Camp Coffee Shop: Barista Magazine Brings Summer Camp Energy to Café Business Education
Trade shows have their purpose. You walk the floor, collect business cards, sample coffees, sit through presentations in hotel conference rooms, and leave exhausted with a tote bag full of promotional materials. The format works for what it is. But it’s not where deep thinking happens.
Barista Magazine is betting café owners want something different. Registration opened this week for Camp Coffee Shop, a four-day retreat running August 10-13 at Enchanted Hills, a 300-acre property in Napa Valley, California. Think summer camp, but for people who run coffee businesses.
The Format
Attendance is capped at fewer than 150 people—deliberately small for an industry event. The agenda includes workshops on profit planning, staffing structures, workflow design, menu strategy, and long-term growth. Participants leave with customized action plans, financial templates, and practical tools.
But the structure is as important as the content. Enchanted Hills offers hiking trails, pool access, arts and crafts activities, and evening programming. The idea is that meaningful conversations happen between sessions as much as during them. You can’t rush insight, and you definitely can’t schedule it into a 45-minute conference slot.
Lodging is included in registration, with prices ranging from $699 to $1,499 depending on room choice. Meals are covered too. Early bird pricing runs through April 30.
The Keynotes
Andrea Allen and Ian Williams will deliver keynote addresses—two names that carry weight for different reasons.
Allen co-founded Onyx Coffee Lab in Rogers, Arkansas with her husband Jon. She won the US Barista Championship in 2020 and has built Onyx into a James Beard Award semifinalist operation that spans cafés, a bakery, an event space, and a speakeasy. She knows something about scaling a coffee business without losing its soul.
Williams took a different path. He worked his way from janitor to shoe designer at Nike, then left to open Deadstock Coffee in Portland’s Old Town—a sneaker-themed café that bills itself as “snob-free” with the slogan “Coffee should be dope.” He’s won Travel Portland’s President’s Award and a James Beard Broadcast Media Award. His shop is relocating to The Hoxton hotel this spring after years in Old Town. Williams understands branding, community building, and making coffee accessible to people who might feel intimidated by specialty culture.
Two very different operators. Both have navigated the gap between passion project and sustainable business.
Why Now
The timing makes sense. Coffee shop owners are navigating price volatility, staffing challenges, rising rents, and shifting customer expectations. The pandemic accelerated changes in how people work and where they buy coffee. Many operators are running harder just to stay in place.
Trade shows offer vendor connections and trend spotting. But they don’t offer space to step back and examine whether your business model actually works—or time to learn from peers facing similar problems. The retreat format addresses that gap.
Barista Magazine editor-in-chief Sarah Allen is organizing the event. The magazine has covered café culture for two decades and understands what shop owners actually need, which tends to be less “here’s the latest pourover technique” and more “here’s how to keep the lights on while paying your staff fairly.”
The Bet
Camp Coffee Shop is an experiment. With fewer than 150 spots at premium pricing, it’s not designed for volume. It’s designed for depth—the kind of conversations and connections that require shared meals, hiking trails, and enough time for ideas to land.
Whether café owners will pay for that experience remains to be seen. But the coffee industry has plenty of conferences. It’s short on retreats that treat running a coffee shop as the complicated, creative, exhausting work it actually is.
Registration is open at Barista Magazine’s website.