About

It Started InA Hospital Room.

In 2023, my mom had a stroke. In the middle of that crisis, we found out something else nobody had caught: she had diabetes. It had been there for who knows how long, hiding in plain sight, and none of us saw it coming.

That week broke something open in me. I've spent my career around tortillas and chips, running batches, chasing yield, thinking in cost per pound and margin per bag. It's a business built on scale, and scale runs on ingredients that are cheap, stable, and easy to produce in volume.

My own company, La Jolla Tortilleria, still makes chips that way today: seed oils, refined starches, the standard formula the whole industry runs on. It works. It's just not built with someone like my mom in mind. Sitting in that hospital, all I could think about was what we actually feed people and what it costs them.

I couldn't go back to building Tortiyas the same way after that. It stopped being just another chip brand chasing shelf space next to Siete and Masa Chips and became something with a real line in the sand: better ingredients, no exceptions.

That's why Tortiyas doesn't touch seed oils or cheap starches. We use organic corn and real beef tallow, ingredients that cost more, take more discipline to source, and don't cut corners to hit a lower price point. It's a harder way to run a chip company. It's also the only way I could put my name on it after watching my mom go through what she went through.

We're not guessing at any of this. Coming out of a real manufacturing background gives us an edge most "health" snack brands don't have. We control the process end to end, from the corn to the fryer to the bag. Most better-for-you brands are formulating in a lab and outsourcing production to whoever will run their SKU. We're doing the opposite: we know exactly what goes into every batch because we're the ones making it.

That's how we can hold a standard this high and still run it like a real business, not just a story on a package. Tortiyas exists because one hospital room changed what I thought a chip company was supposed to do.

That's not a tagline. That's the standard we build to. It's the reason I'll never let Tortiyas quietly slide back into the industry's shortcuts, no matter how much easier or cheaper that path would be.