Here's how Miguel Leal, a Latino engineer, went from starting a food packaging company to creating his own Mexican food brand SOMOS.
From making delivery-only products to selling in stores nationwide, here’s the story behind the top-selling SOMOS foods.And for Miguel Leal, a Mexican-born entrepreneur, the love for Mexican food is what eventually led him to begin his entrepreneurship career.Now only a little over 4 years old, SOMOS Foods is already sold in 9,000 retail stores nationwide, including Whole Foods.
"My grandfather would bring me in to translate to the people installing equipment at his factory," Leal said. Years later, in 2007, Leal would sell the company to Georgia Pacific, one of the world's largest manufacturers and distributors of tissues, paper and pulp -- an achievement he says really started his entrepreneurship career.
"All of a sudden, not only was I a dad, there were three of us and I was the main breadwinner," Leal said."It was a lot of pressure on what I was going to do next financially." "That was just like a huge, huge eye opener and a point of pride for me," he said."I was the only Mexican on the team in the U.S. and I just felt like it was amazing, that product."So how did Leal get the idea to start a Mexican food brand?One of the first was when he was still in college in Mexico and lived with his grandma.
Then, as he brainstormed what to do, he remembered a conversation he had with Daniel Lubetzky, a friend of his who founded KIND bars in 2017, where he asked himself three simple questions: Why does Mexican food have to be cheap, have fillers and be made of low-quality ingredients?Miguel Leal, Daniel Lubetzy and Rodrigo Zuolaga, the three co-founders of SOMOS Foods.
"Our first hire was operations, then sales, then finance, and then we were off to the races," Leal said."Rodrigo would send us food in boxes to me at my house," Leal said."And then we said, Why don't we just do a direct-to-consumer business? These boxes are great.'" "We were launching nationally and it was very tough," Leal said."It was a huge failure financially. It was brutal."
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