Miguel Garza, co-founder of Siete Foods, explains why the family had to rent commercial kitchen space nightly in late 2014 to keep up with demand.
Insight
Garza: Never store tortillas in produce warehouses due to moisture and mold
“We had made one of the, a mistake, basically, which is don't store tortillas in a produce warehouse, because produce warehouses are humid, right? There's a lot of moisture, and produce has mold spores on it.”
Insight
Garza: Fast brand-building is the only defense when innovative products get copied
“If you have an innovative product, it'll probably get copied, and, like, the only thing that you have to play defense against that is building a brand and running as fast as you can.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Garza: Siete sold out its initial retail batch within 24 hours
“So we had put these tortillas on the shelf in May of 2014 at Wheatsville, and we put two cases to the shelf, and we had learned a little bit from owning the gym on, like, marketing a service-based business, so what, you know, what we did was we took a picture,…”
Assertion Supported
Siete Foods raised $1M from Austin angels and a Chicago broker
“Yeah, we raised a million dollars from a few angel investors here in town, and then a natural foods broker who's based out of Chicago.”
Assertion Supported
Siete Foods expanded to four Whole Foods regions in January 2016
“They had their regional call, and four regions ended up being very excited about the product, and so January of 2016, we ended up launching in four regions.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Siete Foods was profitable and growing sustainably during 2016 retail expansion
“Yeah, yeah, because we were, at that point in time, we were making enough money to grow the business sustainably, and we were, we weren't making big bets beyond the innovation”