How a Mexican Food Brand Turns Restaurant Trends Into Pantry Staples

0:00Part of the journey is working, listening a lot to what is popular in Mexican cuisine in the US. I think these trends a lot start from restaurants and move to the shelf. Hey, I'm Shuang Esther Shan, and this is Shopify Masters, your companion for starting and building a business. Have you ever wondered how your favorite food products were created? How they're produced? How do they get on the shelves of grocery stores? And more importantly, how can you do the same with your business idea? Today, we're getting Miguel Liel to answer all those questions. Miguel is one of the co-founders of Somos, makers of authentic Mexican food products that can be found in thousands of stores.

0:45Prior to Somos, Miguel shaped many of the brands you love today, like Kind Snacks, Denon, and PepsiCo. Miguel, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Sean, for having me. Thank you so much for your interest, for your support on Somos. I am so excited to be with you today. And we're so excited to chat with you. We understand that you actually had the idea for Somos with your co-workers for a couple of years before you actually launched. So tell us about what sparked the idea for Somos. The way that the idea for Somos sparked was actually not out of a product, but it was out of an experience.

1:27Daniel, Rodrigo and I, we were all living in New York. We were all working at kind bars and we saw how much Mexican food changed in restaurants. Just food became a lot more like the food we ate growing up in Mexico. And when we would go to the shelf, we would see that it was basically not the same level of innovation. It was still yellow, hard tacos and canned beans on the shelf. And Mexican food at restaurants just continued this level of quality and popularity. And the shelf continued to felt stale. Once we started working on it, Rodrigo was in Mexico. He was in Guadalajara. And he would send Daniel and I samples of products via mail.

2:24And we would invite all of our neighbors and our friends and our family. We would put them together and enjoy them. And that was the first spark for Somos. We said, well, what if we were able to put together these boxes that arrive to people's homes? And then you can create basically a Taco Tuesday in a box. And so Moses started then. I think a lot of us might have similar ideas where they think a dish from their family recipe or their favorite food items would be great on a grocery shelf. But how do you actually determine that certain food items and dishes can be turned into a viable consumer packaged good that could be turned into something that could exist on a shelf?

3:14That is a great question. When we started Somos, what we saw was the opportunity to make Mexican food more convenient. So if you look at ethnic food in the United States, Mexican food just surpassed Italian food to become the number one ethnic food. However, most of Mexican food is sold at restaurants. Over 80%. People are still not comfortable cooking Mexican food at home, especially when they don't have a Mexican grandma that taught them how to cook. So there is still a lot of food that it's eaten at a restaurant, it's delivered, or it is picked up. So what we're trying to do with Somos is to make Mexican food as convenient as doing pasta with sauce is for Italian food.

4:18It sounds like you saw this gap in the market that could be filled with Somos. And I think your extensive experience with so many different companies like Kind Snacks, Cholula, Diamond Foods was about product expansion and identifying those gaps. So for fellow founders in similar positions, how do you go about determining which category you should go after and how do you find those opportunities? So it's very much what the famous Steve Jobs quote that you cannot connect the dots moving forward. You can connect them moving backwards. The way that I think about it is where I am sitting today. I can see how my experience at Kind was fundamental into starting this business.

5:09I was able to learn about the culture of ownership, about creating a beautiful brand that would outlast us and would create something beautiful for the consumer. Cholula was also very important for me because it taught me all the tailwinds that Mexican food had. But at the end, the business that we are running today and the 30 billion opportunity that you mentioned of closing the gap of cooking Mexican food at home, we really didn't see it until we were already in the arena and we were talking to retailers. I think, as it regards to your question for fellow founders or founders to be, it is very important to put yourself out there, to play with these things, and also to listen to where the consumer is taking you and where it's not taking you.

