Buna

Buna was founded in 2012 in Mexico City's Roma neighborhood by Eduardo (Lalo) Perez Varona, Alberto Rivera, and David Akle, opening first on Havre street at the corner of Marsella before moving to its current Orizaba 42 address. What began as informal cupping sessions among friends grew into one of the first specialty coffee shops in Roma, at a time when high-quality single-origin coffee had almost no retail presence in the city. The team roasts nearby and works to negotiate directly with the small Mexican farms that supply its beans, an approach that predates "direct trade" becoming a standard industry term. Buna has since expanded beyond the original espresso bar into a broader CDMX food-and-drink brand: chocolate, honey, and mushroom products sold alongside the coffee, a subscription program, and wholesale accounts, all under B Corporation certification tied explicitly to Mexican ecosystem conservation -- the company frames coffee-drinking itself as a habit that can be redirected toward protecting those ecosystems rather than simply extracting from them. For CDMX coffee culture, Buna is frequently cited as the benchmark other Roma-area shops are measured against, less for scale than for having been early and consistent in a market that now has many imitators.