Alejandro Velez, Co-Founder
Back to the Roots
Alejandro Velez, is a contemporary farmer for the ages. The co-founder of Back to the Roots, an urban mushroom farm out of Oakland, California that grows gourmet mushrooms by using recycled coffee grounds as soil. It was during a Business Ethics lecture at UC Berkley that Velez, 25, and his co-founder and college friend Nikhil Arora, got the idea to grow food using a composting method after their professor suggested the possibility. After this light bulb moment the two headed back home with a plan.
After successfully growing their hongos, they were able to convince a Whole Foods Market exec to sell their products in their local store. Shortly thereafter, they began supplying their products to over 300 Whole Foods locations nationwide. Today, Velez’s company offers two major products. The first is a Grow-at-Home Mushroom Kit, which allows anyone to raise mushrooms right out of the box that carries the contents needed to do so. The second item is the Aquaponics Garden, a self-cleaning fish tank that grows fresh herbs. As of August 2013, they had sold almost 350,000 mushroom kits and 15,000 AquaFarms.
Velez is also a founder and board chairman of the Sage Mentorship Project Inc., which offers one-on-one mentoring relationships between UC Berkeley students and low-income elementary school students in the area. Prior to founding Back to the Roots, the Medellin, Colombia native was headed towards a career in investment banking and had worked with Citigroup, UBS, and Morgan Stanley.
Velez has appeared on PODER Magazine’s list of “20 Most Influential Hispanics under 40” and was named Hispanic-Net.org’s 2012 Social Entrepreneur of the Year. The company was awarded an Empact100 award from the White House in 2012, recognizing Back to the Roots as one of the top 100 entrepreneurial companies in the country.
Words to Live By:
“We need to live our lives with passion. Find what motivates you and do it over and over again; through that passion you can motivate others, sometimes without even knowing it.”