Texas State Graduate Student Receives Future Texas Business Legend Award  

By Autumn McGowan
Web Content Contributor

Texas State graduate student Joshua Travieso has been awarded the Future Texas Business Legend Award from the Texas Business Hall of Fame. The award is a grant for $15,000 that Travieso will use to further his business, Floresville Coffee, Texas’ first independent coffee roastery.

Travieso is part of the MBA program at the Round Rock campus and says when he started Floresville Coffee with his friend and business partner, Michael Montes, he was able to integrate the knowledge he has gained at Texas State.  

“He had a lot of equipment and experience, so it was really helpful along with the knowledge I had attained at Texas State in the business program,” Travieso said. “So it was just a lot of lucky circumstances that allowed us to launch and do well early on.”

Travieso and Montes started gathering everything they needed to launch their business in October of 2018 and had their grand opening party a year later. 

“We developed our own facility using an upcycled storage container. We own all our facilities. We own all of our own equipment. We did it all with our own capital,” Travieso said.

“For the first year we were just getting all our ducks in a row and lining up everything and October 2019 was our grand opening party.”

The secret to Floresville is that Travieso sources all the coffee himself and uses a fluid bed roaster, as opposed to the commonly used drum roaster, to produce the highest quality specialty coffee possible for their customers.

“We use something called a fluid bed roaster, which uses hot air that’s heated up by electrical elements as opposed to drum roasters, which use a lot of natural gas and propane gas,” Travieso said. 

“I do all the sourcing and curating myself and so my goal is to find the best quality coffee that I can get to the public at the most efficient price. That’s basically what makes us different. It’s not necessarily all about making money, we’re trying to really introduce people to the highest quality specialty coffee and let them know that these things can taste spectacular.”

Currently, Floresville offers about eight or nine types of single origin coffee and four blends, and does most of their business through digital marketplaces and vendors. 

You can find them online at Floresvillecoffee.com, on Instagram at @floresvillecoffee, and on Facebook as Floresville Coffee Company.

Featured Image via Joshua Travieso