This Vista coffee shop has closed its doors. What’s next for the brand?
Bitty & Beau’s, the coffee shop chain in the Vista that focuses on employing workers with intellectual disabilities, has closed its doors. The husband and wife duo that operate the shop have a new concept in mind.
A little more than a year after opening at 1001 Gervais St. in May 2024, franchisees Brandon and Ashley Abbott announced on social media that they were closing the coffee shop for renovations and a rebrand. The couple plans to open Shiloh Trading Company, a bistro and mercantile with items created and sold by people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
“This is step one of a multi-phase project that is Shiloh Communities, which is a family of companies all designed to help the disability community,” Brandon Abbott said in a video posted to social media Dec. 17.
The new business will be connected to the couple’s farm, with a petting zoo set to open in March.
The coffee chain, which has more than a dozen locations across 11 states, opened its first shop in Wilmington, NC in January 2016. Its mission is to employ people with disabilities and the coffee chain calls itself “a human rights movement disguised as a coffee shop.” The model has drawn criticism from disability rights advocates.
In a post shared to Facebook Dec. 22, Ashley Abbott, the franchisee of the Columbia location of the coffee shop, said their mission had been to employ individuals with disabilities.
“Over the last 18 months, we have fallen deeply in love with this community and the people in it. Through that journey, we also became aware of a great need — one that our current space and model simply could not meet,” Abbott wrote in the post.
The couple hope to reopen the shop at the beginning of the year, but don’t have a definite date, Abbott said.
