Shoukâ

Shoukâ works out of a former restaurant and bar on Rue du Docteur Paccard in Chamonix, describing itself as a torréfacteur d'altitude -- an altitude roaster -- that controls the entire production chain from raw bean to finished bar or cup. On the chocolate side, cacao comes from Tanzania and the Philippines among other terroirs, selected by botanical variety and aromatic profile and worked bean-to-bar into bars ranging from 52 to 85 percent cacao, ground, conched and tempered on site. Coffee runs the same route in reverse: single-origin beans from Costa Rica and Honduras roasted in-house and pulled to order as bean-to-cup pours. The shop sells its own chocolate-covered nuts and almonds, organic teas and infusions, and brewing accessories alongside the core bars and beans, plus subscription boxes for regulars. What started as one Chamonix address has grown into four boutiques -- Chamonix, Annecy, and two in Lyon -- and the original shop still runs factory tours and tasting workshops, letting customers see the roasting and conching happen rather than just buying the finished product off a shelf. It's a small operation carrying an outsized production process: most shops this size buy in one or the other of chocolate or coffee rather than making both from raw material themselves.