Maspanadas, a frozen empanadas manufacturer, is tripling its production capacity with their new 12,000-square foot manufacturing facility in Rockville, Maryland. With this new facility, Maspanadas is able to produce over 20,000 empanadas a day. A timely launch, this will support their rollout with Fresh Direct, Costco in the Northeast, Whole Foods Market (Global), and expanded food service contracts across the United States.
For Founder and CEO Margarita Womack, this represents an exciting new chapter in her journey, which started many years ago in her father's restaurants in Bogotá, Colombia. Margarita carries her family's rich legacy of food into the frozen empanadas that her company sells today.
Womack took an unconventional route to the food industry. After earning a PhD in biology from Princeton and an MBA from Georgetown, she launched a Latin food catering business in 2017 through Union Kitchen, a Washington, D.C.-based food business accelerator.
She worked closely with the Union Kitchen team to develop and execute a packaged version of her most popular catering item, the empanada. Leveraging Union Kitchen's stores and distribution partner, District Distribution, Margarita was able to saturate the local market within two years of launching. By 2019, Maspanadas found itself on regional store shelves such as: Whole Foods Market, Giant Foods, and MOMs Organic. With this increase in sales, Maspanadas had outgrown their previous manufacturing setup. They soon opened their first production site, a 6,000-square foot facility in Rockville, Maryland.
While a big step forward, Maspanadas sales would soon outpace its capacity once again. This would require another upgrade in production facility. To support their expansion, Margarita Womack successfully raised $1.5m in an oversubscribed round led by the Angeles Investors.
Their newest manufacturing plant is SQF-certified, one of the highest levels of food safety certifications, and features upgraded equipment for semi-continuous manufacturing. The increased capacity allows Maspanadas to keep up with their current customers and grow into new accounts.
Comments