Vasquez moved to New York from Ecuador in 2017 with the primary goal of learning English. Toward the end of 2019, after two years of language school, she stopped in at the City University of New York (CUNY) Welcome Center, intrigued after a friend had recently enrolled.
She spoke with a woman named Maxine. Vasquez said she’ll never forget her name. With Maxine’s help, Vasquez enrolled at Hostos Community College in South Bronx. At first, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to study, but the idea of starting a food business had long lingered.
She tried both early childhood education and food studies. Food studies won.
Fast forward to November 2020 and Vasquez, like so many others in New York City and around the world, came down with COVID-19. But with a full load of classwork, her idea of starting a food business was forced to remain on the back burner.
She knew she wanted to build a business around beans, a staple of her diet growing up in Ecuador. Forced to hole up in her room for 10 days and with a sudden influx of time to spend, she decided to make the best of the quarantine.
Vasquez joked that since she came to the United States on a student visa, she had three options that would allow her to stay in the U.S.: Marry an American citizen, find a job that would sponsor her visa, or start a business.
She picked the third choice. While cooped up in her room, she contacted SCORE NYC, an organization that provides free business mentorship and advisement to entrepreneurs and small businesses, and soon Full of Beans Kitchen was born.
Her plan at first was to build a business delivering freshly cooked beans to people like herself who didn’t have the time to cook beans from scratch but weren’t impressed by the usual canned offerings at the supermarket.
But in the following months, she pivoted to creating a new way for people to eat beans for breakfast.
