85°C Bakery Cafe opens its 100th US store in Aurora

85°C Bakery Cafe opened its 100th US location on 18 September in Aurora, Colorado, its first shop in the state and a milestone for a chain that started as one bakery outside Taipei.

The new shop sits in the Parker Commons shopping centre on South Parker Road. It's built around the same formula the chain has run since founder Wu Cheng-hsueh opened his first store in Bao-Ping, then part of Taipei County, in July 2004: bakery and cake-shop quality at coffee-shop prices, sold fast, through a self-service line rather than a counter order.

The name comes from 85 degrees Celsius, the temperature Wu settled on as the ideal point to brew espresso. The company built the whole brand around that number, printing it on everything from cups to storefronts, and has since grown to more than 1,000 shops worldwide, most of them still in Taiwan and mainland China.

It took 85°C almost eighteen years to go from one store in Irvine to a hundred across the country.

Aurora's menu runs to the chain's usual range: Japanese-style milk pudding buns, marble taro buns, Hokkaido custard buns and egg tarts, chocolate-filled buns, cheese dog pastries, mango crème brûlée cakes and tiramisu, alongside sea salt coffee and a strawberry matcha latte.

From Irvine to the Rockies

85°C's US run began in November 2008, when it opened its first American store in Irvine, California, to queues that reportedly stretched for hours on opening weekend. Growth since has followed the US's largest Asian communities in California, Texas and the Pacific Northwest before pushing into second-tier markets like Colorado.

Adam You, who manages the community group Denver Chinese Source, said local anticipation had been building for months before the doors opened, with the store's build-out tracked on social media well ahead of its grand opening weekend.

A slow build toward the next hundred

Store number 100 took nearly 18 years to reach after the Irvine debut, a pace that reflects how carefully the chain has picked sites — sticking to dense suburban centres with existing East Asian grocery and restaurant clusters rather than chasing scale for its own sake. The caution sits at odds with a wider rush of Asian food brands testing new US ground this year, from Sushiro's flat-fee sushi counters in New York to Motors Coffee's Paris-inflected pop-up in Brooklyn.

Whether Aurora becomes a beachhead for further Colorado openings, or stays the state's only outpost, will depend on how the sea salt coffee and taro buns sell against Denver's own bakery scene over the next year.