Small Food Businesses as a Way Up in Mexico
Now let’s go up the social scale a bit and return to food.
Every Monday the local paper AM runs a section called Valor Agregado (Added Value) about local León businesses. I read it avidly as a wonderful peephole into Mexican entrepreneurship.
Today, and this would be typical, among their other stories they reported on three small food businesses. Today they are all restaurants but there are other kinds of food startups too. Of course many of these will fail, but not all of them. And food startups with their relatively low entry costs have been the first step up for hardworking ambitious people in many parts of the world.
- Tortas Sabrosas de Celaya (Tasty Tortas from Celaya, a town about 50 miles away) reports that it’s going to expand and offer franchises. It started 12 years ago in Cañitas market as a juice stand with 3 employees. Now it has 23 employees and its line of tortas.
- Coco Express. A young couple in their 20s by the look of it are going to open a franchise of this Guadalajara chainin León. It features a machine for cutting open coconuts, extracting and chilling the water, and a series of coconut products.
- Burritos Efraín. Efraín Hernández opened his second stand which offers 16 different kinds of burritos. He left Mexico in 1994 and worked for seven years in Wisconsion in a restaurant that offered giant burritos (I think I can guess which). He returned to León in 2000 with enough money to get a taxi or open a food stand.
He decided to open a fajitas stand, discovered it was the burritos that sold, and concentrated on those, starting with northern and swiss burritos (whatever they may be), then added burrito ranchero with chorizo and avocado and then more.
Meanwhile he went to a local university to learn more about business, and now has printed menus, his two stands decorated in red and yellow, and 12 uniformed employees.
So I’m cheering Efraín on.
“And food startups with their relatively low entry costs have been the first step up for hardworking ambitious people in many parts of the world.”
It worked in Seoul. Setting up a little table, cart or kiosk somewhere in a city with a lot of pedestrian density, open air markets and sidewalk shops was a relatively fast track to upward mobility.