A Piece of Home at Local Grocer
With a referral from Claudia Cardozo-Tarullo from the Every Company Counts team to the RI Small Business Development Center, La Paz Food Distributor was able to get the help they needed to launch their business.
The following article was written by Marion Davis-Managing Editor Providence Business News (PBN Photo by Jaime Lowe):
The space is just a small, narrow warehouse, indistinguishable from any other along this shabby stretch of Rathbone Street. But behind the doors of La Paz Food Distributor, in boxes piled up to the ceiling, are items treasured by thousands of New England residents.
Nothing fancy, no – just little pieces of Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean.
Del Frutal juices and La Maya horchata (a cold, sweet rice drink). Yucca chips, chicharrones (Latin-style pork rinds), tropical fruit and vegetable preserves. And not just any hot sauce, but Tapatío from Mexico, or Picamás from Guatemala.
Even the simple things you might find cheaper in the supermarket – spices, teas, chicken broth and beef bouillon mix, rice and beans – or personal care items like shampoo and soap, are just so much better sometimes when they’re precisely the kind you grew up with, the kind you long for when you’re feeling homesick.
The Lurssen brothers understand this because they’re immigrants themselves, from Guatemala, living in the United States for 18 years now, but still immersed in the culture they were born into. Their mom, Marina, works with them at the warehouse; their dad, Fernando, does deliveries. Every day, they work with bodega owners whose livelihood revolves around immigrants, and several times a year, they travel to Central America.
Almost everything in the boxes at La Paz is there because somebody longed for it.
“People ask us, ‘Why don’t you bring this?’ or ‘Why don’t you bring that?’ ” said Ronan Lurssen, who manages the company. “And we have people in Guatemala who will go out and look for the items, and in the next container, we’ll have the products.”
The brothers – along with Ronan, there’s Byron, the sales manager, and Denzel, who oversees deliveries – got their education in the ethnic-products wholesale business by working for Goya, the company that has long dominated the U.S. Latin American foods market.
But as they traveled around New England, working directly with grocers, they started to see a shift: Confident that immigrants would always prefer their own countries’ brands to Goya if they could find them on store shelves, small companies began importing those products.
The supermarkets, for the most part, still wouldn’t have them, but in ethnic neighborhoods, Mexican products, Colombian products, Dominican products became more and more common, and the businesses importing them did well.
The Lurssens decided to carve out their own niche, catering to Central American immigrants. Most bodegas around here, Ronan Lurssen said, are owned by Dominicans or other non-Central Americans, but the merchants were happy to accept their help stocking products that immigrants in their neighborhoods wanted to buy.
They started with about 10 items, he said. Today they carry about 250 – about 95 percent imported directly by La Paz from Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, and the rest purchased from other importers (primarily Mexican and Colombian goods).
Their customers, about 400 at this point, are primarily neighborhood grocers, Lurssen said, along with taquerias and a few other eateries. And the end consumers are, overwhelmingly, Latinos, though just last week, an Indian man e-mailed them inquiring about buying the coconut water they stock, because he liked the flavor.
La Paz has grown a great deal since its inception, Lurssen said, but the pace has accelerated in the last year, and the brothers have several ideas for how to get to the next level.
For starters, they’re diversifying, scoping out new products to make themselves more attractive to Dominicans, Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in this market. They are also preparing proposals for major supermarket chains, aiming to get some of their brands on the shelves early next year.
And next month, Ronan Lurssen is moving to Miami to set up an operation there. All imports from Central America come in through Miami, so to thrive, La Paz needs to be in the middle of the action, he said. His brothers will stay in Providence to run the rest of the operation.
With the help of the R.I. Small Business Development Center, they also obtained a bank loan for the first time this year, from Coastway Credit Union. It’s helping finance the Miami office. So they’re pretty confident right now.
“We’ve grown about 50 percent faster in the last year than we did in the two previous years,” Lurssen said. “One year from now, I believe we could be in the chains, competing with large companies like Goya and La Fe.”