A contemporary Oaxacan-style micro-bakery that garnered national press for its yearlong run in New York City has relocated to Randolph. Atla’s Conchas will make its first public Vermont appearance at the Chelsea Farmers Market on Friday, August 29. Caroline Anders and Mauricio Lopez Martinez will sell Mexican pan dulces, cookies, snacking cakes, granola, freshly milled flour and other big hits from their New York days at the weekly market until its summer season ends on October 10.
The married couple moved into a 125-year-old farmhouse in Randolph in late July and are currently renovating what will become their attached bakery. They plan to build “slowly and intentionally” from their initial market run, Anders said.
Atla’s Conchas “led the New York wave” of its namesake pan dulce when it opened in Spanish Harlem in June 2024, according to Eater Boston. Lopez Martinez adapted the couple’s recipe for the traditional soft, sweet bread with a crunchy sugar topping — shell-shaped and vibrantly colored — from one he learned growing up in his family’s bakery in Mexico. The classic is flavored with anise and vanilla; the couple has also made varieties such as spiced dark chocolate, coffee, hibiscus-lime and toasted sesame-white chocolate.
Five months into their first bakery’s “fantastic year,” Anders said, “we started to realize we hit a wall.” Their rented space in a 100-year-old building had limited electrical capacity. It was fine for the convection oven they used to bake conchas, but customers were asking for other breads they couldn’t produce with their equipment. Renting a larger space would have required a level of growth the couple weren’t comfortable with.
Out of the blue, they found the property in Vermont and decided to relocate. Owning their home and attached bakery is “an empowering situation for us to expand production and challenge ourselves at a slightly less stressful pace,” Anders said.
The bakery space currently has no electricity — “less than we had before,” Anders joked — but will have capacity for “as many ovens as we would ever want” after the renovation, she said. Their full lineup of breads will likely launch for the spring farmers market season.
Anders, 30, and Lopez Martinez, 39, met while working at a bread bakery in North Carolina where they “learned all the classics,” Anders said, including baguettes, bagels and sourdough miche. A year before the couple struck out on their own, Anders started milling flour using a basic tabletop mill. Her first experiment with the completely unsifted — or “full-inclusion” — flour, a sponge cake for her grandma’s 80th birthday, “blew my mind,” she recalled.
To make that style of baking more attractive to customers who might associate it with the poor-quality whole-wheat baking of the past, she and Lopez Martinez chose conchas. Instead of white flour, they use 80 percent Appalachian white wheat and 20 percent Sonora white wheat.
At $5 each, the sweet breads were small enough that customers were “willing to gamble and try something new,” Anders said. Atla’s Conchas also sold cookies, snacking cakes and other treats in New York, but “the conchas are the star,” she said.
They’ll continue to be the star of their bakery in Vermont, where conchas are relatively rare. For updates, follow @atlasconchas on Instagram.
This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!