For This Successful Food Entrepreneur, It’s All About The Spice

Meet Mexico’s first chili-ionaire. My new feature on the founder and CEO of Tajín, Horacio Fernández, is a classic Forbes success story. Fernández has rarely given interviews in the four decades he has run the iconic chili spice brand, so when I heard he was willing to share the secrets to his success with me, I hopped on a plane to Jalisco.

My story explores how Fernández has rebuffed investors and acquisition offers in order to retain control of his spice blend business. It also looks at how that control has allowed him to invest beyond his beloved brand into a number of different avenues, including seed cultivating and chili processing.

I toured the grounds where he raises and sells specialty chili peppers with the largest research operation of its kind worldwide. It can produce 9 million seedlings annually. Meanwhile, Fernández’s Capsicum Sabores De Mexico is the largest processor of chilis in Mexico and among the largest in the world. It insures Tajín’s supply, while also selling to conglomerates like publicly traded PepsiCo and Grupo Bimbo. As one of the world’s most successful food entrepreneurs, Fernández is helping to preserve some of Mexico’s key cultural foodways.

Fernández has built quite the business. And he’s all-in on America, despite looming tariffs. Enjoy the read, and I hope you have a spicy weekend!

— Chloe Sorvino, Staff Writer

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FIELD NOTES

America’s hottest “luxury item”: scrambled eggs, served at Founding Farmers in Washington, D.C. alongside hash browns, ham steak and an English muffin.

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Chloe Sorvino leads coverage of food and agriculture as a staff writer on the enterprise team at Forbes. Her book, Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed and the Fight for the Future of Meat, published on December 6, 2022, with Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. Her nearly nine years of reporting at Forbes has brought her to In-N-Out Burger’s secret test kitchen, drought-ridden farms in California’s Central Valley, burnt-out national forests logged by a timber billionaire, a century-old slaughterhouse in Omaha and even a chocolate croissant factory designed like a medieval castle in northern France.