Two Utah women entrepreneurs talk about how machines are boosting their food businesses

Being a small, independently owned producer of fine foods in Utah is no small feat.

Securing quality ingredients, meeting and exceeding the desires of customers, and even distributing products to the public are complicated endeavors fraught with regulations and costs at every turn.

For two established female entrepreneurs, the post-pandemic business landscape has prompted a change in the way they’ve done business for many years. For Salsas de Mendoza, they needed space to grow, while Cakes de Fleur struggled to find skilled employees to meet demand.

Both owners are betting their futures on the benefits that machinery and automation can provide their growing companies.

Salsas de Mendoza

Lack of space has been slowing Salsas de Mendoza co-owners Linnaea and Sergio Mendoza down for some time.

Salsitas Mendoza, now trademarked as Salsas de Mendoza, began in 2011 as a way to supplement the Mendoza family’s income after the 2008 recession. The couple took their family salsas to an outdoor market and sold out the first day. Today, they make 15 different salsas, chips and cooking sauces, sold at farmers markets and 130 grocery stores from Montana to New Mexico, as well as on Amazon. They also make products for the private label of Draper’s Pirate O’s Gourmet Market.

As the Salsas de Mendoza product line grew, the Mendozas grappled with too little space for the fresh produce they use to make their salsa, as well as a lack of room to store, fill and package their jars of salsa.

This year, with help from grant money, the Mendozas were able to move into a new production facility, with a 36-foot commercial hood shared with Yoshi’s Commissary, to meet their growing production demands.

“These grants have not only enabled us to construct a state-of-the-art facility, but have also empowered us to continue our mission of providing high-quality, authentic salsas to our valued customers,” Linnaea Mendoza said.

One of the grants, the local supplier development grant from the Utah-based Harmons grocery chain, is an annual program that “rewards local businesses for their exceptional dedication to and effort in producing and providing high quality products for local customers,” according to a release from Harmons.

Salsas de Mendoza also purchased a new conveyor chip fryer, a larger grill to roast tomatoes, a compression capper that puts just enough torque on each jar, a fully automated salsa jar labeler and scrambling table, and a new drop-in freezer.

“Now we have a grill that is way hotter and way bigger than before, so we can do a lot of the grilling twice as fast,” Mendoza said.

In less than six months, she said, they have been able to double their daily production of jarred salsas and chips.

“We went from four to six batches of salsa a day, and now we can do eight batches a day, very consistently,” she said. “As we grow, I think that we’ll end up at ten batches a day.”

The Mendozas have faced a problem in recent years that most every food producer has: An exponential rise in the cost of goods.

“The cost of oil is more than double what it was when we started making chips,” Linnaea said. “We started at $18 a jug.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, the price was up to $57 a jug, and they were limited to five jugs per purchase. “Now that oil prices are coming down, it’s still $38 a jug,” she said.

These costs were a consideration for the number and size of Salsas de Mendoza’s product line. For example, the company started offering only one size of tortilla chip bag — to match other brands in Harmons.

“If we streamline with one size of bag, then I don’t have to buy twice the supplies anymore,” she said. “And then the pricing on the single bag is better.”

The new conveyor chip fryer allows them to produce 4 to 5 times more chips than frying by hand. That is allowing Salsas de Mendoza to produce an average of 3,000 bags of tortilla chips a week.

The tortilla chips are made in three flavors. They make the original flavor on Mondays and Tuesdays. They produce the seasoned flavor on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Fridays is the day for the chile lime flavor.

“Then we don’t have to switch the equipment as often,” Linnaea Mendoza said.

The company has worked for years to put various sales agreements in place, and the Mendozas are excited to see their efforts come full circle. For example, they can now fulfill a contract with Associated Foods and their affiliate stores to sell the entire line of salsas and chips.

“We weren’t prepared to make a commitment that we could keep up with the chips until we had this chip machine,” she said.

Cakes de Fleur

Laurlee Morrison, founder and owner of Cakes de Fleur, has struggled to find skilled bakers and cake decorators for the past three years, since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

Before the pandemic, Morrison employed as many as 18 people. Now, she said she strives to keep even 10 on staff. She said she has had to turn down cake orders because of staff shortages.

