Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - December 2008 - (Page 19)

o matter what they say, the work is never done. That’s the mantra for everyone who has been smitten by the entrepreneurial spirit and whose search for freedom from the corporate rat race has resulted in a lifelong sentence to a labor of love. It’s the daily predicament that growing small businesses face as they encounter unexpected new opportunities and confront harsh unpredictable challenges in what seems like a never-ending bid for survival. It’s also the lesson that Chris Martinez learned from his father, Luther, who founded Albuquerque Tortilla Co. in 1987. One day, just after the company opened, Chris remembers talking to his dad as he painted the windowsills in the company’s nondescript 1,300-sq.-ft. store and asking him what appeared to be an obviously simple question. “I knew nothing about this business,” Chris recalls. “I was actually in the medical ﬁeld. So I asked him, ‘How in the heck are you going to make money selling tortillas?’” His father paused to think about it for a while, and then said a word — possibly two — that better be left up to the imagination. “We laugh about it 21 years later because it has provided the family with a good living, and we have been pretty big employers in New Mexico over time,” Chris says. N In the beginning, like many start-up enterprises, the family business struggled just to make ends meet. “I remember my dad working 18 hours a day, coming home dead tired and full of grease and burns from the oven,” says Chris, currently vice president of sales and marketing. “We had a very simple 90-degree press that would make two tortillas at a time.” Eventually, other family members got involved. Chris’ mother, Rose, is vice president of the company. Rose’s brother, Pete Martinez, would spend the morning producing tortillas that Chris, who left his medical job, would sell in the afternoon and then return to the shop at 3 p.m. to work the night shift in the ﬂedgling operation. “We didn’t have a mission statement,” says Pete, now director of operations. “The job was to make it and sell it as fast as we can.” For more than two decades, the work has never been done. As sales grew, Pete recalls, so did the operation from the original shop of 7,000 sq. ft. to 20,000 sq. ft. in size. In 2000, the company shifted to a 104,000-sq.-ft. operation, just a 10-minute drive from downtown Albuquerque. Finally, Chris thought, the company could take a breather. That lasted until the company’s prepared foods business began to blossom. “When we moved into this plant, we thought, ‘This is it. We’re done. We have plenty of room,’” he recalls. “But lo’ and behold, ﬁve years later, we were back at the drawing board.” Today, in addition to cranking out tens of thousands of tortillas an hour, the U-shaped 189,000-sq.-ft. food processing plant produces dozens of varieties of authentic, individually quick frozen (IQF) New Mexican-style snacks, appetizers and entrees for restaurants, schools and the supermarket freezer case. The 85,000-sq.-ft. expansion is a stateof-the-art, U.S. Department of Agricultureinspected facility that houses ﬁve lines, including one that makes tamales, another that pumps out burritos, a pouch line for institutional sauces and seasoned meats, a line for rolled taquitos and enchiladas and a tray operation for frozen dinners such as chile rellanos. All recipes, Pete says, are developed inhouse. That’s why the company’s slogan is “From our kitchen…to your table.” “What you can get in a restaurant, you can get here,” Pete says. “We make the products that grandma would serve at dinner.” All Shapes and Sizes Overall, the food processing part of the plant operates ﬁve days a week while ﬂour tortilla production runs seven days a week. Albuquerque Tortilla Co. also produces white, yellow and blue corn tortillas, as well as unfried corn tortilla chips, salsas, spices and New Mexico’s signature red and green chile sauce. In the ﬂour tortilla production department, four lines turn out 5,850 dozen an hour, depending on the size of the tortilla. A larger, new line, installed about a year ago, can crank 1,140 dozen an hour. For the retail market, the company sells everything from 6-in. ﬂour gorditas to 9.5-in. burrito-sized ones. For foodservice, the plant also makes 10-in. and 12-in. wraps. Albuquerque Tortilla Co. speciﬁcally installed the new larger line to produce a more consistent foodservice wrap. The line’s larger press and its rocker arms, Pete notes, move more evenly than the older lines and allow the plant to create a more consistent product with less heat and pressure. Flour is stored in ﬁve, 50,000-sq.-ft. enclosed silos adjacent to the production area. For the double lines, ﬂour is pumped into two, 300-lb. sifters and into one of ﬁve spiral mixer bowls, which feed each divider with ﬁve to six 300-lb. batches an hour, again depending on the size of the tortilla. A separate room with three more mixers is dedicated to the larger new ﬂour tortilla line. “We limit the batches because you get more uniform products with smaller batches,” Pete says. “When you get over 1,000-lb. batches, the recipe doesn’t always transfer right through the oven.” Unlike most bakeries and tortilla manuContinued on page 20 www.snackandbakery.com DECEMBER 2008 - Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery 19 http://www.snackandbakery.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - December 2008

Snack Food &�Wholesale Bakery - December 2008 Contents Editor’s Note Now, That’s Haute! Bigger ‘n’ Better But Is It Art? New Products Branching Out Engineering Management Fits to a T Racing to the Finish The Final Word

Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - December 2008

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