La Tortilla Factory

Jose and Mary Tamayo and their five sons opened a small taqueria in Santa Rosa in 1977 — the first such establishment in Sonoma County, which they called a Mexicattessen — and made fresh corn tortillas at the back of the storefront on a small machine, bag of masa at hand. By 1989 the family had closed the restaurant, moved into a 15,000-square-foot facility, and was producing tortillas for wholesale; by the 1990s the firm had popularised the category that the food industry now calls *better-for-you* tortillas, with fat-free and low-carb variants that travelled out of Northern California and onto the supermarket shelves of the rest of the country.

The firm makes flour and corn tortillas, wraps, taco shells, and the related bakery items in branded retail and private-label form, from a single production facility in Santa Rosa, in the heart of Sonoma County. Distribution is national; La Tortilla Factory’s products sit on the shelves of major American grocery chains, club-store retailers, and natural-foods retailers, and serve the food-service trade through specialist distributors. The firm has remained operationally headquartered in Santa Rosa for the entirety of its history.

What distinguishes La Tortilla Factory in its sector is the combination of family origin and category leadership. Most American tortilla manufacturers of comparable scale are either regional players still serving their immediate metropolitan area or national private-label producers operating as the manufacturing arm of a grocery group; La Tortilla Factory was a Sonoma County family business that took a national category position by recognising — earlier than the rest of the industry — that the American consumer was interested in tortillas with calorie counts and fibre content stated on the label. The 2017 sale of a controlling interest moved the firm into an external ownership structure, but the founding family remains involved.

The practice has worked with La Tortilla Factory at the Santa Rosa production facility on Lean process implementation across operations.