Morrison started Cakes de Fleur in 2004, and built a stellar reputation turning time-tested batter flavors and buttercream frosting into edible works of art. Her client list includes celebrities, global corporations and anyone who needs an outrageous and creative custom cake creation.

Over the years, Cakes de Fleur has delivered everything from rustic and exquisite wedding cakes for guests at Alta Lodge, Harry Potter-themed birthday cakes, and a U.S. Marshal cake to announce a new job. They have made cake versions of Rice-Eccles Stadium, the Eiffel Tower and Adobe’s Lehi campus. (That last one served 500 people, and required the tech company to shut down security at the front doors and remove panes of glass to get the cake down the stairs.)

With such exacting requirements from customers, cake-making isn’t a profession one can walk into right off the street — and Cakes de Fleur has found itself in short supply of experienced bakers.

Morrison — a former software engineer before she became a bakery owner, and therefore adept at solving complex problems — said she has seen Utah’s labor shortage push her limits.

“I really did some serious soul-searching the end of last year,” she said, adding that she reached the point where she asked herself “Is this worth it?”

Her answer, ultimately, was “yes,” she said, because she truly finds joy in providing this sweet luxury item to customers. “We are in the business of making people happy,” she said.

To move forward, though, she said she had to automate some of the bakery’s production tasks. “I realized that we could probably solve some of our labor problems with machines,” she said.

When Morrison learned another bakery was going out of business, she bought some of their equipment. She bought a frosting machine, a cake depositor (which measures out cake batter into pans) and an 80-quart Hobart mixer.

While Morrison continues to look for skilled bakers and decorators for the company’s custom cake orders for weddings and corporate events, the machines’ efficiency will help increase output for Cakes de Fleur’s bread-and-butter business: Six-inch cakes sold in the company’s bakery, at The Store in Holladay and The Gateway in Salt Lake City, eight Harmons locations and Meier’s Meats and Fine Foods in Highland.

The mixer allows for large-scale cake production, while the depositor — which weighs the batter and deposits it in the pans for baking — has eliminated waste and improved cake consistency. The frosting machine, though, has been the game changer.

The turntable frosting machine, Morrison said, has “changed what we do for the 18 years we’ve been in business.”

The machine, with a frosting depositor operated by a foot pedal, ideally has three people working on it at the same time. One person gets the cakes ready for the machine, a second runs the machine, and the third puts on the sprinkles and decoration, and puts the cakes in boxes.

After just a few days with the new equipment, Morrison said, “we believe that we have increased by about 20% in a day.”

Frosting and decorating a cake by hand might take three employees, working together, 5 minutes, Morrison said. With the machine, they can do it in 60 to 90 seconds.

“It’s a different feel, but it still needs to be right. You certainly want the quality of your product to be good,” she said.

That efficiency translates into more potential vendors to sell “a little bit of luxury” to customers, she said.

“I think that’s so brilliant,” she said. “We have machines that will help us do it faster, but it’s not taking away any jobs from humans, because the humans still have to make sure it works.”

The machine also helps with training, she said. “I can train people to write ‘happy birthday’ on a cake, and I can work with them on six-inch cakes for a long time until their skills improve to the point where I can move them to some of the other custom work,” she said. “It’s a good training ground because it’s steady and consistent.”

In addition to the cost of the machines, Morrison had to make major upgrades to use them.

“All of our new equipment runs on [compressed] air, so we had to prepare our whole facility,” she said. “We had to get new power and we had to put air through the building.”

Also, the kitchen needed a sink big enough to wash an 80-quart mixer bowl. And anyone taking phone orders had to move far away from the air compressor, because of the noise it makes.

Morrison said her employees were concerned by the changes. ‘We’re totally low-tech and so honestly, my people have been afraid,” she said. “It’s been really scary.”

It will take about a year, Morrison said, to recoup her costs from the upgrades.

“I bet the future of this company on this equipment, because I spent what we had to get us doing it,” Morrison said. “And, you know, when you’re doing that, you don’t know if you’ve made a good investment.”