Twelve years ago, after Jorge Cuellar was laid off from a surveying job with a construction company, he began working with a friend doing deliveries. Within three months, Cuellar realized he could start his own business making and distributing Mexican cookies and sweets in the Valley. He named the company the Debby & Abby Factory, after his two young daughters.
Today, Cuellar delivers packaged shortbread cookies with coconut (hojarascas), empanadas and assorted tamarind confections to 470 Valley stores and restaurants, La Joya to Brownsville. What started as a home-based business with his wife and a family friend preparing the cookies now operates from a stand-alone, purpose-built factory with four workers, two commercial ovens, multiple cooling racks and 12 different products. He is well aware of the booming Hispanic demographic that hungers for dulces con chile, hojarascas and empanadas with cajeta and nuts. The recipes, developed by Cuellar’s wife, Elizabeth, through testing them on family and friends, resulted in empanadas and coconut cookies that stay fresh and are hard to resist.
“From the beginning, everything has been made from scratch,” said Cuellar, who still handles all the deliveries six days a week. On the homebound legs of distribution routes, he stops at the Central Produce terminals in south McAllen to pick up fresh, whole tamarinds and chiles.
No other company he knows of makes the tamarind candies as Debby & Abby does: starting with the whole fruit instead of using processed tamarind pulp. The resulting hand-shaped products, all rolled in fresh chile powder, supply an explosion of flavors: sweet and sour, salty and a hint of spiciness with a fig-like consistency. Baby bolitas are small balls of tamarind on sticks, tami-pops are popsicle-shaped tamarind fruit pulp on a stick and bolarindos are billiard ball-sized treats. They all sport the Go Texan stamp.
The fresh-fruit flavor of the bolarindos is so pronounced that Cuellar has handled requests from Florida and California to ship pallets to stores there. He also ships cartons to vendors in Ohio and the Carolinas who want to introduce them to those areas. Recently H-E-B approached Cuellar about stocking Debby & Abby tamarind products. Negotiations are underway to supply Houston and Valley H-E-Bs.
“Poco a poco, we have grown the business. It took a while to build what we have now,” Cuellar said. “I didn’t think we would get to this point.” With profits, he bought a Harlingen lot near the cotton oil mills and built what looks like a tidy pink house, other than the loading dock where living windows would be. The factory has room to expand inside and out, as well as the possibility of adding another shift to its Monday through Friday schedule.
To read more of this story by Eileen Mattei, read the June 2015 edition of VBR under the “Current & Past Issues” tab on this website, or pick up a copy on news stands.