Where It Started
Where It Started
Maria Magdalena
My parents both worked hard, economic conditions in Bogota, in the 70's and 80's were difficult, so I spent much of my childhood with my grandmother. She was a devout Catholic, and I accompanied her, countless hours, tucked at her side, in church, a quiet, healing place where people bared their souls. There I overheard stories of heartache, pain, and suffering, and something took root in me: a burning desire to ease the suffering of the world.
Her kitchen was my safe haven. It was where I felt at home, where I learned, and where I first fell in love with feeding people. Long before anyone called it wellness, she taught me something I have carried my whole life: food is medicine. La comida es medicina.
Juicehaus started at 509 North Broad Street in Fuquay-Varina, and we made juice the way she would have if she'd owned a juicer: fresh, unpasteurized, nothing added to stretch its shelf life at the cost of what's inside. We call it bio-fuel, only half-joking.
From Bogotá to 509 North Broad
You're me, only younger.
Alex Arrieta was nine years old when he and his mother landed in New York on October 27, 1984. By then he had already moved nineteen times. His father had come ahead of them, after a youth spent running from men who conscripted teenagers, once hiding submerged in a river, breathing through a hollow reed.
At nine, Alex was washing dishes at Emilio's in Harrison, in water hot enough to scald. By eleven he was stripping and waxing floors through the night beside his father. In 2004, after his father lost his job, they started Arrieta Building Services together. Alex went on to serve twenty years with the Yonkers Fire Department, and then opened Juicehaus at 509 North Broad Street in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina. Most recently he completed the Chief Marketing Officer executive program at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.
What I'd tell a kid who's where I was
- Your mind is the most powerful tool you own.
- Work won't scare you if you learn to laugh your way through it.
- Learn something with your hands. It will feed you when nothing else will.
- Ask who benefits from what you're being told.
- Asking for help is not weakness. Keep a short list of people you can call at midnight, and be on someone else's.
- Pick the outcome you want, then work backward, one step at a time.