Almost seven years have passed since Sofía Casarín and Francisco Musi met in London; She was studying a master’s degree in Art History and he was dedicated to gastronomy. Both agreed on their passion for making Mexican cuisine and culture known and that is how Tamoa was born, a marketer of native corn and other products from the cornfield that today supplies a hundred restaurants in the world.
“We started in 2017 and it was really born from a genuine interest in understanding corn and the milpa as a fundamental basis of the food culture of Mexico, and corn led us to other crops such as beans and chili and also to other ingredients such as lime, for example, which is needed for nixtamalization,” said Casarín.
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In an interview with El Sol de México, the founding partner pointed out that to date they export these native products to restaurants and tortilla shops in the United States and European countries such as the United Kingdom, Spain and Germany, mainly.
The entrepreneurs began to supply their products with a restaurant in London called El Pastor, which today has several branches in the United Kingdom and specializes in Mexican cuisine, mainly tacos.
“He was our first client, he is from a group of English people who lived in Mexico many years ago and had this nostalgia for returning to the United Kingdom, they wanted to share a little of the Mexican food that they had experienced when they lived here, so they contacted Francisco, they told him that they wanted to make tacos, but that they wanted to do them well, nixtamalize and make tortillas. We then embarked on that journey to understand the varieties of corn that exist in Mexico, we discovered that many are in danger of extinction, others do not have a commercial outlet and therefore many seeds are being lost.
They export native products to restaurants and tortilla shops in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain and Germany.
“On these research trips we found peasant families who have been preserving various varieties of corn for many years and we began the work to export to the United Kingdom, from there a whole window of opportunity opened up for us and we decided to dedicate ourselves to the supply, that is, to create this responsible supply chain, which connects these peasant families with restaurants that have this interest in preserving Mexican cuisine and contributing to these peasant economies,” said Casarín.
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This project began to grow by word of mouth, said the director, and they have been adding restaurants organically, avoiding exponential growth to be more careful with the quality of the product.
“It has been a gradual growth and we have wanted to maintain it; we have not had this exponential growth because we care a lot about the type of relationship we build in the field, that is, we do not want to exert pressure on the communities, we seek to understand that the rhythm of the field is different,” he explained.
Currently, more than 90 percent of Tamoa’s customers are abroad, especially in the United States, with almost 70 restaurants and businesses, followed by Europe and a small percentage in Mexico.
Casarín said that in Mexico they do not have that many clients because, unfortunately, there is no sensitivity about the fair price.
“Historically, these crops have a much lower price conception, such as corn, which has always been conceived as a product that costs little, the same as beans, chili and other native crops, so it is a bit difficult to change the paradigm and imply that there is a lot of work behind it and that farmers not only carry out historical preservation work, but also that the work in the fields is arduous, laborious and that it is not compensated as it should,” he said.
Work with indigenous communities
Today Tamoa works with about 130 families from the State of Mexico, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatán, Veracruz, Tlaxcala and Guerrero, helping them plan their crops and the sale of their products abroad.
The idea of the project is to publicize the basis of Mexican cuisine while supporting the communities where these products are grown.
Tamoa’s purpose is to connect and create fair and respectful distribution channels focused on different crops and products from Mexico.
To achieve this, the company works with families, groups and peasant cooperatives, with the aim of contributing to the construction of a new food system that contributes to the improvement of life in the countryside and the preservation of biodiversity.
“It is a social company that is really based on creating a network of farming families in Mexico, which preserve identity-based native crops for many generations, because there are many crops that are not necessarily endemic to the country, but that have been in a region for so long. that are already part of a culture. We bring precisely these foods that promote biodiversity to restaurant kitchens both in Mexico and abroad. For now we are not a direct-to-consumer business, but rather we market to restaurants and culinary projects,” explained Casarín.
Tamoa has a traceability system that allows customers to know where each product comes from. Additionally, this supply system eliminates unnecessary intermediaries to ensure that income distribution is equitable, offering high-quality services and ethically sourced crops to consumers.
The company has a traceability system that allows customers to know where each product comes from, in addition to eliminating unnecessary intermediaries.
Casarín explained that the company is managed with purchasing planning with the communities during half of the year, and the other half they go to the field to carry out cultivation work and harvests, which they store in warehouses that the company has.
“We work with a process of commitment letters with farmers, we seek to understand what their production estimates are, what we can commit to buying and what the yield was in the end,” said Casarín.
He explained that prior to this work, Tamoa makes an arduous study of production costs, adding a profit margin for farmers and the company, in addition to including export and logistics expenses.
Today, Tamoa is redefining this methodology to encourage the final price to reflect work against climate change.
In addition, this year the company will close an investment round to expand its operations, although Casarín assures that more than exponential growth, they want it to be gradual and of quality.
“It remained a family business until this year when it could no longer be sustained like this, so we decided to open to investments and well, we are currently close to closing the first round of investment and getting to work to continue growing,” said the director. .
Today, Tamoa and its clients must deal with waiting lists due to the high demand for the product, even though it closed the year with a total of 250 tons of product.
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The plan, he added, is to continue growing with care of the processes in the field and outside it and to incorporate more farming families and more products to the company’s catalog, and for the farmers with whom they work to have production surpluses that can be translated into higher sales and profits.
“We seek that, little by little, the Tamoa catalog can be representative of all the biodiversity that exists in Mexico that, by consuming it, we are supporting its conservation,” Casarín concluded.
2023-12-11 09:00:00
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