We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Stefania Fochi. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Stefania below.
Stefania, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Folks often look at a successful business and imagine it was an overnight success, but from what we’ve seen this is often far from the truth. We’d love to hear your scaling up story – walk us through how you grew over time – what were some of the big things you had to do to grow and what was that scaling up journey like?
I own an empanada manufacturing plant. We make the dough and over 25 different fillings from scratch, with whole ingredients, with great care. I started the business over a decade ago from a love of food and a deep desire to make delicious food that I was proud to share. For the first several years, I did everything largely on my own. I had some help with bits and pieces but I put it all together – manufacturing, purchasing, packaging, selling, etc.
I started with just a small booth at the Farmer’s Market, renting a small space in my parent’s commercial kitchen while I attended university full time. Over time, I found that demand steadily increased – both at the Farmer’s Market but also from my wholesale customers. Time and time again through the years, I have found myself having to scale up. At different times, this meant different things – investing in machinery, hiring more team members, acquiring more space for our facility, investing in physical infrastructure, investing in marketing, investing in vehicles, expanding our menu, creating different legs of expansion, and the list goes on! This has meant a lot of what I consider “invisible work,” because it’s not so much the kind of work that can be measured by clocking in and out. This kind of work happens while life is happening and it is ongoing – coming up with ideas, researching options, contacting people, making calls and answering emails, searching for pricing and funding, creating opportunities out of thin air, and so on.
It’s much like a game of chess – where you have to make one move before you can make another, where there aren’t right answers and every move has to be calculated. Different moves can take you to the same place, but in the end you have to take the plunge and make a move in order to make another, and another, in hopes you find results on the other side!!
About seven years ago, I found myself completely submerged in production work. It was so consuming that I worked seven days a week and started experiencing painful side effects of tendonitis. I realized that my current structuring was on a timer and time was running out – I had to make changes and I had to do it fast if I wanted my business to survive. It ended up taking years, but I managed to find funding and the right machine to import to replace my arms! The machine replaced my long nights making empanadas, but the trade-off was that it requires three people to run it. This meant that even if I was involved, I still had to hire additional help. On the flip side, we were able to exponentially expand our weekly output. As a result of this, we outgrew our space and ended up needing to rent our own warehouse. In this move, we expanded from approximately 500 sqft to 1200 sq ft of production space. In turn, as a result of all of the above, we were able to expand to more markets as well as taking on larger wholesale clients.
In the bits of time where we coasted without changes in infrastructure, I would invest in marketing – the logo, the marketing material and signage for the farmer’s markets, the website, social media, etc. I found that this investment always ended up increasing our exposure, which would then continue to increase demand and call for further scaling of infrastructure!!
Following a big marketing makeover, I stumbled upon the opportunity to rent another warehouse next to my current kitchen in order to build more infrastructure. We had recently reached a production limit with our walk-in freezer and were in desperate need of more freezer space to be able to continue to scale to meet the ever-growing demand! With this opportunity, finding more funding, I was able to triple our freezer space, build an office, build an expansion of my current kitchen, as well as add storage space for our market equipment. The expenses for this additional space meant seeking more ways to increase sales, which brought me to invest in a concession trailer to fulfill the demand for attending events, parties, and catering opportunities that I have been having to decline because I didn’t have the infrastructure in place to operate a branch of the business this way!! This trailer meant more funding and investing in a vehicle to pull it.
It’s been my experience that scaling not only isn’t something that happens overnight, but it’s something that happens gradually, piece by piece. In order to achieve a certain goal of expansion, there’s always many steps that I have to do in a very particular order in order to achieve the final piece. It’s never quite as easy as, “I’m going to implement a GF line of empanadas!” First, I had to source a machine from Colombia and import it. Then I had to find a 60 gallon air compressor and pay a handyman to build a small shed for it outside my facility, install the hosing through the walls of the facility and install a breaker box for it specifically. Meanwhile, I spent every moment of my free time for about three to four months sourcing the best ingredients and formulating a GF recipe worthy of being deemed delicious by those requesting this product. 55 trials later, an acceptable recipe was finalized. Then, an entire new process and training on this machine had to be created for the factory team, a new warmer had to be purchased to serve this line of product at the farmer’s market, a new page added to the website, new pictures taken by a photographer, new menus and signage to include this line. After all of that was complete, designed, and purchased, the new line could be released and offered to the public. From the front, all that was visible was, “Gluten Free Empanadas now available!!”
Not mentioned in the above examples are all the growing pains of going from a business with no employees to employing over 10 full time and part time employees. My business is still a small one, but the growing pains were not! Each person that I have hired has come with many lessons for me to learn as a business owner and employer. Learning the delicate balance of being flexible, understanding, empathetic, patient, or strict has been one not for the faint of heart. Learning to handle different personalities, the varying needs of real people with real lives, learning how to train people with different capacities and learning capabilities, learning to establish rules that you didn’t think you had to establish, learning how to have respectful boundaries as an employer. The art of employing gracefully is an ongoing practice that grows alongside the business itself.
