Larry Gerosa is Mr. Tortilla. It’s a name that has stuck, partly because of the vast quantities of breakfast tacos his previous convenience stores peddled on a daily basis, but also for the freshly pressed and grilled tortillas that envelop those popular hand-held treats.
Gerosa has been in the c-store business since he was a young man. He worked for a few big outfits before joining the ranks of independents when he purchased two Texas c-stores called Jud’s Food Stores in 2006. Both stores were home to automatic tortilla press and grill machines.
While he is in the process of selling those two stores, Gerosa has kept one of the tortilla machines. After all, what would Mr. Tortilla be without the machine that spawned his name?
Gerosa, in fact, hopes to use it soon: He’s preparing to open a store in Fredericksburg, Texas. “The customers love [the machine] because they know the tortillas are fresh,” he says. “Of all the reasons I chose this machine, No. 1 is probably in the eight years that we’ve had them, I think I’ve had to service that machine twice. It’s a workhorse.”
At his previous stores, Gerosa could sell nearly 300 tacos per day. He certainly credits that to fresh ingredients and fine taco craftsmanship, but more than anything, he feels he owes his success to the fresh tortilla.
“They’re fabulous machines,” he says. “We put them out where customers can see them. The reason we do that is because we want the customer to know that we made these fresh.”
The Way of the Tortilla
In another life, the tacos were made from scratch. From the making of the dough to rolling, weighing, pressing and grilling the tortilla, it was all done completely by hand. “We ran for eight and a half years,” Gerosa recalls. “That whole program was designed from scratch with one lady. She would come in and make the masa and she would roll it out.
“We didn’t have a scale, but she could tell by gravity what the weight was. We’d roll them out and cook them. When we got the machine, she thought she was in heaven.”
NEXT PAGE: Taco Preparation & Fact Sheet
Today at Gerosa’s old stores, which he still occasionally helps run, taco preparation starts at midnight. For the next two hours, a worker presses, grills and fills the breakfast tacos. The 13 different varieties are ready for the breakfast rush the next morning. And there usually are enough flour tortillas left over to sell fresh in packs of 12 to hungry, fresh-tortilla-loving customers.
“Another thing about this machine is its simple training. I haven’t found anybody that hasn’t liked [using] it,” Gerosa says. “The only complaint I’ve had was from one of the girls who is too short. Otherwise, all the employees love it. It’s easy to maintain, easy to grill. Cooks them quick. One person can pump out these tortillas.”
The tortilla machine is called the Wedge Press Combo tortilla press, grill and stand. It comes from San Antonio-based Bakery Equipment & Service Co. Inc., also known as BE&SCO. The machine operator feeds the dough ball, sourced from Pioneer Frozen Foods, Duncanville, Texas, into the machine, which presses the ball flat into a tortilla. The raw tortilla is fed directly onto a hot grill tended by the operator, who flips two to four tortillas at a time.
Technically, the machine could produce 780 to 900 flour tortillas an hour, prompting Gerosa to muse, “You’d have to pick up the employee off the floor if we made that many tacos a day.”
The efficiency of the machine is obviously a positive, and it’s also enhanced the tacos’ reputation. “The machine … increased the perception of the quality because the customer can actually see them being cooked,” he says. “You can watch someone putting something in and it comes out. The employee flips it.
“[Customers] know that it’s fresh. When you put that front and center for them to see, they love it.”
While the most popular taco at Gerosa’s old stores is still the bacon, egg, sausage and cheese breakfast taco, they also sell a lot of bean and egg, chorizo and potato and egg tacos. But if Gerosa is involved, the customer always gets what the customer wants.
“Sometimes people just want a warm [tortilla] with butter! You can make anything with [the machine],” he says. “We wrap a sausage on a stick with a tortilla and sell them that way. It’s every which way to use those tortillas besides just breakfast tacos. It opens a wide avenue of what you can do with that tortilla grill.”
Taco Fact Sheet
According to research from Chicago-based Food Genius, the taco has room for growth. Tailor-made for on-the-go eaters, the taco seems a natural fit for the c-store sphere. Several c-store taco purveyors are noted for their fine foodservice programs and innovative takes on the taco (such as Susser’s Stripes chain).
But where are we today as a nation of taco eaters? Here’s some data from the research to help us figure it out:
▶ Tacos are found on 20% of unique U.S. menus, and in 17% of locations.
▶ The top three states for taco market share are California (14% of all locations), Texas (12%) and Florida (6%).
▶ The top state in terms of locations serving tacos compared to the number of locations is Iowa, with 34%.
▶ Tacos have an average price of $6.45 nationwide; 86% of all taco menu items are listed at $2.17 to $10.17.
▶The top proteins found in our nation’s tacos are chicken (55%), steak (29%) and ground beef (24%).
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