Newly graduated from Florida Atlantic, Christopher Rosario was working as an intern at the financial firm UBS and felt trapped by what he saw as a tedious and stressful environment.

Rosario ended up working with his dad for a couple of years, not only to get away from the finance sector but to find himself.

As a result, Rosario founded The Raw Juice Company, which specializes in cold-pressed juices and is located in South Florida.

Now, Rosario is launching PEKO Tea House in the same region. He said that he plans to eventually expand to other locations.

Rosario explained that he got the idea of creating cold-pressed juices after he watched the documentary “Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead.”

According to its website, the documentary follows Joe Cross, a man who is severely overweight and suffering from a debilitating autoimmune disease. He takes a 60-day trip around the United States, drinking fresh juices to better his health and sharing with people the benefits of juicing.

“I saw that documentary and I was kind of intrigued, so I decided to do juicing on my own with my parents and my best friends,” Rosario said. “And we were like, ‘Wow this is like actually something that helps.’”

He said that PEKO Tea House was created with the same kind of idea in mind.

“We were just like drinking tea and we were like, ‘How can we make this tea better?’ We’re living in a coffee culture, especially in South Florida and there are Starbucks everywhere, everyone likes coffee, everyone needs coffee, apparently. I know I do,” Rosario said.

“And I remember I was drinking a cold-brew coffee and thinking, ‘We could try this with tea.’”

Rosario said that he’s found cold-brew tea comes with a lot of benefits, and since it has to be steeped for 24 to 48 hours, a lot more nutrients are extracted.

“And that’s kind of how that was born,” Rosario said. “We were like, ‘OK so this is new, this is something that is different, let’s run with this.’ And we became Florida’s first organic cold-brew tea.”

Rosario said that he not only wanted to make better tea but also have a positive effect on the area.

“So we actually coined the term: ‘brewing a tea for change,’” Rosario said. “And what we do is that at a lot of these pop-up events, depending on the location, we’ll actually choose a local charity and for every bottle that we vend, we’ll donate a dollar to that local charity.”

According to Rosario, his main goal is to expand the company to a nationwide level. For now, he is going to focus on putting the tea in hotels, spas, Whole Foods, Publix Super Markets and other retailers based in South Florida.

“Let’s stick to infiltrating the South Florida market first because there is a lot of competition when you’re creating a new beverage,” Rosario said. “Especially something like tea, it’s pretty intense but it’s fun.”

Jessica Johnson is a contributing writer with the University Press. For more information regarding this or other stories, email [email protected] or tweet her @jessangst.