a building called The 1907, which they bought in 2018. There is an Onyx café in Bentonville, which is probably how I got turned around. The roastery and the company are in Rogers, and Rogers should get the credit.

Everything else in this video was me trying to explain why a coffee company from a town of 75,000 people beat almost every café on earth. The reasons hold up. The details, in several cases, I got scrambled.

The ranking, then and now

At the time: Onyx placed second in the world on the 2025 World's 100 Best Coffee Shops, announced in Madrid in February 2025, behind Toby's Estate Coffee Roasters of Sydney — and it was the top-ranked shop in the United States.

Since then: Onyx took first in the world for 2026, ahead of Tim Wendelboe in Oslo and Alquimia Coffee in San Salvador. Nine American cafés made that list, more than any other country.

1. The competition record — let me do this properly

I was reading a chart on screen and mixed up four different championships. They are genuinely distinct, so here they are: the US Barista Championship and the World Barista Championship are espresso-drink competitions. The US Brewers Cup and the World Brewers Cup are filter and manual-brew competitions. Different skills, different events.

Now the actual record, which is verifiable through the US Coffee Championships and World Coffee Championships results:

Andrea Allen, Onyx co-owner, won the 2020 US Barista Championship after finishing second three times previously, then placed second at the 2021 World Barista Championship in Milan. That was the best American result at the WBC since 2015.

Morgan Eckroth won the 2022 US Barista Championship and then placed second at the 2022 World Barista Championship in Melbourne. I said she "won World Barista, then she won second, she won first place at US," which is the sequence backwards and the title wrong. She won the national title first, then took silver at Worlds. She has never won World Barista.

Two more I did not name at all. Dylan Siemens won the 2017 US Brewers Cup. Elika Liftee won the 2022 US Brewers Cup and placed second at the 2022 World Brewers Cup. Lance Hedrick was US Brewers Cup runner-up in 2020.

So the shape of my argument was right — this company has sent competitor after competitor to national and world finals for the better part of a decade. I just owed those people accurate titles.

2. The farmer pay claim is true, and the number is published

I said Onyx pays farmers "three to five times higher than the actual normal like fair trade standard," and I hedged that I did not really know the subject. The hedge was fair. The number was right.

Onyx's own FAQ states it directly: they "always pay guaranteed double Fair Trade and more often 3-5 times more." The Fair Trade minimum is $1.80 per pound, which puts Onyx's typical payments somewhere around $3.60 to $9.00 and up.

They also publish per-coffee transparency data on individual product pages — the FOB price they paid, the cupping score, and what the C-market and Fair Trade prices were at the time of purchase. And they say they visit farms directly for about 70 percent of the coffee they import.

That last part is the piece I would emphasize more now. Anyone can claim to pay well. Publishing the price you paid next to the commodity price on the same page is a different level of commitment.

3. The community classes are real, and cheap

Confirmed, and worth naming properly: Onyx Coffee Academy runs public classes — Coffee 101, Espresso Basics, Latte Art Foundation, drink making — at $25 to $60, taught by their education team at 2nd Street Studios in Rogers.

On camera I fumbled the description — the audio garbles into something like "geared towards just regular folks, you and me, or at least me" — but the point was that these are for ordinary customers, not industry people. That is exactly what they are, and $25 is a low barrier for something people assume is not for them.

4. The album is real — the genre is not what I said

I want to be clear that I did not make this up, because it sounds made up: Onyx released a record made entirely out of their worst Yelp reviews.

It is called "Cry For Yelp!" — a four-track EP, about 12 minutes long, released as a limited Halloween promotion in November 2022 alongside a single-origin Ethiopian coffee. Every lyric is drawn from real one-star reviews of Onyx cafés. One track is titled "Stockholm Syndrome." It was performed by Onyx staff: warehouse and account managers on vocals, a furniture builder and their social media lead on instruments.

I called it a death metal album. It is closer to a blend of nu-metal, metalcore, black metal and hardcore. I am told by people who care about this distinction that it matters. It is on Spotify.

On the collaborations, I need to be more careful. The NBA one is real: Onyx worked with Jimmy Butler and his BIGFACE brand on a limited $200 Geisha coffee and mug set in December 2022, after a joint sourcing trip to Cundinamarca, Colombia.

I also claimed an NFL player collaboration and one with Liquid Death. I cannot find either. Onyx's own collaborations archive lists musicians — OneRepublic, Judah & the Lion, August Burns Red, Silverstein, Animal Collective, Lecrae — plus USA Cycling, (PRODUCT)RED and New Belgium. If I had a source for Liquid Death I cannot reconstruct it, so treat those two as unconfirmed.

The real list is arguably more interesting anyway. A coffee roaster whose collaboration history runs through metalcore bands and a national cycling federation is telling you something accurate about where it sits in the culture.

5. The argument that NWA made Onyx possible

This is the part I cannot prove and still believe. What I can do is check the examples.

All three companies I named are genuinely from here. 7 Brew was founded in Rogers in 2017 and has grown past 500 locations. Slim Chickens opened its first store in Fayetteville in 2003. AcreTrader, the farmland investment platform, was founded in Fayetteville in 2018.

And the autonomous delivery I mentioned in passing is real and more advanced than I made it sound. Walmart has worked with Gatik since 2019 on autonomous middle-mile trucks in Bentonville, moving orders from a fulfillment center to a Neighborhood Market pickup point. In 2021 they removed the safety drivers — the first fully driverless commercial delivery route in the industry, anywhere. The fleet has since covered close to a quarter-million miles on roads here.

So when I said this is an experimental region, the strongest evidence was a thing I mentioned almost as an aside.

Whether Onyx could only have happened here is not a claim anyone can settle, and I should label it as opinion rather than a finding. What the record does show is a company that pays multiples of Fair Trade and publishes the receipts, sends competitors to national and world finals year after year, and put out a metalcore EP about its own one-star reviews. Make of that what you like. I find it hard to describe as conventional.