Hattiesburg Coffee: Nine New Shops Since 2019
Updated: Oct 6
Local student media outlet SM2 reported that, drawing from local coffee shops' own social media and websites, roughly nine coffee shops have opened in Hattiesburg since 2019, not counting restaurants or bakeries that happen to serve coffee. That is a real, documented boom worth understanding on its own terms, in a city with a population of just over forty eight thousand people.
Numbers like this are easy to skim past in a single sentence and move on. This piece slows down instead, naming the specific shops behind that count, the specific years they opened, and the specific, honest reasons this pattern likely took hold in Hattiesburg the way it did.
A Real Number, Honestly Hedged
This figure comes from student media reporting, not from a formal citywide business census, so it is worth treating the number as an honest approximation rather than an exact count. Even hedged that way, it points to something genuinely notable happening in this market, a pace of new coffee shop openings that would be notable in a much larger city, let alone one under fifty thousand people.
SM2 gathered this figure from the shops' own social media and websites rather than from a government business registry, which is exactly why the roughly nine figure deserves that qualifier rather than being repeated as an exact citywide count. That does not make the underlying pattern any less real. It simply means the number should be read as a credible, sourced estimate rather than an official statistic.
The Shops Behind the Number
Equinox and Mulvi's both opened in 2019. Mo'Bay Beignet Co. opened across from Southern Miss in the summer of 2022. Grin's larger cafe space opened in the summer of 2023, a milestone in the family roaster's own garage to storefront growth story. Cafe de Luna opened on West Pine in 2024, with a ribbon cutting that October following an owner's earlier public comment that there was no coffee shop downtown. eYrthBeat arrived later on Front Street.
This is a real sequence of genuinely new shops opening across several consecutive years, not a single burst that might have been a coincidence or a one time fluke. Each of these openings represents a distinct business, a distinct owner, and in several cases a distinct part of the city, from the USM adjacent Equinox and Mulvi's to the downtown focused Cafe de Luna and eYrthBeat.
What's Likely Driving It
A growing Hub City identity and the steady presence of the University of Southern Mississippi are the honest, plausible drivers behind this pattern. Neither factor is invented for this piece. Both are simply the real backdrop against which this many new coffee businesses have chosen to open in the same few years, alongside William Carey University's own presence in the city.
Downtown revitalization efforts, documented separately in local news coverage of Cafe de Luna's opening and later of eYrthBeat's arrival on Front Street, are a second real thread worth naming. A city actively working to bring more foot traffic back into its downtown core creates a favorable environment for new small businesses, coffee shops very much included, to take a chance on a storefront that might not have made sense a decade earlier.
What This Means for Competition
This many new, good options opening around the same stretch of years changes what competition actually looks like in this market. It is not one dominant shop competing against a slow trickle of newcomers. It is a crowded field of real options, all still relatively new, all still establishing themselves, spread across at least three distinct pockets of the city.
That kind of competitive landscape rewards specificity. A shop that can clearly say what makes it different, whether that is Grin's family roasting history, Equinox's genuine campus partnership, or eYrthBeat's downtown roasting operation, has a real advantage over one that simply describes itself as another Hattiesburg coffee shop among nine or more recent openings.
Why This Pace Is Unusual for a City This Size
Cities under fifty thousand people do not typically see this kind of sustained new business activity in a single category over a six year stretch. Specialty coffee in particular tends to concentrate in larger metro areas, which makes Hattiesburg's pattern worth taking seriously as a genuine local phenomenon rather than dismissing it as ordinary small city growth.
The presence of two universities inside city limits, USM and William Carey, is almost certainly part of the explanation, since college towns of all sizes tend to support more coffee shops per capita than similarly sized cities without a major academic institution. Hattiesburg simply happens to have two such institutions inside a single, relatively compact city.
What This Boom Does Not Mean Yet
Nine new openings since 2019 does not mean nine businesses with fully built out, search optimized websites. The audited roster in this specific research, Grin, Equinox, and eYrthBeat, shows real gaps in titles, structured data, and blog content even as the broader scene keeps adding new names. A genuine business boom and a genuine digital visibility boom are two different things, and right now this city has clearly experienced the first without yet fully experiencing the second.
