Houston’s Tenfold Coffee Company Is Hoping to Change How You Think About Coffee

Tenfold Coffee Company, the Heights-based cafe and roastery, will open its second and largest location in Second Ward this fall, but you won’t be able to sip your favorite latte there — at least not yet.

Co-founder Jacob Ibarra says the coffee company, which provides coffee to more than 30 local companies, restaurants, and cafes in the area, has outgrown its Heights digs and will open a wholesale facility in the Plant in Second Ward, joining other establishments like paleta shop Popston and James Beard-recognized Thai restaurant Street to Kitchen’s anticipated new location.

Located at 3302 Garrow Street in the walkable mixed-use development, the 5,000-square-foot space will be a base for all of Tenfold’s wholesale production, allowing it to increase its cold brew and other coffee offerings, which supply multiple local coffee shops, including Eden Plant Co., the Plant’s coffee and plant shop; Refuge on Westheimer, Agora, Wild, 2nd Cup, Blue Tile, and the Heights Bier Garden.

Caroline Boyle

Following stints in Costa Rica, Seattle, Washington, and Australia, where he deeply embedded himself and worked in the coffee industry, Ibarra launched Tenfold in the Heights with his Australian business partner Euseng Teo in June 2020, during the height of the pandemic. The all-in-one roastery, cafe, and lab has since invited people in to learn more about coffee through weekend classes and tastings to make specialty coffee more approachable for the everyday coffee drinker, but Ibarra says the coffee company has outgrown the Heights space, inspiring them to move its wholesale operations to the Plant, which will open up more room in the Heights space for seating.

Tenfold’s new roastery in Second Ward, which is slated to open later this year, won’t be open to the public like its Heights cafe, but Ibarra has plans to still make the space accessible in other ways.

“I really want the city of Houston to be the champion of coffee,” Ibarra says. The coffee enthusiast and buyer by trade says he’s intent on improving the supply chain in specialty coffee by connecting farmers and consumers at the best value, while also helping consumers better understand coffee’s value. To do so, though, there needs to be more “spaces in the coffee experience that help people think about coffee in a different way,” he says, and with Houston being so close to coffee-producing countries in Central and Latin America, he believes it’s the perfect place to significant impact.

Ibarra says he’ll work to make Houston even more of a coffee city by embedding Tenfold’s Second Ward facility into the community, offering a neighborhood subscription service that allows residents to purchase its coffee for pick-up, plus an on-site tasting room that invites curious residents and visitors inside to tour the space and learn more about Tenfold’s offerings.

Tenfold also plans to participate in the Plant’s market every second Saturday of the month to immerse itself with the local community and will aim to offer classes in both English and Spanish like its Heights location.

Eric Walley

The co-founder, who identifies as Hispanic, says he’s wanted Tenfold to have a presence in the Second Ward area for years now, with hopes of engaging with the neighborhood’s large Hispanic population and its rich coffee history (Second Ward was formerly home to now-closed Maxwell House).

Concept Neighborhood’s construction of the mixed-use development made it all the more appealing, Ibarra says. The development and management company announced its plans in 2022 to make the Plant the city’s first “15-minute” walkable neighborhood, with a central community of restaurants, retail shops, gathering spaces, public amenities, and eventually residential areas and office space — a departure from some of Houston’s more “tragic development styles,” which often clear land to build strip malls that are often “void of soul,” Ibarra says.

A Tenfold retail space in the Plant is a long-term goal, Ibarra says, but “we want to know the community before we figure out what our expression of coffee would be in this area.”