Founder of CocoRiquito
Meet Stacey
My favorite place to be is in the kitchen – it's always been my happy place. While most kids were out playing with friends, I was hanging out with my abuelas in the kitchen, watching them make everything from scratch. I watched them put so much love into the food they made, then sit back while the rest of the family ate, because all the fuel they needed was the smiles and silence that came from food made with love.
Some of my strongest memories come from cooking for family. It’s part of my culture, and it’s who I am. It’s where I learned that food is my generational inheritance and that it’s a love language – seeing people smile when I make them something is one of life’s greatest joys.
I loved cooking enough that at one point I seriously considered leaving college for culinary school. My parents' response was essentially: absolutely not.
So, I stayed in college, but I never left the kitchen.
Over the years, I became the person in my family who held onto the family recipes. The one person people asked to figure out the recipe when we didn’t have it in writing. The person who still makes everything from scratch, preserves the recipes, and carries forward much of the culinary lineage my abuelos left us.
CocoRiquito grew from that same instinct.
Ironically, I didn't grow up drinking traditional rum-based coquito, because I was raised in a Seventh-day Adventist home where alcohol wasn't part of our lifestyle. There were alcohol-free versions around, but as an adult, I would eventually discover that they weren't quite the same. Rum is what brings coquito to life. It adds a rich layer of complexity and gives depth to an otherwise basic coconut-flavored drink.
The little girl who was always in the kitchen asking questions about how to make everything wanted to figure out how to make this “traditional” coquito herself. What started as curiosity became a recipe I spent years refining – and eventually the holiday gift everyone knew me for.
I wasn’t willing to compromise on anything I loved about my rum-based recipe – the richness, the creaminess, the indulgence. Everything about it gave me that unmistakable feeling of the holidays, and I wanted to preserve what I had discovered so many years ago.
It turns out that creating an alcohol-free version wasn't about taking something away. I realized I wasn't just recreating what I had before. I had the opportunity to make something more people could experience together. Something I could bring to a table and share with the whole family.
In a funny way, I went looking for the coquito I didn't grow up drinking and ended up creating one that brought me right back to my roots.
Maybe that’s why CocoRiquito means so much to me. It carries a little bit of everything that came before it – the little girl in her abuelas’ kitchen, the recipes that were passed down, the ones I had to figure out for myself, and a tradition I found my own way of carrying forward.
And just like everything else I learned to make in my abuelas’ kitchen, CocoRiquito is always made with love and meant to be enjoyed with those you love.