Q&A: Tucson Tamale Company aims to increase production eight-fold | Small Business

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Todd and Sherry Martin are the owners of the Tucson Tamale Company. Since opening a restaurant in 2008, the Martins have grown the company into a company that plans to produce more than 6,000,000 tamales this year. The company has two restaurants in Tucson but has grown into a wholesale company selling tamales in more than 3,500 grocery and specialty stores across the country. The tamales are number 3 among the natural brands in the Frozen Burrito category. (There is no frozen tamale category, so they are lumped together with the burritos.) The Tucson Tamale Company recently partnered with Diamond Ventures to purchase the Malone Meat and Poultry facility in South Tucson, where they own theirs The company and its staff want to expand to 50 employees.

Congratulations! You have just acquired the former Malone meat and poultry factory in South Tucson. What are you going to do in this room?

Sherry: We’re going to do a lot of tamales.

Todd: So our capacity is basically eight times the current level.

Many restaurants have had a really tough year thanks to the pandemic. How has COVID-19 affected your business?

Todd: Well, from a restaurant point of view, yes the restaurant was, I don’t mean to say, decimated, but we were probably down 70% in the first few months. So the first thing we did with the restaurants was to convert a large part of the dining room into a specialty market. It’s still the concept of “Come in and get a great takeaway”. But you can get great local items too. We offer many local artisans in the specialty market. So the restaurants are still on their way back. You are not back where you were. A large part of our restaurant is catering for business lunches. So that doesn’t happen. Nobody has a face-to-face meeting.

Sherry: When Tucson Tamale was introduced to grocery stores nationwide, Todd and I were promoting our tamales at trade shows, and we met other brands and love their food. So part of what we did in the restaurants in the market was sourcing items that we knew were pretty special that couldn’t be found at Safeway, for example, or even some specialty markets. One of our favorite items is the Sunshine Nut Company. They sell cashew nuts. This Sunshine Nut Company was founded by a former Hershey manager who moved to Mozambique to teach the people there how to create cashew cooperatives. So he lives in Mozambique, buys cashew nuts from local farmers and creates a little economy there. And then his wife pairs widows with orphans. This is how they start families and their cashew nuts are delicious. Part of that is helping people do really amazing things.

Todd: The other thing about COVID, however, is that most of our business is in wholesale. We are sold in over 3,500 stores across the country and we have a really strong ecommerce business. When COVID hit, frozen food sales in grocery stores just went through the roof. And that was really good for us. And then e-commerce – in April 2019 we shipped around 220 orders across the country, and by April 2020 we should have 1,400 orders. So we ended the last year in our overall business 50% better than 2019.

You mentioned earlier that you can increase production by a factor of eight. How many tamales are you doing now? And how many are you going to make?

Todd: Last year, on December 23rd, our four millionth tamale rolled off the assembly line for the year. This year we will make at least 6 million if not more. But we were only able to get new accounts to a limited extent last year just because we were pretty busy. By 2023 we will do 20 million.

How many did you do in your first year?

Todd: In our first year we made about 200,000

Sherry: And all of them are still made by hand. We’ve certainly improved our technology, but I’m really proud of our staff who show love and care to every single tamale that walks out the door. That’s what people say, but I’m serious. On the side of our sales box it says that these tamales were “lovingly made” and then the signature of each individual employee is on the side of the box. Because these are real people in real life and they are great tamales.

Todd: We are really proud to call ourselves “Tucson”. It was a decision we made when we started the company. We intended to become national. And you know, to the best of our knowledge, we’re the only national Tucson branded consumer packaged good product. We feel like Tucson’s ambassadors for the rest of the country.

You bring tamales so creatively. They make the standard green corn tamales and red chili tamales. But they also offer tamales with fillings such as curry and vegetables or blue corn and vegetables or breakfast sausage and cheese. Where did this idea come from to redesign the tamale and see what could be done with it?

Todd: Sherry and I have always been great foodies. We both worked at Intuit. And, you know, Sherry grew up with her family making tamales, and it was a great family tradition. Then her parents grew too old to continue this tradition. Sherry and I loved tamales. We looked around town, couldn’t find anything we liked that met all of our needs. So we started playing around with our own and when we were making tamales it occurred to me that a tamale is like a sandwich in the sense that anything you put between two slices of bread is a sandwich. This is the same as with masa and the filling. So whatever you can put in masa becomes a tamale. And that’s when we started to really expand and see what else we could do. I think on our website we have maybe 14 different flavors for you to buy. But we’ve probably made 70 different varieties over the years. Sometimes it was just one-off specials like we made a Chicken Pot Pie Tamale. We made an Italian sausage, we made a paella tamale. So we did a lot of different things to them. Make a great masa and filling and the two go together.

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