6:11I think with some of us, we were very fortunate that where the consumer was taking us was this incredible gap that was currently not being addressed at retail. And a big part of it is offering these authentic recipes where you worked extensively with chefs to develop them. Can you tell us about some key areas you focus on when you're turning those recipes and scaling them up for production? Our objective is to make Mexican meals easier. for the consumer. Today, if you Google a Mexican recipe, it will probably take you to a recipe that has between 8 to 12 ingredients and would take you for 45 minutes to an hour to make, and then I would say another 20 minutes to clean.

7:05We want to create recipes that take less than five ingredients and less than 15 minutes. That is very important and that is part of the ethos of Somos. not only to make life easier and more delicious for our consumers, but also to increase their confidence in cooking ethnic food. And they don't have to clean, which makes they can spend a lot more time around the table with their family. So we start there. That is the objective and that is the ethos on Somos. On the back end, to answer your question, we are looking for ingredients that tell the story of a journey. We started in this route of taste and convenience with sourcing ingredients that are very popular in Mexican food in the U.S., like jalapeno peppers, like chipotle peppers, like refried beans, like rice with lime and cilantro.

8:11And now what we've been doing is listening a lot on social media and on data on what items are becoming very popular in Mexican restaurants. For example, last year, what we saw was that street corn, Mexican street corn or esquites, was basically everywhere. We could see it in social media. We could see them in restaurants, not only in New York and Texas, but actually in the Midwest and in the mountain region. So we felt like it was time to bring some of those products into the portfolio of Somo. So we created our Mexican street corn white rice, which is fantastic. If you haven't tried it, it's probably my family's favorite product at this point.

9:05And that is part of the journey is working, listening a lot to what is popular in Mexican cuisine in the U.S. I think these trends a lot start from restaurants and move to the shelf and then sourcing the product with farmers in Mexico. And then making sure, just continue with the example of a straight corn rice, that we can char the corn, that we can add a pasote, which is a umami herb born in Mexico. and that we continue to bring the story of Mexico through the ingredients and the recipes that we use. Can you tell us about the importance of working with these farmers because they're such a big part of your supply chain?

9:49So how did you go about approaching these farmers and setting up that operation? It is actually a story that I love to tell, Juan. Thank you for asking it. When we started the company, this whole notion of premium Mexican food was something that it took us a while to sell in. Took us a while to sell to our sourcing partners, to our farmers in Mexico, and to sell to our cooking partners in Mexico as well. We wanted products that were non-GMO. We wanted products that were gluten-free. And just to highlight the complexities of what we were trying to create, rice is gluten-free, but sometimes it gets transported on trucks that have carried items with gluten.

10:43So to clean up that supply chain to the level of quality that we wanted to create Somos, we received a lot of pushback. A lot of people told us that we should be focusing on maybe creating food that was, you know, of lower quality and was more affordable or cheaper to make and cheaper to transport. and me and my two co-founders, we just bought that battle. We believe that the same trends that we're seeing in restaurants of this quality food, that the consumer will react positively to it on the shelf. So we ended up with partners that gave us that opportunity and we did a lot of work getting farmers certified and cooking farmers certified with all the certifications that we wanted someone to have.

11:39And at the end, when we put the items on the shelf, we saw the consumers reacting so positively to the brand, to being non-GMO, gluten-free, plant-based, clean ingredients, everything coming together, creating delicious flavors. And it really surprised us. And I would tell you, the first year of operation of the company, I was spending most of my time working with customers, selling this idea of the Somos systems and Mexican meals made easy. Today, I spent most of my time talking to suppliers, visiting farmers, visiting kitchens, visiting packaging suppliers and building a community of Somos. I don't think Somos is just the team members that are here, but it is every farmer, every cook, every chef that helps us with the recipe.

