College student’s tea business funds planting of trees in Haiti
Evans City resident Mark Sotomayor has turned his Peruvian grandmother’s tea recipe into both a startup business and a charitable endeavor.
Last Labor Day he had gone home from Grove City College for the long weekend. His mom made him his favorite food and drink, including a pitcher of his grandmother’s chai tea spiced with cinnamon, cloves and anise.
“I drank the whole pitcher,” he said, “and then I told my mom, ‘This is so good you could literally sell it.’”
Within a few short months, he was, in fact, literally selling it.
Mr. Sotomayor is entering his junior year as an entrepreneurship major. He is the founder and his mom, Vitalia Sotomayor, is the production manager of their tea company, currently being called Te Amo, which in Spanish means tea love or I love you. The name combines a play on the word “tea” with a reference to the company’s charitable arm: For each bottle sold, a tree is planted in Haiti.
But the name and the charitable arm are soon changing. In order to avoid issues with another Te Amo company in a different field, Mr. Sotomayor is changing the name. And he’s finding that it’s not financially viable long term to continue planting one tree for every bottle sold, but he does still intend to use part of his proceeds to fund tree planting in Haiti.
Mr. Sotomayor’s parents moved from Peru to the United States in 1997, before Mr. Sotomayor was born. His father, Edgar Sotomayor, lives in Butler. His grandmother Vitalia Montez, who developed the tea recipe, still lives in Lima, Peru.
At a vendor show in the early stages of the business, Mr. Sotomayor met David Brauer, a professor at Duquesne University and vice president of the board of Haiti Friends, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit that assists Haiti through tree-planting and artist support programs.
Through Haiti Friends, Mr. Sotomayor was able to visit Haiti in March and see firsthand the devastation caused by systemic deforestation of the island. He signed on to help, and so far Te Amo has planted 5,000 trees in Haiti.
To make the tea, the Sotomayors use ingredients from Con Yeager Spice Co. in New Castle and Prestogeorge Tea in the Strip District. They sell three flavors of tea: Peruvian Chai, Berry Jasmine and Citrus Chamomile. The teas are brewed in a commercial kitchen at the Evans City VFW, but their short-term goal is to open a manufacturing facility. And the long-term goal? “We want to be in Whole Foods, we want to be in Sheetz, [and] we want to be in Wawa,” Mr. Sotomayor said. “We want to be everywhere.”
Right now the tea is sold in about 20 independent shops in Butler County and Allegheny County. The shops are listed on the company’s website, buyateaplantatree.com.
Through Saturday, Mr. Sotomayor is running a crowd-funding campaign at pieshell.com/projects/ te-amo. He aims to raise $4,000 to take a team to Haiti in January to build on to an existing Haiti Friends nursery so that Te Amo can have its own nursery property. Some of the crowd-funded proceeds would pay for Haitian staff to maintain the nursery. Supporters of the crowdfunding campaign can get T-shirts, signed artwork, cases of tea bags and other gifts for contributing.
For more on Te Amo, visit the company’s website at buyateaplantatree.com to see video clips of Mr. Sotomayor discussing the business.