Black Sheep Coffee Brings Specialty Robusta to Texas
Most specialty coffee shops will tell you Arabica is superior. Black Sheep Coffee built a business disagreeing.
The UK-born chain, which specializes in 100% specialty-grade Robusta, has signed a 20-store franchise agreement to expand across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex over the next five years. Planned locations include Richland Hills, Bedford, Garland, Rowlett, Richardson, and Sachse, building on an existing Texas footprint that already includes spots along Preston Road, East Mockingbird Lane, Grapevine, and a downtown Austin café that opened in January.
The Robusta Rebels
Gabriel Shohet and Eirik Holth founded Black Sheep Coffee in 2013 after quitting their jobs on the same day, pooling £20,000 in savings, and setting up a pop-up stand in London. They couldn’t afford a proper espresso machine, so they rented a second-hand one.
What they could afford to do was go against the grain. While the specialty coffee world treated Robusta as the inferior species — the stuff of instant coffee and cheap blends — Shohet and Holth went hunting for exceptions. They visited hundreds of plantations looking for the rarest thing: Robusta beans good enough to serve straight.
What they found became Robusta Revival, their signature house espresso that now accounts for 85% of total coffee sales across the company. The pitch: higher caffeine, lower acidity, nutty and chocolatey notes, and a bold profile that cuts through milk without fading.
The name Black Sheep came from being the coffee world’s contrarians. By betting on a bean the industry dismissed, they became outcasts. It stuck.
Why Robusta?
The case for specialty-grade Robusta is partly practical. Robusta plants produce more cherry per hectare, resist disease better, and thrive at lower altitudes and higher temperatures than Arabica. As climate change reshapes growing regions, Robusta’s resilience has drawn fresh attention from researchers and farmers alike.
But for Black Sheep, it’s also a flavour story. Their Robusta Revival trades the fruit-forward brightness of washed Arabica for something denser and earthier. It’s espresso that hits harder, caffeine included — Robusta naturally carries nearly twice the caffeine of Arabica.
Not everyone will love it. That’s rather the point.
Texas Hold ‘Em
The Dallas-Fort Worth expansion comes through a partnership with Yoloway’s, a UK-based franchise operator. The deal is one of Black Sheep’s largest international franchise agreements to date.
Texas makes sense for a brand leaning into bold flavours and higher caffeine. The state’s coffee culture has room for outsiders: Blue Bottle, Verve, and a wave of third-wave roasters have all planted flags here in recent years, but the market isn’t as saturated as the coasts.
Black Sheep currently operates more than 130 locations globally, spanning the UK, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the US. They’re the fourth-largest coffee company in the UK by store count and, by some measures, the fastest-growing by new openings.
The DFW stores will follow the brand’s usual playbook: local street art on the walls, Norwegian waffles on the menu alongside açaí bowls and ceremonial-grade matcha from Japan. It’s an aesthetic that skews younger and urban, calibrated for Instagram without apologising for it.
Why This Matters
Black Sheep’s American expansion is a bet that specialty coffee’s Arabica consensus has room for dissent. Not everyone agrees — plenty of roasters have tried and failed to sell high-quality Robusta to sceptical consumers.
But the company has already proven the concept works at scale. If they can replicate their UK success in Texas, it could shift perceptions about what “specialty” even means. The term has always described quality rather than species. Black Sheep is forcing the question of whether the industry actually believes that.
For now, Dallas-Fort Worth is about to find out what the black sheep of coffee tastes like.