12:41And something that I hear a lot that makes me proud is that they love how we show the best version of Mexico, a version of Mexican food that is so clean and delicious. They are all proud to be part of this journey. It really sounds like you've built up this community and network of farmers and cooks and chefs. How do you go about managing so many different pieces of the puzzle to make sure that everything runs smoothly all the time? Yeah, it's tough. But something that I learned from my time at Kind is that everything starts with the team. So I've been very lucky to have a fantastic team at Somos that they spend a lot of time making sure that we are sourcing the best ingredients, that we are also developing new formulas with chefs and using cooking processes that make our food taste fresh and delicious.

13:46One example of that is our line of salsas where we use a process in Mexican cuisine called tatemado. And we are able to do this in an industrial scale. Tatemado is a process of roasting vegetables and tomatoes together. And you get a beautiful sauce that the ingredients are very well mixed, but that it is not watery. You lose a lot of the liquid through the process. So when you put it on your taco bowl or in your burrito or on your eggs in the morning, the water from the salsa doesn't make your taco soggy and all the flavor remains on top. So to answer your question, I owe a lot of that to the Somos team, first of all.

14:37But then I think our, I would say our secret ingredient is spend time with the suppliers. We, with our head of operations and our sourcing managers in Mexico, I spend a lot of time giving them updates on SOMOS, sharing the forecast, sharing the wins with them. also getting input from them on what recipes or maybe what new technology we should be using to make our food taste even better. And that really makes a difference. I think especially culturally in Mexico to be reaching out and to make partners part of the story, then we're able to get the best quality peppers and the best quality tomatoes.

15:25Or maybe we get more than our first share of time on the cooking line. And all of these little things really add up. It's very cool to hear about the behind the scenes, how many different little steps you and your team had to take to make sure that everyone's breakfast experience was enjoyable and not a watery one. There were also a great deal of misconceptions you had to work against, like showcasing the diversity of Mexican food beyond tacos and also expanding customers' knowledge beyond what they know from fast food chains. How did you tackle the customer education front? We talked about one of the misconceptions that we had on the Mexico side, which was this pushback against high-quality Mexican food on the shelf.

16:18The other big misconceptions that we had was that Mexican cuisine was cheesy, was too heavy, or was full of empty calories. The reality is when I talk to Daniel and Rodrigo, my co-founders, I am from Monterrey, Daniel is from Mexico City, Rodrigo is from Guadalajara. The food that we grew up with was nothing like that. It was incredibly tasty. It was full of legumes, full of vegetables, food of really very nourishing ingredients. So I think we had to fight back a lot of that. And intentionally, we wanted our first line of product to be all plant-based with clean ingredients. because we felt we needed to really differentiate ourselves from the rest of the Mexican food that was in the market.

17:23It was not enough to be delicious and convenient. We also had to have this plant-based, this gluten-free, this non-GMO certification and the highest quality ingredients. And only by starting at the very top of quality and taste, then we could tell consumers that there was a different way to enjoy Mexican food that would really nourish you. And maybe, you know, the story I like to tell, just to complement my answer, is both Daniel and I are married to Americans. So we're in a, you know, multicultural family. I've been married now for 20 years. And at the beginning of my relationship, sometimes we say, well, I don't want to eat Mexican food like twice in a week.

18:16That would be too heavy. Now at home with my wife and my kids, we eat Mexican food several times a week. Like, you know, I love to give the example that, you know, in Mexico, we have Mexican food every day of the week and, you know, we're able to do it. So it was just fighting that paradigm of Mexican food today in the U.S. versus, you know, what Mexican food can be in terms of nourishment. You're not just changing the way that grocery shelves are looking, but you're also changing how lifestyles of the different consumers are having with SOMOs. And I understand the beginning of launching SOMOs, you did launch with the direct-to-consumer model.

19:00How did you incorporate their feedback and innovate with their reviews in mind as you developed new products? Yeah, direct-to-consumer has been a big part of our journey. And I would even say it has been a big part in three different chapters so far. At the beginning, the most important thing for us was to get a proof of concept and to get feedback on consumers on the product. And direct-to-consumer was just such an incredible way to make that happen. Direct-to-consumer is an incredible model for both growth and brand loyalty and also consumer feedback. So when we started, we would do our first run.

