This article is part of Bísness School, a series that highlights one of the fastest-growing groups of entrepreneurs in the United States, Latinos. You can hear or watch the full conversation with Veronica Garza and Miguel Garza below.
Veronica Garza didn’t really know what “grain-free” meant in 2014.
“I remember looking that up at the time, like ‘What is grain-free?'” Garza said. “That means no flour, no corn. That was a lot of things that were off the table for me.”
Garza was a professor at the University of Texas at Laredo when a series of autoimmune disorders had her overhauling the way she ate.
“[My older brother Rob] had reached out and mentioned a different way of eating that he had discovered through CrossFit, which was a paleo type of diet,” she said. “It was sort of an elimination diet to determine the foods that felt good for me to eat and the things that were sort of causing issues, or inflammation for me.”
Get Tri-state area news delivered to your inbox. Sign up for NBC New York's News Headlines newsletter.
For Garza, the diet change worked. It helped alleviate some symptoms of lupus and Hashimoto’s disease, both autoimmune disorders that make the body attack itself. But for Garza, who grew up in a Mexican American family on the border between Texas and Mexico, the new diet came at a big cost, especially at family barbecues.
“It didn’t feel good to show up at a carne asada with a bag of lettuce and kind of get teased about it,” she said.
“There was one ingredient that I was really missing from my diet that sort of made me feel disconnected from my culture being a Mexican American, not being able to fully participate in food,” Garza said.
That ingredient was a tortilla. Whether they were the corn or flour variety, Garza couldn’t eat tortillas.
Garza decided to experiment in the kitchen to see if she could make a grain- and gluten-free version of a tortilla.
“I decided one day to put [almond flour] into something that could resemble a tortilla,” Garza remembers.
Garza’s family was impressed by the tortilla — so impressed that they encouraged her to sell them at the CrossFit gym the family owned. The health-conscious clientele in the border town of Laredo would surely appreciate a “better-for-you” tortilla, they thought. The hypothesis was correct.
“I was getting feedback of, ‘Hey, this is delicious,’” she said. “And sometimes it was from people who were still eating flour tortillas or corn tortillas. And they just loved the way the product tasted. Or, even at that time, I was already getting feedback from people who were saying, you know, I’m buying these for my son who has a gluten allergy, and they haven’t had something like a flour tortilla in years.”
Today, that tortilla has ballooned into Siete Foods, national billion-dollar brand of grain-free and gluten-free Mexican American food products that spans chips, salsas and cookies, is sold at major retailers across the United States, and was recently acquired by PepsiCo for $1.2 billion.
Veronica Garza and her brother Miguel, who is now the CEO of the company, spoke to NBC's Bísness School about how the family built Siete Foods into the fastest growing Hispanic food brand in the United States. The answers have been edited for length and clarity. The interview was conducted before PepsiCo announced it was acquiring the company.
Bísness School: Miguel, you enter the picture right after Veronica starts picking up appeal with your family’s CrossFit gym. You’re the youngest in the family, you’re off in Austin and you had just graduated from law school?
Miguel Garza: I was job hunting, actually. Potentially selfishly, I told my sister she should start a business. That way maybe down the line I would have a job, since I was job hunting. The conversation was driven by being in a community in Austin of people that were starting businesses and specifically consumer packaged goods businesses — and really thinking that we might be able to do the same thing, that my sister’s product could become a business beyond the side hustle. I think I told her that she would regret not starting the business when she saw somebody else launch the same product that she had created.
BS: What is that first step to get your first account or first store to carry your tortillas?
Veronica Garza: My brother is pretty persistent, and he’s really good at just getting things done. He had mentioned to me, let’s just see if even one customer is interested in carrying the product. That’s when I took samples up to Austin, to a co-op [store]. We had a very informal meeting standing in the middle of the grocery store, in the middle of an aisle, just telling the buyer about our product. He wanted to just take the product to the back and try it later. My brother made the guy try the product right in front of us. He was like, “No, I want to see your reaction,” which I was really anxious about, being the one who made the product. But thankfully the buyer’s reaction was good and on the spot, he said he would carry our product. That was very exciting to us, but I remember getting in the car with my brother and being like, “Ok, what do we do now?”
Bísness School: It’s a tall order to receive that compliment, but also a super tall order to then be carried in Whole Foods. So how do you get from a co-op in Austin to Whole Foods?
MG: You knock on the door, and then they tell you no, and then you get lucky. One of our customers at the co-op store, Wheatsville, was somehow connected with one of the executives at Whole Foods. She was producing a documentary that Whole Foods was involved in. She reached out to us and said, “Hey, I just want to let you know that you should be receiving an email from Whole Foods. I think that they’re going to want to carry you.” We actually got an email that was a forward of a forward of a forward, where it was a chain of individuals saying, “Hey, we need to figure out how to get this product on our shelves.”
Watch the full conversation with Veronica Garza and Miguel Garza to learn what the number “Siete,” or seven, in the company’s name refers to, how they got Eva Longoria to be an investor and why they call it a Mexican American food brand and not a Mexican one.
