Located in a brightly painted building on Larimer Street in the heart of the River North Art District (RiNo), Raquelitas Tortillas is not your average tortilla manufacturer and retail tortilla store. It has deep roots in Denver and the historically Latino section of Larimer Street, dating back to the 1940s.
“Back then, Denver was obviously much smaller,” says Rich Schneider, the resident “Tortilla Savant” at Raquelitas. “If you wanted Mexican food, it was pretty much on Larimer Street between 19th and 23rd.”
The business began by producing tamales and tortillas, which led to the Mexican restaurants in the area looking to source their tortillas through them. The company quickly outgrew the original location and moved to a new one — also on Larimer — where chips and bread joined the existing product line of tamales, flour tortillas and corn tortillas.
In 1960, Schneider’s father bought the business. To this day, the business remains family-run in the most genuine sense — siblings, spouses and Schneider’s nephew, Ben, are all on the team. In the early days, Schneider and his brother Raul (who is the president of Raquelitas) served as their father’s arms and legs, doing the bulk of the physical labor needed to keep things running, while their father ran the show. The brothers asked for a raise, and their father made a counteroffer they couldn’t refuse.
“[He said] ‘You want more money? Take this over. I’m going back to the store.’ We were all happy,” Schneider recalls. “There was a song called ‘Ain’t No Stopping Us Now’ and that was us. We were going to set the world on fire.”
At the time, the client base was only a handful of restaurants.
“We had maybe 25 to 30 accounts,” Schneider says. “Raul and I were high-fiving […] but we could also clearly see that we couldn’t grow our business just based on Mexican restaurants.”
The brothers went on foot into some popular non-Mexican Denver eateries at the time to demonstrate the huge potential for the tortilla beyond its traditional use in Mexican food, such as the now-ubiquitous breakfast burrito. Initial attempts often met racially charged hostility, including tortillas being thrown back at them as they were asked (not politely) to leave.
“I was like man, this is gonna be tough,” Schneider says. “But you know what? We just kept going. We went to another restaurant, and another restaurant. And we eventually carved our own path.”
Raquelitas products can’t be found in grocery stores, and they can’t be found outside of Colorado — both by design. After conversations with grocery store buyers, the brothers realized that grocery stores simply weren’t their audience.
“So we stayed in restaurants,” he says. “Our biggest motivation, when it comes down to it, is to make tortillas that are so undeniably great with such a compelling story that no one throws them at us anymore.” He laughs. “It’s like, let’s gain respect for what we do.”
Raquelitas is of Colorado, by Colorado and for Colorado to its core. The beginning of this ethos was a practical one.
“Many of our suppliers were being bought out by our biggest competitors. That’s what was happening in our industry. So we had to forge relationships with these smaller, local farms that flew below the radar of these big companies,” Schneider says. What the team quickly discovered is that staying local plays a much larger role in the end product than they could possibly have imagined. “When you know your corn farmers, when you know the local farmers and the local farms, and the people growing your sunflower oil[…] once you break bread with them and know their families, suddenly that sack of flour isn’t just a sack of flour. You want to make something amazing out of it.”
Schneider makes a habit of going on drives (in an old Cadillac, to be precise) to check up on Raquelitas’s local farmers and suppliers.
“I’ll see the quinoa farmers, the corn farmers. We’re doing a bison tallow tortilla right now, with tallow sourced from a Colorado bison herd from Rock River Ranches,” Schneider says.
Raquelitas tortillas are also set apart by their variety and generally creative approach to tortilla-making.
“I see tortillas moving outside of Mexican food,” Schneider says. “It’s already been happening for a while now.”
Flavored tortillas are a big part of the focus when developing new products, as well as tortillas geared toward non-Latino flavor profiles — Italian or Asian flavors, for example. Currently, the team is working on a wasabi-lemongrass tortilla and an innovative tortilla that is so thin (yet flexible) that it is only 30 calories. The end goal is to easily cater to many different cultures and styles of foods.
“I’m always trying to expand the ways that tortillas might be used. I want to make the whole pie bigger, even if it’s to the benefit of our competitors,” he adds. “I don’t consider our competitors our enemies. We aren’t trying to be everything to everyone — you sell your soul to do that.”
Today, Raquelitas products can be found in more than 2,000 restaurants around the state of Colorado… and Colorado alone.
“If people ask me, can you ship them to Utah, New Mexico, Kansas, Nebraska? I tell them, ‘I got nothing for you.'” The pride is clear in Schneiders's voice. “I’m not making my product for them. I’m making it for Colorado.”
Far from lip service, the Raquelitas dedication to the world of Colorado agriculture has even been recognized by the state government with a proclamation from the governor, lauding their promotion and elevation of local Colorado farmers and producers. As a point of pride, Raquelitas doesn’t just source their products locally; they also make a point to help guide other local food manufacturers who wish to do the same. With the exception of a group of family farmers producing white corn in Hastings, Nebraska, every ingredient that finds itself on a Raquelitas production line is locally sourced from Colorado.
Part of the team’s dedication to the land and history of Colorado agriculture is in clean energy and regenerative farming practices.
“Let’s start with the easy one,” Schneider smiles and points out the windmill on the company logo. “That little windmill signifies wind-generated electricity.” Schneider sees the move to wind and solar energy as a practical one, as well as an ethical one. “It aligns us, I think, with our core customers. I think people who want to buy local are often the same ones who are environmentally conscious.”
Today, 100% of Raquelitas' electricity is powered by wind or solar. In terms of regenerative farming practices, that falls under the dedication the team has to personally visiting and getting to know the farms they partner with, resting assured that good practices are in place so that the farmed land is being left as healthy as ever.
Looking forward, Raquelitas plans to focus on developing more global flavors and creative products that fall well outside of the realm of the conventional tortilla. Butter tortillas? Absolutely. Honey tortillas? No problem.
“We want to make products that are both indulgent and healthy,” Schneider says.
And as of this year, Raquelitas products are available through their storefront in RiNo, right next to where the tortillas are made. He likens it to a tasting room (as in wine tasting), as opposed to a traditional bakery or tortilla shop experience.
“I’ve been on wine tastings, and I love how they make you feel,” he says. “They tell you the story of the grape, and everything that follows. Then by the time you’re done, you’re not just taking home a bottle of wine. You’re taking home a memory. That’s what we do with tortillas — it’s a treasure hunt of innovative tortillas and chips you won’t find anywhere else.”
The recently (as of 2024) opened brick-and-mortar Raquelitas Tortillas storefront is located at 3131 Larimer Street near downtown Denver.