La Pale’s store on International Boulevard in Brownsville is a vibrant ice cream shop featuring Mexican-style desserts.

A big whiteboard in Daisy Alcazar’s back office at La Pale Frozen Bar in Brownsville tells the story of a small business making the leap to something much bigger.

“HEB COUNTDOWN 48 DAYS TILL PICKUP,” is written in big blue letters. The message was written in late 2024 before the first delivery truck would arrive in late February.

The pickup for H-E-B occurred at refrigerated space that Alcazar and her husband, Gerardo, lease in Harlingen. Seeing it off, 10 pallets with 120,000 frozen La Pale treats, the couple knew it was a first step in proving their product can compete with corporate-made goods.

“Now the real game begins,” Daisy Alcazar said of La Pale’s products going out to over H-E-B stores. “Can we maintain capacity? Can we maintain the discipline?”

The answer would be yes if the last five years are any measure. This is a business that started from scratch in 2019 with a single store. It has done nothing but scale up since then. There is a well-earned confidence, but it’s tempered with a realization that proving yourself beyond a local market is a daunting task. 

“H-E-B took us under their wing,” Alcazar said. “We are very grateful to them for their support. Now we have to do the work.”

Getting Started

In the 2010s, Alcazar thought she and her husband were settling into years of a lengthy tenure of living in the Houston area. 

That was the plan with Daisy working as a schoolteacher and her young family looking at clear skies ahead. Then Hurricane Harvey happened in 2017.

“It took our house,” she said of the storm. “And then I got homesick.”

Back in Brownsville, the Alcazars decided to go into business. They purchased a storefront to try what was the family’s business from her husband’s roots in Mexico. Gerardo’s family had generations of being paleteros in Michoacan. The Mexican-inspired frozen dessert treats began appearing in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. The popularity of paletas spread mainly through family-to-family support due to the large Mexican and Mexican-American population in the United States. 

In the case of the Alcazars, there were longstanding recipes and systems of making paletas in Mexico that went back to the 1930s. 

“I said, you guys are the pioneers in doing this,” Daisy Alcazar recalled telling her husband and father-in-law, Rafael. 

The Alcazar family brought Mexican traditions and an authentic style of paletas to Brownville by opening multiple stores in that city and Los Fresnos as well.

“We started learning the business,” Daisy Alcazar said. “We began to see this is what we do and the more we saw, the more we thought of what we could do.”

Quest For More

There was a first wave of retailing for the Alcazar’s La Pale Frozen Fruit Bar. 

Four stores opened in southern Cameron County. Their interests would shift to scaling up their business beyond local markets and producing their paletas in greater volumes while maintaining quality. Daisy Alcazar would seek insights from entrepreneurs who started small and then were able to get their products on the shelves of large retailers.

She worked on the intricacies of pitching her family’s products and entered competitions like StartUp Texas, an accelerator program and seed fund from the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation. La Pale would finish third in the StartUp Texas of 2023. From there, it was a try for a bigger prize. La Pale would compete in H-E-B’s Quest For Texas competition in 2024 in joining hundreds of other small businesses seeking recognition from the state’s largest grocer.

La Pale would finish fifth and just out of the top four that received cash prizes. Perhaps more importantly, the Alcazars gained the attention of H-E-B’s top management and those contacts would lead to an agreement to produce paletas for the grocer.

“The logistics were hard but everyone on our journey has been helpful,” Daisy Alcazar said from La Pale’s remaining store in Brownsville on International Boulevard. “We have made the next jump but we know there are many more steps to be taken.

“We’re excited,” she said. “Now we have to deliver.”