That gap is not a criticism of any specific owner's priorities. Opening and running a new coffee shop is demanding enough on its own without also mastering search engine specific website details. It does mean there is real, specific opportunity still sitting untapped across this growing scene.
A Timeline Worth Looking at Directly
Laid out year by year, the pattern becomes even clearer. 2019 brought both Equinox and Mulvi's into the market in the same year. 2022 brought Mo'Bay Beignet Co. across from Southern Miss during the summer. 2023 brought Grin's larger cafe space, the culmination of a garage roasting story that had been building for years before that. 2024 brought Cafe de Luna to West Pine downtown, with a public ribbon cutting that October. eYrthBeat's Front Street arrival came later still.
Five distinct years, five distinct openings named specifically in this reporting, spread across a city of just over forty eight thousand residents. That is not a scene that boomed once and then went quiet. It is a scene that has kept adding real, new options nearly every year for roughly half a decade running, a pattern few markets this size can claim with this much specific documentation behind it.
Two Universities, One Compact City
USM and William Carey University both sit inside Hattiesburg's city limits, an unusual concentration of higher education for a place this size. College towns generally support more coffee shops per capita than similarly sized cities without a major university, and Hattiesburg effectively gets that effect twice over, from two separate institutions drawing students, faculty, and visiting families into the same relatively compact footprint.
That academic density likely explains part of why so many of the named openings in this timeline cluster near USM specifically, Equinox and Mulvi's both opening in 2019 near that campus corridor. It does not fully explain the downtown activity though, where Cafe de Luna and eYrthBeat both opened away from either campus, suggesting genuine, broad based demand rather than a single university driven explanation alone.
What Comes Next for This Scene
If the roughly nine shop pace documented since 2019 continues, Hattiesburg will likely keep adding new coffee businesses in the years ahead, further crowding a field that is already competitive by this market's own standards. Each new entrant will face the same basic choice every existing shop in this post already faces: build a real, specific, search ready online presence, or rely primarily on word of mouth and social media the way most of the current roster still does.
Given how few of the currently audited shops have made that first choice so far, an owner willing to make it now, while the broader scene is still relatively young in search terms, has a real, specific opportunity to stand out clearly rather than blending into an increasingly crowded list of names.
Downtown Versus Campus, a Second Look
It is worth pausing on the geography of this timeline a second time, because it tells its own story. Equinox and Mulvi's, both 2019 openings, sit near the USM corridor. Mo'Bay Beignet Co., opening in 2022, sits across from Southern Miss as well. Cafe de Luna in 2024 and eYrthBeat sometime after that both chose downtown Hattiesburg instead, specifically West Pine and East Front Street respectively.
That split suggests two separate growth stories happening at once inside the same small city: a campus adjacent coffee scene that grew earlier in this timeline, and a downtown coffee scene that has grown more recently, likely tied to the broader downtown revitalization efforts that local news has covered separately. Both threads deserve to be told with their own specificity rather than flattened into one undifferentiated Hattiesburg coffee boom.
Why Student Media Was the One Telling This Story
A student media outlet, not a city government office or a chamber of commerce, is the source that pulled this nine shop timeline together in the first place. SM2's reporting drew on the shops' own social media and websites, doing the legwork that apparently nobody else in Hattiesburg's local institutions had yet done in quite this specific, dated way.
That says something honest about where this scene's own story currently lives: in scattered social media posts and a single piece of dedicated student journalism, rather than in any kind of official citywide business tracking or in the coffee shops' own consolidated content. A city with this much genuine coffee shop growth arguably deserves a clearer, more permanent public record of it than one article, however well reported that article happens to be.
Each of the nine shops named or implied in that reporting could, in principle, tell this same growth story on its own website, framing itself as part of a genuine local movement rather than an isolated new business. Right now, none of the three specifically audited in this post does that. The timeline exists in a single piece of student journalism and nowhere else that a search engine or an AI answer tool could easily point to when someone asks what has been happening with coffee in Hattiesburg lately.
