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VIDOR — A new coffee shop has rolled into Orange County stirring up specialty drinks and cutting through bureaucratic red tape to help small businesses succeed in Texas. 

Grit N Grind Coffee Shop is multi-tasking a caffeine-fueled mission to change the permitting process that hinders growing establishments as they pursue their love of sharing coffee with the community.

The Vidor Chamber of Commerce will host Grit N Grind Coffee’s ribbon cutting on March 27 at Vidor City Hall from 8 a.m. to noon located at 1395 N. Main Street in Vidor. The owners Rhonda and Billy Hennessey, of Silsbee, will be serving a selection of coffees.

“We moved here from Idaho about three years in November,” she said. “We really wanted to be in the Orange area, but we lived in Port Arthur for the first six months, and then we ended up buying a house in Silsbee. But I still felt called to the Orange County area. We’ve been in business since we started it in 2022, we didn’t open our doors for business until March of 2023.”

The Hennessey’s have been doing “the mobile thing” for the last two years.

“We were just kind of trying to find our niche,” she said. “And we just have always been drawn to that Vidor and Orange area, and the people have been very receptive to us being there. We love the people there.”

In December of 2024, the Hennessey’s joined the Vidor Chamber of Commerce.

“We don’t know a lot about Southeast Texas, and we don’t have any family here,” she said. “We needed to have those business connections to find out a little bit more about the area, and thought maybe that joining the chamber would help our business grow.”

Grit N Grind focuses on business delivery and private and business events.

“We are completely self-contained,” she said. “Meaning we don’t need anything from anybody to set up and we have our own power and bathroom board, that enables us to go to lots of different places that other food trucks can’t go. Because of the way we’re set up, it makes us a little bit unique. We do a lot of private events like Mother’s Day and have worked a Mother’s Day brunch.  We’ve done baby showers and festivals, and we can accommodate weddings and family reunions. We serve businesses if there is at least six to 15 people or more that they want coffee delivery.  It takes us 20 minutes to a half an hour, but we’ll go and we’ll park there, and they’ll come out, and they’ll order their coffee, and we make the drinks, and then we go on to the next place. So that’s really kind of what has been our niche for the last two years, is focusing on that business delivery piece.”

Grit N Grind does not have a permanent location and must be invited onto business properties.

“Being a mobile business in this area is very difficult,” she said. “You can’t just park anywhere. You have to be invited onto somebody’s property in order to park there. But it’s very expensive, and that’s what people don’t realize, is the permitting process is very costly. For example, when we were in Idaho, you could get one permit from the health department that would cover you for the entire state, and then you could go anywhere in that state. And you would just have to let the cities know, ‘Hey, we want to do business in your city for a week, weekend or a month,’ and they say, ‘Okay, it’s gonna be $25 and they would give you that business permit for $25. However, here you have to get a permit from the health department, from every county that you want to do business in, and in some cases, additional cities within that county. So, for example, Jefferson County charges $350 for their permit, but that only covers the unincorporated parts of Jefferson County. I must get an additional permit for Beaumont, which is $250 and an additional permit from Port Arthur, which is another $150. For us to do business in like, a 60-mile radius from where we live, it cost us almost $3,000 annually, just in health department permits.”

This issue led the Hennessey’s to begin advocating to change legislation in Texas surrounding the permitting process for food trucks to make it more cost effective for them.

  “Texas advertises that they are small business friendly, but the permitting fees and event fees along with the high cost of food and fuel is crippling,” she said. “I emailed Ted Cruz and Brian Babin around June and July of last year.  I have been told that we will have to meet with each local district representative.”

  It will start with local jurisdictions first.

“It is going to be a long process,” she said. “Business owners are hesitant to stick their necks out as they don’t want to lose their livelihood.  The process is filled with bureaucratic red tape.  It becomes about who you know and how much money you have.  Restaurant owners don’t like food trucks because they think food trucks steal their customers, and they think it’s unfair because we don’t have the overhead.”

Rhonda said if we all publicly supported one another, we all win.

“I have thirty years of retail management experience and the one thing I know is that there’s enough business for everyone,” she said. “If a restaurant owner feels threatened by a food truck, they need to step back and evaluate what they are doing. Plain and simple. 

The Hennessey’s said they will support and promote fellow small businesses every single day.

 “Even if they have similar product,” she said. “We also try to partner with them when we can. Doing so makes all of us stronger. People have so many choices of where they spend their money, you must give them a reason to choose you.” 

Grit N Grind locally sources their coffee and espresso to support other coffee businesses.

“We are really passionate about supporting local,” she said. “We tried a lot of coffee in the area before we started the business, and we decided to go with a company out of Houston called Geva Coffee.  They’ve been in business since 1974 who locally grind their coffee beans. We get our espresso beans from Island Brow in Orange.”

Rhonda said their business primarily sells espresso-based drinks but has a specialty menu to choose from.

“We have common drink names like Snickers and Almond Joy,” she said. “But we have created our own recipes for these drinks, and what our goal is to offer the people of Southeast Texas a premium product at an affordable price. So, we take pride in handcrafting all our own beverages. We completely hand barista everything and nothing is automated except pulling the espresso shot. We froth all our milk and do everything by hand. It took a lot of tasting nasty stuff to come up with each beverage that we currently have.”

Our business isn’t just about selling good coffee, she said.   

“We are about building relationships with our customers and using each interaction to pour into every person we meet,” Hennessey said. “It’s about truly ‘seeing’ people and recognizing what emotional need we can fill in the short amount of time we have with them.”

For booking, call 409-239-8084.