How Jackson, Mississippi Built a Real Coffee Culture
In Jackson, the coffee scene has a lineage.
Not in the sense of a trend that arrived and called itself a movement, but in the way of people who built something, passed something forward, and watched the next person do the same.
Follow the thread far enough and it leads back to one shop in Fondren, 1993.
BeanFruit Coffee Co.: A Jackson Specialty Roasting Gamechanger
Paul Bonds grew up hating coffee. At Mississippi College he drank it only for exams. Then, around 2008, he attended a cupping at Mississippi Coffee Company and tasted a washed Ethiopian Yirgacheff. That was the end of indifference.
He started ordering specialty coffees from roasters across the country. Then he started roasting at home — first in his oven, then on a small roaster in his guest bedroom. In 2010, BeanFruit Coffee launched at the Mississippi Farmers Market. Bonds was still at Eaton Aerospace, roasting before dawn, running deliveries on his lunch break. By 2012, he'd left the day job.
One of BeanFruit's first wholesale accounts was Sneaky Beans in Fondren — giving the neighborhood another destination for locally roasted, single-origin coffee. In 2015, BeanFruit won a Good Food Award, the first Mississippi roaster to win in any category. Bonds is the only Black-owned roaster in the state and its only Fair Trade certified roaster.
His roasting operation has since moved to Flowood, just east of Jackson. The story belongs here regardless. BeanFruit grew in this city, proved its case here, and sent the specialty coffee world a message: Mississippi could do this.
The Bean: Fondren's Coffee House Anchor
Sneaky Beans, owned by Byron Knight, was one of Fondren's foundational gathering places — coffee, live music, local art, the kind of informal energy that a scene needs to find its footing. It was one of BeanFruit's first wholesale accounts, and the shop where many Fondren regulars first encountered locally roasted specialty coffee.
When Kristy Buchanan bought the space in 2020 and renamed it The Bean, her frame of reference was the coffeehouses she'd known in Brooklyn — places that served as café in the morning and wine bar at night, where the room changed function without changing character. She built that in Jackson.
Today The Bean is coffee, cocktails, small plates, and a courtyard that hosts Songwriter Nights, Storytime for kids on Tuesday mornings, and Trivia Nights that fill both indoor and outdoor space. Kristy took her staff to the New York Coffee Festival, brought new techniques back to North State Street, and kept building. Two names, one address, one unbroken commitment to being the place Fondren gathers around.
Northshore Specialty Coffee: Jackson's Roasting Operation, Built to Scale
Trey Malone has called Paul Bonds a coffee hero. When Malone came back to Jackson, he built on a tradition the Camerons started and Bonds extended — that Jackson's coffee culture had room to grow, and that someone should do the growing.
Northshore Specialty Coffee — owned by Haven Holdings (Malone, Justin Fontenoy, and Stephanie Fontenoy) — runs roasting facilities in both Jackson and Covington, Louisiana. The Midtown Jackson roastery is 13,000 square feet, anchored by a Loring S35, with Head Roaster and Green Buyer Robert Akin leading the operation. The beans move east to The District at Eastover, where Northshore's café runs on a RetroTiki concept — Eversys Cameo espresso, xBloom Studio pour-overs, local craft beer, and house-made burritos, muffins, and pastries. The idea is the third space: not home, not work, but somewhere worth staying.
At Belhaven Town Center, Cultivate Coffee Project takes a different form. A joint venture with Fertile Ground Beer, Cultivate pairs globally sourced, locally roasted Northshore coffee with nitro coffee made from Fertile Ground ingredients. Open daily, it makes equal sense at 7 a.m. and 7 p.m.
Northshore also supplies other Jackson shops wholesale — quietly sustaining the scene it grew from.
When the right roaster came along — the Stronghold S8X, used in world roasting championships — they drove to Houston to pick one up. Soapbox launched with a washed Ethiopian Yirgacheff and a Colombian co-ferment called Red Fruits, anaerobically processed with freeze-dried strawberries, wine yeast, and fruit pectin. Their first blend was called Starting Line. The name carried its weight.
Soulé Coffee + Bubble Tea: A Global Coffee Experience in Fondren
Ezra Brown studied jazz at Jackson State University, then toured the world as a musician and arranger. In Switzerland he nursed tiny espressos. In West Africa he watched the communal ritual of Attaya — green tea, sugar, and mint passed between people as an act of connection. In cafés from Malaysia to Singapore he took notes on what a coffee shop could be when it was genuinely embedded in a culture.
He brought that back to Fondren. Soulé Coffee + Bubble Tea, founded in 2017 and rooted at 2943 Old Canton Rd, runs a menu that spans espresso, matcha, bubble teas, and refreshers — a global range that reflects its owner's worldview more than any single tradition. The ordering is cashless, self-serve. The walls are covered in art. Live music plays on Sundays. Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba attended the grand opening.
For Brown, the café is the vehicle. The community is the destination.
Just Vanilla: Artisan Pastry and Specialty Coffee in Fondren and Downtown Jackson
Guillermo Salinas came to Jackson from Zihuatanejo, Mexico, enrolled in Belhaven University's art program on the strength of a portfolio that included both drawings and pastry work, and trained in professional kitchens in California and Texas — including a stint as Lead Pastry Chef at the Post Oak Hotel in Houston. He made the finale of Food Network's Halloween Baking Championship, Season 7. Then he came back to Fondren.
Just Vanilla, co-owned with his father-in-law Doug Eltzroth, operates out of Duling Hall, Tuesday through Saturday, 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. The coffee is real — drip, lattes, cold brew. But Guillermo leads with pastry: croissants, seasonal offerings, custom desserts built with the precision of someone who trained at the highest levels. Coffee is the companion to the thing he actually makes.
In 2026, Just Vanilla opened a second location — a coffee bar at Regions Plaza in Downtown Jackson, at 210 E. Capitol St., in a space that once housed a Cups satellite location. The address has changed hands, but the through-line is hard to miss: a room that once served the city's pioneering roaster now belongs to the next generation of Jackson coffee. Guillermo and Doug stepped into it and made it their own.
The Current Shape of Jackson's Coffee Scene
Each operator in Jackson's coffee culture looked at what existed and decided to add something it didn't have. Cups added the concept. BeanFruit raised the standard and proved the national coffee world would take notice. Sneaky Beans and then The Bean built the community infrastructure that gave both of those things an audience. Northshore, inspired by what Bonds made possible, added scale and a second model for what a roasting operation could be. Native added world-class sourcing at neighborhood scale. Soapbox is adding its own roasting voice. Soulé opened a room that feels like the world. Just Vanilla brought specialty coffee back to the heart of downtown, to a room that once held the city's pioneering roaster.
The lineage is visible if you know where to look. And the Jackson Coffee Festival — a celebration of the culture these operators built together — is proof that enough people are looking. A city doesn't get its own coffee festival by accident. It gets one because, cup by cup and year by year, someone kept showing up and making something worth celebrating. In Jackson, the proof is in every cup.
