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In the early 1980s, Mexican immigrant Jose Luis Gutierrez faced a choice no one should have to make: keep his Las Vegas home, or keep his struggling tortilla business alive. His two business partners had already walked away. The work making flat, corn-based bread by hand in a 400-square-foot room was hard, and the profit didn't yet justify it. Jose Luis chose the business anyway, leaning on family to keep it alive while he held down a second job as a waiter.
That choice was years in the making. Jose Luis had immigrated from Mexico to California in the 1960s, working as a bartender and waiter to build a life for himself. In the 1970s, on a friend's recommendation, he traveled to Las Vegas to look at job opportunities and within a week, he was earning more in a single night there than he had in a week back in California. He moved his family to Las Vegas soon after, and it was there, watching the city's Hispanic community grow with no one making tortillas for it, that he and a few friends saw their opening. In 1979, they bought production equipment from Mexico and began turning out 100 pounds of tortillas a day from that cramped 400-square-foot room.
There was just one problem. "We had no market, we had no customers," his son Gus Gutierrez remembers. Half of what they made went straight into the trash. One partner gave up in 1980. The other followed in 1981. That left Jose Luis and his family to carry it alone.
So they did. Jose Luis kept his job at the gourmet room while the rest of the family carried the business forward. His wife, Felicitas, began walking door-to-door through Hispanic neighborhoods with tortillas in hand, building the customer base one household at a time, persistence that eventually opened the door to retail stores. Their young daughter, Teresa, tagged along on those same routes, running up to knock on doors and take orders before running back to her mother with the count. Gus worked alongside his father from the start, and took the lead on sales.
Slowly, the breaks came. Ricardo's, one of the few Mexican restaurants in Las Vegas at the time, agreed to buy their tortillas, the business's first real validation. Restaurants inside the Stardust and the Frontier followed, opening the door to casino clients. As the business grew beyond just tortillas into salsa, chips, and more, the family renamed it from Tortillas Inc. to T.I. Foods. What had started as four people in a 400-square-foot room, Jose Luis, Felicitas, Gus, Teresa, and Jose Luis's brother Rosendo Jr. grew into a company of 115 team members across three locations in North Las Vegas, selling more than 500 products and supplying restaurants on the Strip.
Then, in 2020, T.I. Foods lost two of the people who built it. COVID-19 took company president Gus Gutierrez, and not long after, founder Felicitas Gutierrez. It was the hardest chapter in the company's history.
It was also the moment Maria Teresa Gutierrez-Martinez stepped into her own. Teresa had spent her whole life around this business, from those early door-to-door routes she ran as a girl at her mother's side, to growing up watching her parents and brother build something out of nothing. Leading T.I. Foods wasn't something she took on to fill a gap left behind. It was what she was raised to do.
Today, T.I. Foods is women-owned, led by Maria Teresa as its second-generation matriarch alongside an all-female executive team. The company doing business as T.I. Foods, Los Arcos, and Garden Valley Food (GVF) still manufactures the same tortillas, chips, and salsas the Gutierrez family started with, now scaled to hundreds of products serving the Las Vegas community and beyond. The name on the door has changed over the years. The family behind it hasn't. It's the same legacy that started with a father who bet his home on a dream, carried forward by the daughter who was always meant to lead it.
Publications
July 16, 2021
Tortillas Inc in North Las Vegas is a family-run business specializing in making tailor-made chips and tortillas. They employ almost 140 people and have managed to maintain the business's family feel, with the owner, Teresa Martinez, taking great pride in the family affair that Tortillas Inc has become. Martinez has had to face tough times, including the loss of her brother and mother, but the pride she has in her family's business is stronger than ever. Watch More....
Oct 2, 2019
The company got it’s start manufacturing tortillas back in 1979 when Gustavo’s father invested in a small tortilla machine and a 400 square-foot building. The family would catch and package the tortillas by hand, then travel door to door selling their tortillas to a Hispanic-dense region of Las Vegas, called “Naked City.” Watch More....
May 27, 2017
Although T.I. Foods might have gotten off to a rough start in 1979, in hindsight it was in the right place at the right time. Read More...
Feb 26, 2015
If you’ve eaten Mexican food in Las Vegas, you’ve probably had their tortillas or chips, which are the foundation for tacos and nachos in restaurants across the Valley and in Strip properties from Mandalay Bay to the Stratosphere. Read More...