Furthering the family business

Andrey Perez ’25, a double major in economics and chemistry, found the intersection between his academic interests and his family’s roots—and launched a business along the way. Perez started Crezia, a United States-based company distributing coffee grown and processed on his family’s farm in Colombia.

 

“Crezia,” is named for Lucrezia, Perez’s grandmother. 

“It’s very meaningful to me because I was close to my grandmother,” Perez said. 

Perez’s family got into the coffee business in the ’80s when his grandfather bought a piece of land in Colombia and converted it into a coffee farm. His mother and uncle grew up working on the farm, growing and processing the coffee. In 2008, his uncle bought another farm, La Fargue, “the fortune,” and in 2023, he bought the original family farm and has been running both ever since. 

Typically, Colombian coffee imported to the United States is sold to a distributor who then sells it without farmers knowing where their coffee is going, or consumers where their coffee has come from. Through Crezia, Perez sells his family’s coffee—as unroasted, green coffee—primarily online. He has also begun selling to local restaurants and cafes to roast and use, is in talks with some roasters, and hopes to expand his distribution across the country.

“A big part of my goal is to tell my family’s story and to give meaning to the coffee that people drink,” Perez said. 

While the business taps into more of Perez’s economics skills (his uncle handles the coffee production), he hopes to make use of his chemistry training, too. 

“What we’re doing right now is just the wash coffee,” Perez said, meaning the fruit has been removed. “Think of when you pulp a cherry, it’s slimy, so you wash it. There are other ways you can do it. You can dry the coffee beans, dry the pit with all the slimy sugars, or you can ferment them. All those things determine or change the flavor profile.

“What we do now leads to a fruity, light citrus flavor. In the future, we want to have different fermentation lengths, cultures, temperatures, and ages, and I think my chemistry background is going to be helpful in that.” 

Now in his final year at Washington, Perez is completing his combined Senior Capstone Experience with the family business in mind. The economics side of the project explores what factors determine commodity export prices of developing countries, and what makes those prices increase and decrease, specifically looking at Brazil and Colombia’s coffee industries. The chemistry side explores how nutrients in soil affect growing, roasting, and brewing coffee. 

The idea for the chemistry side of the project came from his uncle, who takes soil samples from the farms to a lab for testing. 

“If you put fertilizer with everything in it, you can get runoff and different minerals that can affect nature and even your own coffee,” Perez explained.

Knowing which nutrients your soil has, what it needs, and how those will affect your coffee crop is important. Nutrient absorption, the roasting process, and decaffeination are all chemical reactions that impact the overall taste of the coffee. 

During an organic chemistry lab, Perez’s class experimented with an organic solvent that he later learned could create a chemical reaction to decaffeinate coffee, a technique that he hopes to use in the business. 

“What I love about the chemistry department is they’ve done the class and lab structure really well. We are hands on in just about every lab,” Perez said. “We talk about something in class, then the next lab we are all doing it. The fact that class sizes are so small, we are able to really focus and work almost one-on-one with the lab professor.” 

Being at a small school has not only allowed Perez to develop close relationships with professors and classmates, it has also allowed him to explore his many interests outside of the classroom—Perez was on the swim team for two years and now is completing a strength and conditioning internship in the Johnson Fitness Center. 

“I’ve really made the most out of doing whatever I want. I don’t think you can spread yourself out at a big college, where you have to be in the school of chemistry or whatever. The ability to spread out as I have, and the relationships I’ve formed with professors and other students is awesome.” 

When asked if there were any professors that were particularly impactful on Perez, he listed all of his professors.

— MacKenzie Brady '21