19:55We would put it on our website. We would ship it out. At the beginning, it was mostly family and friends. We would just put it organically on social media, and we would get an immediate reaction on how people were using the products, what do they love about it, the naming conventions, how to sell it, what kind of recipes that we have. and I don't think it would have been possible to do it without D2C. Omnichannel has always been a distribution strategy for someone. So on our second chapter, direct-to-consumers played a big role. As we go into this next third chapter, what we are finding out is the convenience, the recipes, The way that we allow consumers to be comfortable cooking Mexican food at homes, five ingredients, 15 minutes, is something that is made for D2C.

20:58And the way that we see our path moving forward is how do we create partnerships? How do we create recipes? How do we collaborate with chefs? and we can bring that just constant newness and variety on the recipes and experiences that it would be very hard to do on retail. So for, you know, all the other fellow founders, I think the experience that I would love to share about Somos is the different role each channel takes. I think there has been a lot of chatter of moving from retail to D2C or from D2C to retail, where I actually see these channels evolving and playing different roles as the company is scaling.

21:49Sounds like a very complimentary approach you have with all of the different channels. I'm chatting with Miguel Liel, co-founder and CEO of Somos. If you're enjoying today's episode or if you want to give us feedback for the show, leave us a review wherever you're listening right now. Give us a follow or subscribe. If you haven't, it helps others to discover the show. Thank you so much. This year has also been a really big year for new products, one of which is the salsa matcha. We can think of it kind of like a Mexican chili crisp. Tell us more about this launch. Salsa matcha is a really interesting phenomenon because it is a recipe that has existed in Mexico for many years, over 100 years.

22:39And it's a very regional product. You know, salsa matcha that started in the state of Veracruz is very different than a salsa matcha from the West Coast or even a salsa matcha from the North. when I am from. So in Mexico, I would say that it has been a slow burn of popularity. And right now it's really growing significantly. When I was young, you would go to Mexico and see one or two salsa matchas on the shelf. I was just there for a retail tour and there were 20 to 30 different salsa matchas on the shelf. Super popular. What we've seen in the U.S., especially over the past five years, is just an explosion of Asian chili crisps entered the mainstream market.

23:31Me, in particular, have become a huge, huge fan on our household of those products. Something that I've been paying a lot of attention to is the Asian chili crisps started a lot in restaurants. and now over 60 % of the volume, it's actually used at home. So continuing, Schoen, with that story of food becoming very popular in food service away from home and then just exploding in at-home usage. When we look at the similarities between these two products, we see this trend of global cuisine, especially in condiments. and we think salsa matcha is not that different. Rodrigo's family, Rodrigo, my co-founder, they've been developing salsa matcha and selling them in Mexico for over 20 years.

24:29So we thought it would be a great opportunity to bring this product into the U.S. We developed our salsa matcha with avocado oil, so it is a slightly different note. than some of the chili crisp in the market. It's a little nuttier. It also has a lot of seeds, a lot of nuts that we, you know, put through the oven to give some umami to the flavor. And it has a lot of versatility. You know, we use it with Mexican food, but it's actually quite popular on breakfast foods, eggs, avocado toast, anywhere to pizza, to ice cream. So I am very happy to be bringing this product to market, especially with the quality and the taste that we're bringing it on.

25:23But I am also very happy to be bringing a recipe that has been in my co-founder Rodrigo's family for over 20 years. There's something very fun about promoting this new product as well. I understand during the promotion, you actually partnered with a fellow founder, Fly by Jing, to do some of the promotion. Tell us about how that partnership came to be. So for the launch of Salsa Matcha, I was able to partner with Jing from Fly by Jing, who her and I have developed just an amazing relationship. I think both of us have learned a lot from each other and I just really enjoyed talking to her. She is such a wealth of knowledge when it comes to ingredients and cooking process.

