A street, a tower,
and a bean that
travels well.
Bucareli is named for one of Mexico City's oldest boulevards, and based in Logan, Utah. What connects the two is a single idea: that a bar should taste like somewhere.
The name
Paseo Nuevo, 1775
In the late eighteenth century the viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa ordered a new promenade cut through the edge of the city — a wide boulevard lined, they said, with more than a thousand ash trees, with fountains set into three plazas along its length. People called it the Paseo Nuevo. Eventually they just called it Bucareli.
Two and a half centuries later the trees are gone and the fountains have been moved, but the avenue is still there, still dividing the old centre from everything that came after. Newspapers were written on it. A café on the corner has been pouring since 1954. It is not a monument street. It is a working one.
That is the part we wanted. A name with a long memory and dirt under its fingernails.
The mark
A beacon holds still
so everything else can move
We took the tower for our mark because of what a tower on a busy street is for. It does not chase anything. It stays where it is, lit, and lets people find their way by it.
That is roughly our theory of chocolate, too. The recipe does not change to follow a trend. The beans change — harvest to harvest, farm to farm — and the job is to keep the light steady enough that you can taste the difference.
How we got here
The short version
The name and the mark
Bucareli begins with a lighthouse, an avenue in Mexico City, and a conviction that most chocolate tastes of nothing in particular.
Past the commodity market
Rather than buying bulk cacao on price, we start buying by lot and by origin — tasting the beans before committing to them.
A short, stubborn range
A handful of single-origin bars, refined lot by lot. One gets added only when it earns its place on the shelf.
Logan, Utah
Bucareli is based in Logan, with cacao arriving from Madagascar, Indonesia, Mexico and wherever else the season's best beans turn up.
Dates and milestones above are placeholders drafted for layout — send us the real ones and they go straight in.
Why it matters
Cacao has always
been a traveller.
The tree was first domesticated in the upper Amazon — in what is now Ecuador — where people were using cacao more than five thousand years ago. From there it moved north along trade routes into Mesoamerica, and it was there, in Mexico and Central America, that cacao became chocolate: ground, spiced, whisked into a drink, used as currency, treated as something close to sacred.
Today the same tree grows in a band around the equator, and a bean from Madagascar tastes nothing like a bean from Indonesia. That is the whole opportunity. We buy by origin and by lot, keep each one separate, and let you taste the difference between them.
Inside the process