Bold Bean Coffee Roasters (Riverside)

Bold Bean Coffee Roasters started in 2007 as a small wholesale roasting operation in Jacksonville, founded by Jay Burnett, and didn’t open its first retail cafe until 2011. The company is still family run: Burnett’s son Zach now serves as managing partner, and another son, Adam, works as the company’s baker. That history matters because it explains why Bold Bean reads less like a coffee shop that started roasting and more like a roasting company that eventually opened cafes to sell what it makes. The Riverside location, at 869 Stockton St, is one of two current Jacksonville cafes, the other being at the Beaches, after the company closed its San Marco shop in September 2024 when that lease expired.

The roasting itself is where Bold Bean puts most of its effort. Coffee is roasted on a Loring Kestrel S35, tracked with Cropster software, and each coffee gets its own production roast profile rather than a one size fits all approach, with the stated goal of highlighting origin character and natural sweetness instead of masking it. On the sourcing side, the company says it works directly with producers and pays “well above the C-market price” based on production cost and quality rather than commodity pricing, and it runs weekly cupping sessions along with sample roasting on every coffee to check consistency before it goes out the door. Coffee sold at Bold Bean’s cafes and through its Whole Foods wholesale accounts, where it’s stocked in 15 plus Whole Foods stores across Florida, comes out of this same roasting and quality control process.

Day to day, the Riverside cafe functions like most specialty coffee shops: drip coffee, espresso drinks, and pour-overs, with mobile ordering available if you’d rather skip the line. Bold Bean also runs a coffee subscription program with a gift subscription option, a text alert program for new releases, and periodic classes and cupping events for people who want to go deeper than a to-go cup. Hours at Riverside run 6:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekdays and 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on weekends, later than a lot of Jacksonville coffee shops that close by mid-afternoon, which is useful if you want a coffee shop that still functions as a coffee shop in the evening rather than shutting down after the morning rush.

Worth knowing before visiting: the San Marco cafe that a lot of people still associate with Bold Bean is gone, so if you’re working from an old address, double check you’re headed to Riverside or the Beaches location instead. Parking around Stockton Street is street parking in a walkable, busy stretch of Riverside, so expect it to be tighter at peak weekend hours. For anyone who cares more about where their coffee comes from and how it was roasted than about a particular drink on a menu, Bold Bean’s roasting transparency, direct sourcing, and weekly cupping routine make it a more serious operation than the typical neighborhood cafe.