Turning a News Story Into a Lasting Page
A news article, however well reported, eventually ages out of relevance in a way a dedicated, regularly updated page on a business's own website does not have to. SM2's reporting on the nine shop boom will remain a valuable historical record, and it is not built to be updated as an eventual tenth or eleventh shop opens in this same market.
A Hattiesburg coffee shop that built its own version of this growth story, updated as the scene keeps changing, would have something the original news article structurally cannot: a living page that stays current and that a search engine or AI tool can keep returning to as the authoritative, up to date source on Hattiesburg's ongoing coffee boom.
What a Timeline of Nine Openings Actually Reveals
Laid out in order rather than as a single headline number, the pattern reads differently. Equinox and Mulvi's both trace back to 2019. Mo'Bay Beignet Co. opened across from Southern Miss in the summer of 2022. Grin's larger, garage born cafe arrived in the summer of 2023 under Tommy Teepell. Cafe de Luna opened downtown on West Pine, with WDAM covering both the April 2024 announcement and the October 2024 ribbon cutting. eYrthBeat arrived even later, opening on East Front Street next to Wax Fantastic Records, covered by WDAM in March 2026.
Read that way, the nine shop figure is not one boom in one year. It is a five plus year run of individual owners making individual bets on a growing college town, each one landing in a slightly different pocket of the city, from a campus adjacent corridor to a rebuilding downtown block. That distinction matters for anyone trying to understand whether this is a bubble or a durable trend, because a steady drumbeat of openings spread across half a decade looks a great deal more like sustained demand than a single speculative wave.
Related Reading
More from this Hillcane city series, plus the pages on the site that sit next to the work.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many new coffee shops have opened in Hattiesburg since 2019?
Local student media has reported roughly nine, based on the shops' own social media and websites, not counting restaurants or bakeries that also serve coffee.
Is this number an official citywide count?
No, it comes from student media reporting rather than a formal business census, so it should be treated as an honest approximation.
Which coffee shops opened in 2019?
Equinox and Mulvi's both opened that year, according to the same student media reporting.
When did Mo'Bay Beignet Co. open?
In the summer of 2022, located across from Southern Miss.
When did Grin's larger cafe space open?
In the summer of 2023, a milestone in the family roaster's own growth from a garage roasting operation.
When did Cafe de Luna open?
In 2024, on West Pine, with a ribbon cutting reported in October of that year.
What is likely driving this growth in Hattiesburg?
A growing Hub City identity, the presence of two universities inside city limits, and active downtown revitalization efforts are the plausible, real factors behind this pattern.
Does this mean all nine new shops are part of the same specialty coffee scene?
Not necessarily. This figure includes a range of coffee shops beyond the specific specialty roasters and cafes covered elsewhere in this post.
What does this level of growth mean for competition in Hattiesburg?
It means a crowded field of real, relatively new options, rather than one dominant shop facing occasional new competitors.
Is this pace of growth unusual for a city Hattiesburg's size?
Yes, cities under fifty thousand people do not typically see this kind of sustained new coffee shop activity over a six year stretch, making Hattiesburg's pattern notable.
Does this business boom mean these shops all have strong websites?
No, a genuine business boom and a genuine digital visibility boom are different things, and several of this city's audited coffee shops still have real gaps in titles and structured data.
How can Hillcane help a new Hattiesburg coffee shop stand out in this growing market?
Hillcane can help build the search visibility and structured pages that help a shop stand out clearly in a crowded, growing market. Reach out at hillcane.co/contact or call (256) 384-2449.
Work with Hillcane
Nine new coffee shops have opened in Hattiesburg since 2019. That is a real boom for a city under fifty thousand people, not a rounding error.
If your new Hattiesburg coffee shop wants to stand out in this growing market, Hillcane can help build the visibility to match your story. Reach out at hillcane.co/contact or call (256) 384-2449.
Reach out at hillcane.co or (256) 384-2449.
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