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Panchita’s Tamales by Navarro’s

Tamales made from 100% from scratch. So delicious and authentic, they deserve to be in your local freezer section.
January 5×5 Night at Start Garden
Voting Closes:

January 20, 2025 11:59 pm

About this idea
Navarro's reopened its doors in February 2021 and to date has sold over 15,000 packs of tamales. Our dream is expand the business by adding authentic, high-quality,frozen, ready to reheat at home tamales to be sold in retail and direct to consumer. What makes our tamales special is the traditional process of cooking, cleaning and grinding our corn in house to make masa from scratch. This is unique to our business, as to our knowledge, we are the only restaurant in Michigan that does so. While this process is labor intensive it produces a more authentic and quality product. At this time, we are currently at production capacity. We re looking to make an investment in equipment that would allow enable us to increase production in order to be able to distribute to retailers.
Impact
Funding from Start Garden would allow us to put a downpayment on machinery that would enable us to increase production by three times and reduce production time by at least 50%. We are currently able to produce 50 dozen tamales per hour and this would increase production to over 200 dozen per hour. With the added production capabilities, our goal is to add frozen, ready to reheat at home tamales to our product line for mail-order and retail sales, which would lead to increased revenue of nearly $84,000 in the first year. The funding would create the ability to build inventory for this new venture and make it possible to develop additional flavors. We would need to add 2-4 members to the “Tamale Squad,” our employee team, in the first year. This would be impactful for our city, Muskegon Heights, as it is economically underdeveloped and is experiencing negative job growth at higher rates than the national average.
What I'll do with $5,000
The machinery that we require to increase the production costs $40,000. The $5,000 grant would be used towards a downpayment for the equipment. The remainder will be financed through a lender that works directly with the equipment manufacturer.
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