A young entrepreneur from Mexico is studying at a college in Oakland while managing her business and its global partners. Carolina Levy, 26, is studying at Mills College to get a master’s degree in business, though her entrepreneurial experience has already been a real education.

Levy’s passion for tea, dried fruits, and helping businesses to succeed inspired her to launch Soy Te (I’m Tea) in 2012. Soy Te sells and produces high quality teas and tisanes infused with dried fruits. The company imports tea leaves from all over the world and buys local, Mexican fruits that are dehydrated and combined with herbs and spices to create the tisanes. Levy’s passion is the creation and fusion of flavors and she works with suppliers in several countries to create the desired blends and quality.

Soy Te is a successful company in Mexico that employs twelve people and has plans to expand next year. Levy worked for years with Banobras, Mexico's state-owned development bank that provides financing and refinancing to public and private investment projects in the areas of infrastructure and public services. The experience gave her the opportunity to travel through Mexico and visit traditional places and taste traditional and unique flavors. The experience also gave Levy the opportunity to see the needs and challenges that small businesses face in their daily operations.

“When I was meeting business people in Mexico I saw firsthand their needs but also saw how many resources are wasted,” Levy said. “In many local markets in Mexico 40 percent of the fruit is wasted.”

Managing more than her own business, Levy sees the heart and the work of the farm producers, who are from Japan, China, South Africa and Mexico. Her goal is to promote them through Soy Te.

“We want to promote the producers,” she says. “We have wonderful and tasty fruits and we know the local producers so we trade in a fair, organic and sustainable basis”.

The teas and tisanes are distributed all over Mexico and the business model supports the goal of helping everybody in the chain –local Mexican agriculture producers, distributors, and the final consumer of the tea.

Levy says the company is empowering people financially. “A lot of our distributors are young women between 20 and 45 years who want to start a business so they open a small store with our products.”

In Mexico, the words ‘organic’, ‘local’, ‘sustainable’, and ‘synergy’ are not unfamiliar any more. “Mexico is living an organic moment,” said Levy. “Mexican people are starting to recognize the quality of the good Mexican products - they ask for Mexican products.”

Soy Te is working to export its products to the United States, Europe, India and South America. “We want to impulse a healthy culture and emphasize the Mexican products,” says Levy. “We need to exploit Mexican diversity.”