Howdy! First of all, thank you for your interest in Likewise Coffee Roasters! The fact that you're taking the time to click around on our website is legitimately appreciated.
Likewise Coffee Roasters is a specialty coffee roaster in East Texas owned and operated by two local families. We roast for our coffee shops that we own, as well as for a growing list of wholesale partners. As a small team, we source, sample, roast, bag, and ship all our coffee ourselves. This is a very hands-on way to run a roastery, but it allows us to keep quality extremely high without a bunch of middlemen getting involved in the process.
Our journey in the coffee started in 2019 when both families moved back home to Jacksonville, Texas from Seattle, Washington and Denton, Texas respectively. We all loved coffee as a hobby, with full-blown espresso setups at both of our houses to prove it. We also loved our hometown, but saw a huge lack of welcoming community spaces and quality coffee culture: both things we'd come to appreciate while living in bigger cities.
We always talked about how much Jacksonville could use a quintessential downtown coffee shop to anchor the town and be the unofficial hub of the community.
So our hobby turned into a business in 2021 when we began the buildout of Neighbors Coffee in Jacksonville, Texas. We opened in 2022 with fingers crossed that our small hometown would be able and willing to support a local specialty coffee shop. We were (and still are) blown away by how much of a loyal following we gained and retain.
We didn't know at first whether the coffee business we started would be able to be a career for both families. Three of the four owners still had "day jobs" for the first year of Neighbors being open. But after much prayer and deliberation, we decided to jump all the way in and open another shop. We set our sights on the bigger Tyler market and in 2023 we opened Likewise Coffee in the Mosaic District.
Roasting has been something we've wanted to do since before we ever even opened Neighbors. We love both the art and the science of coffee, and roasting would be the best way to take our business to the next level. In 2025 we finally took delivery of our production roaster and debuted Likewise Coffee Roasters. It's been a blast roasting for our shops, and we have big plans of growing this side of the business.
We had awesome relationships with the wholesale roasters we partnered with before opening Likewise Coffee Roasters, and we intend on offering the same encouragement, help, and advice to our wholesale clients in addition to a great product to serve at their shops.
While we've been roasting, we've also been in the process of planning and building out a third coffee shop, another Likewise Coffee location in South Tyler. More news to come for opening in 2026!
Over the past 4+ years, coffee has gone from being a hobby, to a side project, to a full time career field for us. It's our passion and our livelihood. We take our craft extremely seriously, pouring our full effort into every part of our business. We are so thankful to God and to our customers for allowing coffee to be our real jobs. We have big future dreams and don't plan on slowing down anytime soon.
Ben Casey, Co-owner | 903.721.8147
P.S. We received a lot of advice and guidance from other coffee professionals before we started our business and at various points since. If you're reading this and want to pick our brains on anything coffee/business-related, don't hesitate to reach out. We'd love to help other people succeed in the coffee industry.