Goya Foods 75th Anniversary

Posted on Sunday, November 7

Goya Foods 75th Anniversary
by Elias Cepeda

Photo: Courtesy of Goya Foods, Inc.

Bob Unanue fondly remembers being brought as a child to his father Anthony’s workplace. “I adored my dad so I loved being there in the warehouse,” he says.

“I started working there when I was ten. I did just about every job I could – I worked the line, I loaded trucks, worked in the print shop and worked the fork lift.”

Bob remembers the mixed-scent of that east-coast warehouse, more than anything else. Luckily for him, Bob’s father worked at the food producer Goya and the warehouse the young Unanue got to visit was filled with a treasure-trove of international food. That is to say, the smell was pleasant.

“My biggest food memory is still just the smell, the wonderful smell, that hit you as soon as you walked into that warehouse. It was just the most interesting mix of smells that represented the products we made. There was the garlic, the cilantro, the oils, just so much aroma,” Bob says.

It is no coincidence that Bob speaks with pride and ownership of the Goya product. It was his grandfather, Prudencio Unanue that started the company in 1936 in New York. Don Prudencio purchased the catchy company name for one dollar from a fellow merchant, and began to import food goods from his native Spain in order to provide himself and others a taste of home.

Prudencio and Carolina Unanue
Photo: Courtesy of Goya Foods, Inc.

As the years went on, Prudencio and the Goya company deftly tracked and capitalized on immigration patterns by bringing authentic food from peoples’ home nations to the U.S. When Puerto Ricans and Dominicans began pouring into New York, Goya began providing Caribbean ingredients. Then it was South American foods to bring immigrants from that continent into the Goya fold. As Mexicans spread out all over the states, Goya grew perhaps the largest line of Mexican food products of any U.S. company.

Bob and his younger brother Pete now run U.S. operations of Goya, but their path to the top of their family’s company was anything but straight and assured.

Bob says that he had to work his way up the ranks from the very bottom

“By the time I was grown, my father had died and although my uncles are supportive, it was very clear that no one could get a job just because they were family. There was and still is a rule about the level of education one has to have to work as an executive at Goya, and there had always been an expectation that anyone in the family has to first become a success outside of the company before being able to work within it,” Bob says.

Pete, for example, earned both undergraduate and graduate degrees, worked for the better part of decade at outside companies after finishing school, and only then began at Goya as an executive. Pete also got a taste of working in virtually every part of the Goya company as a youth, including cleaning factory floors.

Seventy-five years after their grandfather started Goya, the company is the largest independent producer of Hispanic food and has gone transnational. And though they may have seemed ubiquitous for years to Latinos in the states, Goya struggled for years to gain acceptance in grocery stores.

“We can’t overstate the importance of the independent tiendas and bodegas that carried us from the beginning because for a long time, they were the only ones that would” Pete says. “The large supermarkets were not always accepting of the products or market.”

In large part due to that reason, Goya worked with individual stores as opposed to wholesale dealers. That is still how they do business these days. It is more expensive up front to have professionals in communities go store door to store door pitching Goya, but Bob believes it is that personal touch that has made their reputation. “When you deal individually with stores, and you have as many products as we do – over sixteen hundred different ones – you can customize a package for them that makes the most sense for them.”

According to the share-holding brothers, another important component to Goya’s longevity and success is the authenticity of their products. As any international company does, Goya does third part tests on their many products. But they also rely on much more simple tests.

“Goya’s employees are a reflection of the products and the nations they come from. So when we are looking at a product we do all the third party tests, but we also just have our people in different communities taste it and tell us if it is authentic. Some Mondongo, for example, may taste great to me, but we need to have some Dominicans or Puerto Ricans in the company who grew up eating their mother’s to tell us if it really taste authentic,” Pete says.

Goya’s base has been Latinos but with the explosion of acceptance in the general market of a range of Latin cultures, and food in particular, they have had an easier time getting into neighborhoods, stores and kitchens that they were not welcome in during Bob and Pete’s father’s time. “I think our food is kind of like Chinese food and Pizza was for people when we were kids. It is accepted as a thing to out and get and to try and make at home for non-Latinos as well,” Pete says.

During a press conference in Chicago last week that both Bob and Pete attended, their business growth and breadth, in cold, hard figures was often emphasized. Thousands of products, dozens of countries, thousands of employees, and so on. And as operational heads of such a company, it made sense that Bob and Pete spoke at the podium about all these things.

But although they make food their business, the brothers maintained in one-on-one conversations with us that their hearts are in the food, not just the business. Ever savvy at promoting his company, Bob manages to fit a laundry-list of Goya products into an answer to the question of his favorite dishes to make. There is an impressive salesmanship in his ability to integrate product names seamlessly into a discussion of food likes.

“I like throwing things together. There are just certain flavors, and not to say that American food is bland, but there are just certain flavors out there in the Latin world, depending on where you go, Sazon, adobo, recaito, cumin, garlic, just certain flavors that strengthen food,” he says.”

Definitely part spiel, given that Goya offers versions of all of those. But it is also at this point, when discussing cooking, that Bob’s eyes light up and he leans forward in his chair.

“I love to make something simple for friends like rice and beans. For some friends that are not used to the flavors they just go on and on saying, ‘it’s so good!’ even though it is the simplest thing.”

During this all Bob gestures actively with his hands and upon finishing he leans back, stretches out a bit – his stomach now pointing north, as if full of all the comida he just described. A smile and, though I can’t be certain, a brief lick of his lips.