The concept was brilliant, a stroke of pure genius. There’s no way, other than sabotage, an idea of such brilliance could’ve flopped. That’s what Hector Fofana told himself when his culinary brainchild, Tortilla Tape, became the laughingstock of the Mexican Food industry.
Tortilla Tape was a long thin strip of flour tortilla, packaged in a tape dispenser. It was designed to repair rips and tears caused by the overzealous burrito rollers, enabling burrito lovers to stuff more of their favourite filling into ordinary tortillas. It worked like a patch. You applied a pre-moistened strip of Tortilla Tape to a punctured tortilla, known as a blowout, and left it to cure for thirty seconds. After that, your damaged burrito was as good as new.
Ortega Mexican Foods CEO Javier de la Quintana proclaimed that Tortilla Tape would revolutionise the art of burrito making. The company went all-in on its success. Despite the multimillion-dollar marketing campaign and fanfare surrounding the product launch, Tortilla Tape was a colossal flop. Something about the scale of its failure captured the zeitgeist. Late-night talk show hosts eviscerated Tortilla Tape in bombastic monologues. Magazine editors scrambled to commission think pieces directly linking Tortilla Tape with corporate hubris and apathetic consumerism. Tortilla Tape became shorthand for disaster. Javier de la Quintana was whisked away into the sunset on the wings of a golden parachute, but Hector Fofana’s reputation was destroyed. He was left to wring his hands, wondering what went wrong, what to do next.
Until the Tortilla Tape fiasco, Hector had been the golden boy of the Mexican Food industry. He graduated from the esteemed Buena Vista Institute of Culinary Sciences and went to work in the test kitchen of a then-obscure Mexican fast-food chain called Taco Johns. His team engineered the Potato Olé, a groundbreaking side item that helped Taco Johns take a bite out of Taco Bell’s market share. He followed that success with the original Double Decker Taco, a staple of the menu even today.
Taco Bell was rattled by Hector’s innovative creations. They hired him away from Taco Johns, doubling his salary and making him chief culinary scientist at its top-secret food lab in Menlo Park. But as he reached this professional pinnacle, his personal life went into a tailspin. His wife left him for a young hotshot from the Whataburger test kitchen who invented chicken rings. An abomination. Hector responded to the darkness and inner turmoil by creating his masterpiece, the Taco Bell Gordita.
Having conquered the world of fast food, Hector set his sights on bigger and better things. ConAgra Foods brought him on board when they acquired the Ortega Mexican Foods portfolio. He floundered at first, reformulating Mexican classics like Pozolé and Menudo for the less-sophisticated gringo palate. It wasn’t long before he again struck culinary gold with the Tastee-Mex line of bake-at-home products. New advances in flash freezing enabled him to reinvent the tamale as a quick and healthy after-school snack. Ortega Mexican Foods leapfrogged Old El Paso to become the juggernaut of the supermarket’s Mexican food aisle.
By this point, Hector Fofana had become the biggest name in the field of culinary science. He had become restless, plagued by an almost delusional compulsion to outdo his past triumphs. This quest would represent his white whale, his moonshot, the drive to create a product so innovative, so wildly imaginative, so relevant and alive, so absolutely vital that it would eclipse the mighty Gordita as the capstone of his resumé.
The idea for Tortilla Tape came to him, fully formed. The prototype impressed the boardroom, but some in the marketing department had qualms over the name. An alternate, Burrito Bandages, was suggested, but Hector Fofana dug in his heels. He fought hard for his vision of Tortilla Tape, cleverly packaged in a plastic tape dispenser. Who could argue with Hector's record of culinary success? After all, he was the man who invented the Potato Olé, the man who introduced the chocolatey decadence of Oxacan Molé to middle American dinner tables, the man who earned the name Mr. Gordita, a true luminary of culinary science.
Hector never experienced such a failure, never expected to fail. The Tortilla Tape fiasco ushered in a prolonged period of reflection and self-examination. Hector retreated from day-to-day involvement at Ortega Mexican Foods and allowed the five stages of grief to play out at their own pace. Motives and priorities were dissected and analysed, and from this chrysalis emerged a rejuvenated Hector Fofana, with a newfound wisdom and maturity. No longer content to chase the fleeting highs of corporate success, he vowed to harness his talent to create foods that brought him happiness.
Lesser men may have distanced themselves from past failures. Not Hector Fofana. He looked at Tortilla Tape as a puzzle that needed to be solved. Clearly, the potential was there, he was driven to reimagine and repurpose it.
The Eureka moment came about by accident. He placed a few strips of Tortilla Tape into a hot cast-iron skillet and was overtaken by a magical sensation as they sizzled to a golden brown. He dusted the chips with salt and white pepper and tried one. It was absolutely divine. Hector Fofana knew it was time to get back to work.
The tortilla chip market had grown stagnant. It was ripe for disruption. Hector’s unique tortilla strips, fried in coconut oil and sprinkled with gourmet seasonings, offered an upmarket alternative to the Fritos and Doritos that dominated supermarket shelves. The sturdy strips were ideal for dipping, a fact not lost on the Ortega Mexican Foods board, who introduced a line of upmarket Tastee-Mex companion salsas.
While Tastee-Mex Big Dipper tortilla strips never overtook Doritos as market leader, they ushered in a new era in snacking. Hector Fofana’s redemption arc was finally complete. Once again, Mr Gordita was back on top. From the ashes of spectacular failure, a snack is born.
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