It is clear that scaling up is a continual process that happens to all facets of a business, in turn. From the front end, it’s easy to see a seemingly successful small business with its teams, its physical and systematic infrastructures, its new acquisitions, and online presence. What isn’t readily seen is the abundance of time, effort, sweat, tears, dedication, consistency, tenacity, impossible decisions, hard conversations, risk, and losses experienced by the person at the helm. It is a lifestyle and truly has to be a labor of love and service, as I know it has been for me, to find joy and fulfillment in the ups and downs of the growing pains of entrepreneurship.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I own an Argentine Empanada manufacturing business called The Empanada Girl. It is our mission to spread love and joy through our delicious traditional Argentine empanadas that we make with love and intention! I began this company when I was 21 in March of 2010 after working at a job where I felt my hands were tied. I deeply desired the opportunity to make food I was proud to serve and decided I did not want to work under anyone else again in order to maintain the freedom to do what I love and fulfill my calling. I started at the local Farmer’s Market with one small table and one small oven and have since been dubbed by our local community, “The Empanada Girl.” Undoubtedly, I adopted the name as my brand.
Being born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, I was already well acquainted with the wonderful world of empanadas. Empanadas are a core traditional food in Argentina. We particularly have a culture of making many flavors of savory fillings so I started with eight traditional flavors. Through the years, I was requested other flavors, mostly not so authentic but created in our style. We now offer 28 flavors of empanadas and a few other products. I developed the recipes one by one, slowly, until reaching a certain point of “I can’t believe I make this,” deliciousness.
I am very proud of the fact that we use whole foods for all of our empanadas. We process all produce in house, we peel and dice every onion, crack every egg, and mix & roll every dough.
Part of the training with our team is to be conscious, aware, and in a space of gratitude. Every ingredient and every empanada matters because they will all be the whole experience for one person. We honor the ingredients and are grateful for our place in the cycle as well as the opportunity to create delicious food and share it with so many others.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
In 2020, I had been in business for a decade. A large portion of my business was built around the local farmer’s markets. When everything shut down in March of 2020, I lost all but one of my revenue streams. Our storefront did not close because it was take-out only – but that income was not enough to keep my business afloat. At this time, I had a manufacturing team and a whole warehouse plus its expenses to maintain, not to mention my personal expenses.
I was determined to keep my team, make sure they didn’t miss a paycheck, and to stay current on all of my personal and professional bills.
I immediately started a social media campaign to offer frozen home deliveries within a 60 mile radius. I started investing in ads on Facebook and Instagram and in just a couple of weeks of diligent work, I was able to bring in enough weekly income to not only retain my staff but also to break even. Given what was going on in the world economically, I considered it a huge win. For six months, the farmer’s markets in Florida were closed but with consistent posting, ads and weekly deliveries, I managed to keep my business afloat.
Inadvertently, this effort built greater brand recognition than I could have hoped for. This venture held steam for quite a while – I was able to invest in a small Ford Transit Connect specifically for the deliveries as well as wrap it with my branding. Things have continued to change and although the deliveries are fewer now, the van continues to provide advertising and brand awareness as we use it for local retail & wholesale deliveries and purchasing.
One of my biggest lessons in the last 13 years as a business owner is to go with the flow and adapt to the changes. Change is guaranteed and the best way to survive successfully in any climate is to keep up with the ever changing needs and desires of the consumer with being flexible and consistently evolving.
We’d really appreciate if you could talk to us about how you figured out the manufacturing process.
Empanadas are a hispanic food widely found where hispanic people are present. Each hispanic culture has its own version of empanadas, originating from Spain. Being from Argentina, I grew up making our style of empanadas at home with my mom. Coupled with my culinary degree, I was able to transform my cultural knowledge into manufacturing them in a commercial kitchen in a larger scale. I had access to my parent’s fresh pasta machinery to make my own dough, until I purchased my own similar machinery as my business grew. I used my culinary training to implement proper kitchen practices and apply them to our cultural recipes and flavors.
One of the most important parts of scaling my business from being a small one handled mainly by myself, to a larger one with two teams with 5 people each, is making sure the quality of the food wasn’t a casualty of the growth. It was very important to me to train every team member how to do every job with the same love and attention I put into it. Growth brought the need for innovation. For example, our breakfast empanada fillings require many eggs. I could have caved and purchased the cased liquid eggs with citric acid for ease and to save time cracking eggs – but instead, I chose to invest the time to train my team members how to crack eggs efficiently as well as implementing using a large bakery mixer to mix the eggs once cracked, rather than doing it by hand.
Although we produce more product as time goes by, I choose to invest more in machinery to help the process rather than cutting corners when it comes to the food itself. I purchased a shredder to help prep the chicken, while still using fresh chicken breast that we cook and season ourselves. I purchased a high capacity food processor that dices, shreds, and slices. We still peel hundreds of pounds of onions per week, but the machine is able to dice them in no time. We roast our own beef, but we use a deli slicer to thinly slice the beef. I found that it’s very important to pick and choose where to cut corners – and it is usually in the ingredients themselves that I refuse to compromise quality. Sticking to our values of making good, wholesome delicious food through the years has been one of the reasons our loyal customer base sticks by us and keeps coming back for more, week after week.
Contact Info:
- Website: empanadagirl.com
- Instagram: theempanadagirl
- Facebook: facebook.com/theempanadagirl
Image Credits
Jenny Acheson Stu Art’s Graphics Brass-Piper Photography