26:17And she has been so generous of sharing her scale-up experience on Fly by Gene with other founders, including myself. So we thought it would be super fun to get together and create videos in which both of us share our favorite recipes for Sichuan chili crisp and salsa matcha. And it was so much fun. We ordered a lot of different foods, some of it Mexican, some of it Asian, some of it Italian, some of it desserts. and we were able to try both of our products together and talk about our sourcing and brand stories. And it's one of my favorite things that I think is like so specific about food, this community of founders where we really don't compete with each other and are able to help each other out to be successful.

27:17So we are now looking at ways that we can activate these two brands together in trade shows and in-store and with recipes. And it is, I love building Somos, but I also love the opportunity to building together with other great founders like her. Yeah, and it sounds like you guys had such a fun interaction and also brainstorming session. We also loved having Jing on the show before. So great to hear about the partnership. And for yourself and the team, I know that growing, expanding involves a lot of innovation. How are you injecting creativity and innovation for the team and for yourself as well?

28:00Yeah, we just had a wonderful session in San Miguel de Agenda. So we took one of our most important retailer partners to San Miguel. We start by walking a lot of stores, Mexican convenience stores. I love to think that in the U.S. we have a Mexican aisle, but in Mexico every aisle is a Mexican aisle. So it's like a great place to start having ideas. Then we meet with farmers and then we talk about sourcing. We talk about ingredients. We talk about ingredients in the sense of stories that we can tell about Mexican cuisine, about, you know, different regions and different cuisines in Mexico. Then we spend time with our cooking partners in Mexico, just going through different technologies and different products that come in.

28:55And we end up at night having dinner with different chefs in Mexico that bring products that are really out of the box, maybe products that are very popular in Mexico that we might bring in five or six years from now. And then we can get feedback from our retail partners in terms of, you know, when we can bring those products into the market. And this is just an example, but I think it really illustrates the point. You know, I try to be very present in those meetings. You know, when we are eating, you know, be open and be listening and be very mindful in those conversations. And then the other part of that is you can have all this creativity, but the team has to be able to bring these products to market and promote them with consumers.

29:49and, you know, take care of the procurement and the supply chain. So have all of those follow-ups. But something that I was thinking a lot about in this particular trip is how fortunate I am that this is my life, that I get to go and meet with farmers and take partners from the U.S. with me and have dinner with different chefs every night and try all these different cuisine. It is a great thing to do, these meetings. but it is also, it makes me so happy to be able to share a little bit of my culture through my work. Yes, I was just going to say, it sounds like such a fun part of your job. Not only do you get to be creative and productive, but you get to enjoy so many experiences and share them with your partners as well.

30:35To close off the show, I would love to just ask you about what is your hope for the next chapter for Mexican food in North America. And what do you hope to accomplish with SOMOS? Yeah, I really would go back to our mission, which it is to make consumer more comfortable cooking delicious Mexican food at home. And we believe that if we do that, we would play a small part, changing some misconceptions, not only about Mexican food, but also about Mexican culture. Mexico is a very popular touristic destination. I think, you know, Mexican spirits are becoming very popular. Mexican spices are becoming very popular.

31:27And my wish and my hope is that Mexican cuisine at homes follows the growth of other ethnic foods and people start playing around with this food and enjoying it. And that seeds some interest in Mexican culture. And I would love if Somos was a small to medium part of making that happen. Amazing. Well, we look forward to all the growth that Somos will have. Thank you so much for joining us, Miguel. Shweng, thank you so much for having me. I love the conversation today. That's Miguel Leal, co-founder and CEO of Somos. And thank you for joining us on Shopify Masters. Our show is produced by Megan Coyle and Gogo Zoger.

32:18Our engineers are Matt Shorts and Miku Betlam. Benjamin Gottlieb is our supervising producer. And I'm Shweng Esershan. You'll hear from us next time on Shopify Masters.