Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month: How natural remedies reflect my Hispanic roots

Growing up in Queens, New York, was… an experience. Especially as the daughter of two Colombian immigrants. My Dad came from Cali, and my Mom from Bogota. My dad’s story really starts on a farm, right at the foot of the Andes Mountains. Being surrounded by all that green, all that life, it just got into his bones, you know? It’s who he is. I can still picture his tool shed, with three, maybe five different machetes just lying around, always sharp. Each one in its old, worn-out leather cover.

It’s funny, the things that stick with you.

A machete seems like such an intense tool, but for farmers in Colombia, it’s just… everything. They use it to clear paths through the jungle or slash down sugar cane. My dad used to tell me stories about the sugar cane fields back in Valle del Cauca, where he’s from. It's wild to think that something like 80 percent of all the sugar cane in Colombia comes from that one area. For him, a machete wasn't just a tool for clearing brush; it was for carving out a life.

I read somewhere that Colombia is one of the world's "megadiverse" countries. It has something like 10% of the entire planet's biodiversity, which is just… wow. When you think about that, it’s not so surprising that people there have always looked to nature for answers, for healing. It explains so much about my dad and why our house was always filled with herbs and fresh fruit. He’d call them “Nature’s remedies.” It wasn't some wellness trend for him; it was just life.

I remember we’d go to Flushing Meadow Park on the weekends. Right at the entrance, there were these bushes with little berries on them. My dad would just walk up, pick a few, wash them off, and pop them in his mouth. My brain would be screaming, “Don't eat strange berries from a park in Queens!”—you know, everything they drill into your head in school. But he just knew. Instinctively. He knew they were blackberries and would hold a few out for us to try. He had this connection to the earth that I just didn't understand yet.

And oh my god, the baking soda. There was always a little box of it by the bathroom sink. He’d make us dip our wet toothbrushes right in there and brush our teeth with it. We thought it was the absolute grossest thing ever. So salty and weird! But he’d just laugh and tell us that growing up, he didn’t even know what toothpaste was. His family used baking soda for everything. He was way ahead of his time, I guess, talking about how it killed bacteria long before it was a thing you’d see on a fancy toothpaste box.

All these little things, they add up. They’re part of my DNA now, as a mom, as a person trying to run this business. That saying he always had, ‘La Tierra siempre provera’—The Earth will always provide—it’s not just a nice quote to me. It feels like a responsibility.

It’s why we try to give back, you know? It's the whole reason we're a mission-driven company. We donate a part of our sales to ‘The Nature Conservancy's Plant a Billion Trees campaign’ because those mountains and forests in Colombia, and all over Latin America, they matter. Our pouches are made with over 50% post-consumer material, and honestly, I’m working on getting that to 100%. We’re also trying to figure out how to get rid of more plastic in our packaging. It feels like the bare minimum, really. It’s the least we can do for Mother Earth, who has provided so much for us.

It's funny how you don't realize what you're learning when you're a kid. You just think your dad is weird for eating berries from a bush. It takes a long time to see it for the gift it really was. I’m still figuring out how to pass that on, I guess.