The Idea

Around 2010, Veronica Garza started trying to rebuild a tortilla in her family's kitchen in Laredo, Texas. She had been diagnosed with multiple autoimmune conditions in high school, and the grain-free, low-inflammation diet that finally eased her symptoms had taken flour and corn off the table. In a third-generation Mexican-American family that ate together every night, that was not a dietary tweak. It was a family sitting down to lettuce leaves instead of tacos.

So she experimented. Almond flour, then cassava. Early versions came out bitter and fell apart. She kept adjusting until she had one worth serving, and then she ran it past the only person whose verdict counted: her abuela.

Abuela approved.

Her younger brother Miguel, fresh out of law school at UT Austin and job hunting, saw what the approval actually meant. If a Mexican grandmother would eat a grain-free tortilla without wincing, the recipe was not a compromise. It was a product, and it was aimed at millions of people who had been quietly locked out of their own food culture.

This was the beginning of Siete Foods.

The Execution

• 2014: The family rented a gluten-free commercial kitchen in Austin by the hour and drove three hours up from Laredo every weekend to hand-press tortillas until three in the morning. They could press 30 at a time, filling five industrial fridges a week. Veronica quit her teaching job because the recipe had stopped fitting around a day job.
• May 2014: They walked into Wheatsville Co-op in Austin with warm tortillas in a plastic bag and got shelf space on the spot. The first cases went out on 1 May and had sold out by 2 May. The brand was called Must B Nutty.
• Early 2015: Whole Foods, headquartered in the same city, said no more than once. Then a customer mentioned the tortillas to co-founder John Mackey, an email arrived the next day, and Siete landed in the chain's Austin flagship.
• 2016: Scaling the recipe meant re-engineering it. Cassava flour behaved differently depending on the tuber and the milling, so Veronica tested her way to one supplier, a mill in Brazil fed by regional family farms. The cassava and coconut tortilla launched as a second product, Must B Nutty became Siete Family Foods, and Whole Foods took the brand national. By that summer they were in more than 400 retailers.
• 2018: One recipe had become a method. Veronica, as chief innovation officer, shipped 14 new products in a year: tortillas in chickpea and cashew flour, cassava chips fried in avocado oil, hot sauces, a cashew-based queso. Every one had to clear the same test the first tortilla did.
• November 2018: Stripes Group led a $90 million minority investment, the family's first institutional money and, Miguel said at the time, probably its last. Siete had 40 full-time staff and sat in 4,400 outlets.
• 2022: The R&D discipline held as the range widened. For heirloom corn totopos the team worked through fifteen varieties of corn over three months before signing off. Siete was on track for $250 million in retail sales and was the fastest-growing Latino food brand in the US.
• 2023: The single tortilla recipe had become more than 80 SKUs doing north of $400 million in annual retail sales, in a category that had not seen a serious new challenger since Goya launched in 1936.
• October 2024: PepsiCo agreed to buy Garza Food Ventures for $1.2 billion, and closed on 17 January 2025. Siete had done $500 million in revenue the year before. Eleven years earlier the entire production line had been Veronica, her parents and a rented worktop.
• 15 October 2025: After a transition year inside PepsiCo, all seven Garzas left on the same day. Former COO and CFO Sami Jallad took over as general manager. The recipe now sits in a portfolio alongside Lay's, Doritos and Cheetos.

The lesson?

The moat was never the tortilla. It was a recipe good enough to survive contact with a factory, and a taste test nobody could buy their way past. Whole Foods said no more than once before it said yes. Abuela said yes the first time, and hers was the harder approval to get. Get that one right and everything downstream, the chips, the queso, the salsas, the $1.2 billion, is just the same test run again. Nail the recipe your toughest customer will vouch for, and the buyers catch up eventually.