Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | S | Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery

Bigger 'n' better: Albuquerque Tortilla Co.'s latest expansion allows the family-owned business to streamline the production of home-style tortillas and expand its line of authentic new Mexican foods.

Article Excerpt
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

No 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.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

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...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!