The story of Velasquez Family Coffee is a story of love and passion — not just for the premium hand-picked fair trade coffee beans it delivers to home across the Twin Cities Metro area of Minnesota, but for people, and the environment, and each other.
It begins some 30 years ago when Cathy and Guillermo Velasquez met by chance and fell in love, despite not knowing how to speak each other's language. Cathy was from South Dakota and Guillermo was from Honduras where his family farm cultivated coffee beneath the natural shade of the cloud forest canopy.
The Velasquez family has always had a passion for protecting the precious ecosystem around them and the way they grow their coffee under the forest canopy helps to maintain a balanced ecosystem. It preserves migratory bird habitats and uses very little to no pesticides or herbicides. The shade trees also help to protect the soil by retaining moisture and reducing erosion.
The couple settled in Minnesota and after finishing their education and began importing and roasting the hand-picked beans from the farm back home. Velasquez Family Coffee was born, giving Cathy and Guillermo a livelihood while ensuring their family in Honduras a livable income as well.
Velasquez Family Coffee takes fair trade personally, because the people who benefit are their direct relatives: grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, siblings and cousins. The coffee beans come from their family directly to yours — delivered with the help of EasyRoutes.
EasyRoutes makes managing deliveries on Shopify easy. From route optimization, to picking and packing, to dispatch and tracking. “We love EasyRoutes! It has been so incredibly helpful to our monthly subscription and home delivery business since we signed up,” says Cathy Velasquez.
Planning deliveries was sometimes an ordeal that would take days to plan due to constantly shifting requirements. “Incorporating new customers was particularly challenging. I used to have to print out maps for new customers and then try to manually fit them into our previous routes,” says Cathy. Now with EasyRoutes it takes only a couple of hours a month in total.
One aspect of EasyRoutes the team at Velasquez Family Coffee appreciates a lot is its flexibility. “It has allowed us to easily adjust routes to changing circumstances like product shortages, bad weather, driver changes and illnesses, and more happily made it possible to incorporate a large number of new customers into our routes without going crazy.”
"I'm not sure how we would have made it through the past 6 months without EasyRoutes."
Velasquez Family beans are carefully roasted in small batches and are hand-delivered free to most homes and businesses in the Twin Cities on the second Friday of the month. For those outside of their delivery zone, don't worry, they can also ship their delicious coffee directly to your doorstep.
“I'm not sure how we would have made it through the past 6 months without EasyRoutes,” says Cathy. Which is ironic, since the team at EasyRoutes isn't sure how they make it through a day without coffee.
Learn more and buy Velasquez Family Coffee at https://www.vfamilycoffee.com
