In 2009, on a bustling American college campus, two students, Alejandro Vélez and Nikhil Arora, discovered a fascinating fact in a lecture: used coffee grounds could be a fertile ground for mushroom cultivation. While others may have overlooked this nugget of information, Vélez and Arora saw it as a seed of a promising idea that would germinate into a unique business venture and eventually blossom into the flourishing gardening empire, Back to the Roots (BTTR).
Though initially strangers, Velez and Arora independently approached their professor to delve deeper into this unconventional mushroom cultivation concept. Their mutual intrigue fostered a professional connection, which led them to decide to pool their resources together. Thus began their journey into entrepreneurship, a path woven from their shared fascination with fungi and the resourceful reuse of spent coffee grounds.
