We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jennifer Arizpe . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jennifer below.

Hi Jennifer , thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I have always loved cooking and baking. Even when I was younger I loved making cakes and brownies, even if they did come from a box.
For a lot of my younger years I worked in the food industry, serving, barista, cooking and managing. I think that’s where I picked up “good” work habits and dealing with all the stress and everything being so fast paced. Which has definitely come in handy now running El Torito.
I love cooking for my family and husband, My husband would always tell me I needed to start selling my tamales.
There really aren’t that many good plant based tamales around, that taste like the authentic Mexican recipes.
I decided during the holidays last year to just make a post on social media about having tamales available. Well little did I know so many people would be interested.
I even had a business reach out to me wanting to try our tamales and sell them at their store.
That’s when it got serious.
We needed to find a commercial kitchen, so many permits and things that had to get done to be able to sell wholesale and do everything the right way.
We started off with two flavors of tamales.
A year later, we are now a full blown catering operation. This past year has flown by and we have grown so much..
Our menu is full of authentic Mexican dishes, from tamales to enchiladas, empanadas, and we also do specialty cakes. Our goal it’s El Torito is to provide authentic Mexican food but plant based, that EVERYONE loves, and that is also affordable.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

One of the things that sets us apart, is we are a one stop shop. Our menu includes everything from tamales, tacos, pozole and pan dulce.
We are able to take care of all catering needs. We have even added a brunch menu.
Our catering setup is also very unique for this area. We serve our food at events and parties out of authentic Mexican cazuelas (pots”) which gives a beautiful look to our setup. We have our tamale and elote cart for rent for happy hour and cocktail hour.
I think customers love that we are just affordable, and we make really good food.
We love hearing that our Chile sauce or tamales taste like their grandmothers.
Or that our Pan Dulce is so good they can’t believe it’s plant based. Everyone is so much more focused on their health, and we can provide great tasting food, that is just better for your body, the planet and is cruelty free.

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We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

El Torito definitely started as just a “side” business. Not even really to make money, but to just provide people with really good plant based food. We also run a 501(c)3 non profit organization, that provides a forever home to neglected and abused farm animals.
Arizpe Animal Sanctuary..
Before El Torito I had my own salon suite, as I had been doing hair for the last 11 years. Working for myself has always been great , and that allowed to me start El Torito. Little did I know, it would grow so much, that I was no longer able to run the sanctuary, the salon and start building El Torito. I had to make a choice. . The beauty industry has always been good to me, but i was honestly getting burned out.
I made the hard decision to say goodbye to salon life and focus on El Torito and the sanctuary..
I have never worked harder in my life.
It has totally been worth it though. We have had so many milestones . Being sold in a few local stores, adding the catering. We are booking weddings and events for next year. We are now in the process of looking for our own store front as we are still working out of a commercial kitchen.
Once we have found a new shop to call home, we will start focusing on adding more retail stores. We have big plans for El Torito.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

We actually started El Torito with savings. We don’t have any investors, it’s just been us.
As I said before it started as a “side” business, that grew. Now once we find our new store we will most likely have to take out a business loan, for build out, appliances etc.
We took a risk with our own money, but we knew we had a really good product.
We are so glad we did.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.eltoritoplantbasedtamales.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eltorito_plantbased_tamales/
• Other: https://www.arizpeanimalsanctuary.com