In this episode of Women in Motion, host Lee Kantor interviews Jane Hartgrove, owner of Tres Picosos, a company specializing in burritos and Mexican food. Jane shares her journey from starting as a packaged burrito brand to expanding into a broader range of Mexican cuisine through a contract manufacturing model. She discusses the importance of customer responsiveness, product innovation, and maintaining authenticity. Jane also highlights the growth potential in various retail channels and her experience as a woman-owned business, emphasizing the support from organizations like WBEC West.
Jane Hartgrove is owner of Tres Picosos, a Mexican food company with four brands: Tres Picosos, Naughty Chile Taqueria, Muncho Muncho, and Tres Locos. Founded and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Tres Picosos — translated as three hotties, or spicy peppers — has produced authentic Mexican burritos for the convenience and foodservice channels since 2005.
Hartgrove has grown Tres Picosos from a regional store-distributed brand to a national distributed CPG company with more than 75 wholesale partners and 3,000 retail locations. Beginning her career as Assistant Editor of WaterSki Magazine, Hartgrove wrote features and columns, managed photo shoots, and covered professional water ski tournaments. Hartgrove then spent six years as a partner in Marketing Resources Group in Winter Park, FL, where she created and implemented many national public awareness programs.
With responsibility for the Miller Brewing Company’s Designated Driver campaign and other safety outreach campaigns, Hartgrove also produced public safety marketing plans for other high-profile clients such as the US Coast Guard, Toyota and Coors. Concurrently, as director of the company’s Personal Watercraft Riders Association, Hartgrove was responsible for media relations, government relations and membership services.
She created promotions and campaigns to increase membership and public awareness about the association’s mission. In 1994, Hartgrove relocated to Denver, Colorado, and opened the Denver office of Marketing Resources Group. She was a founding member of International Women in Boating, and a contributing editor to several boating publications specializing in boating safety, regulations, the environment, and marketing to women.
From 1998 through 2000, Hartgrove served as director of marketing for telecommunications software provider Evolving Systems Inc, where she directed the company’s comprehensive marketing, public relations and philanthropic efforts. Hartgrove helped her family’s venture Passport Foods Company, Inc. bring several brands together in 2003 to develop, manufacture and distribute fresh, pre-packaged ready-to-eat salads, dips, sushi, burritos, sandwiches, party trays, and custom fresh offerings to Colorado retailers and foodservice wholesalers. Passport Foods made a variety of on-the-go products as well as consumer packaged foods, and launched Tres Picosos burritos in 2005. 
Hartgrove bought that brand from the company in 2011 and continued to grow and expand the Tres Picosos company as a WBENC-certified woman owned business. While focusing on Tres Picosos burritos, in 2015 Hartgrove launched Naughty Chile Taqueria with her business partner/husband Shultz Hartgrove to serve the foodservice and convenience industry with high quality Mexican food made to order. Naughty Chile Taqueria is a licensed concept for quick-serve Mexican food at non-traditional retail locations. Capitalizing on their combined experience with QSRs, the convenience/non-trad channel, consumer packaged goods, and marketing, the Hartgroves brought this compelling consumer brand to market and expanded into mainstream foodservice distribution.
As a business owner, Hartgrove has proven success at building brands and growing sales via constant attention to product quality, customer presentation and packaging. Hartgrove graduated from the University of Florida College of Journalism & Communications with a BS in Public Relations in 1987. While at UF, she was a member of Pi Rho Sigma, the Public Relations Honor Society; an on-air announcer and PSA writer for NPR affiliate WUFT-FM, Classic 89; Communications Assistant with UF Office of the President; and Special Events Coordinator for the University of Florida Foundation.
Hartgrove enjoys the Colorado sports of hiking and biking, the Florida sports of golf and boating, and the universal enjoyment of gardening and wine tasting. While committed to comida delicisoa and relentless promotion of Tres Picosos, her children Augustus, Sophia and Margaux are her proudest accomplishments.
Follow Tres Picosos on LinkedIn and Facebook.
Music Provided by M PATH MUSIC
This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix
TRANSCRIPT
Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women In Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.
Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Women In Motion and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC-West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women In Motion, we have Jane Hartgrove with Tres Picosos. Welcome.
Jane Hartgrove: Thank you. I’m elated to be here.
Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Tres Picosos. How are you serving folks?
Jane Hartgrove: Tres Picososis a burrito company, and we have expanded to make all kinds of wonderful Mexican food. I started in 2011 when I bought the brand from my family’s company, and it was a packaged burrito company that we were doing what’s called DSD, Distributed to Stores Directly. And since then, we have expanded rapidly. We got three different packaging styles. We no longer do direct distribution. We have distributors all across the United States, and also we ship to Guam. We’ve got some Circle K stores out in Guam that are serving our wonderful Tres Picosos burritos.
Lee Kantor: Now, can you share a little bit about how something like this happens? A lot of folks think about food service, and they don’t think about going in this direction. Can you share a little bit about the backstory about how that came about?
Jane Hartgrove: Yes. I’m really happy to say that we expanded very organically. My family’s company had a food production facility, and we were making all kinds of wonderful things, like seafood salads and sushi and green salads, you know, like a chicken salad wrap or a grilled chicken Caesar – let’s see – cocktail sauces, sandwiches.
Jane Hartgrove: And a retailer came to us because of the distribution channel that we served. And he said, I have this burrito that’s coming into my stores every day, hot in foil. It’s delicious. Very authentic. My customers love it. But I’ve got 35 stores and I don’t really know where they are making these burritos. And so, I need a production facility that has USDA designation in order to be sure that the food quality standards are adhered to and we can expand to all these 35 stores.
Jane Hartgrove: So, we launched the brand Tres Picosos in order to fill that need. It was a direct customer request. And we’ve never looked back from doing the distributed to the stores directly to the large scale distribution model that can reach every aspect of the United States.
Lee Kantor: And then, you started honing in on Mexican food?
Jane Hartgrove: Right. So, this company had a bunch of different brands underneath of it. And I was the kingpin behind the Tres Picosos brand because I loved it the best. When things got a little bit too hairy for me, I bought just the brand that I wanted, which was Tres Picosos. So, in 2011, I established Tres Picosos as the woman-owned company. And I could outsource everything. I no longer needed the production facility. I got what’s called a co-pack business model. It’s also called contract manufacturing. So, we have co-packers to make our food to our recipes and our specifications and using our packaging.
Lee Kantor: And then, your responsibility is to kind of sell it into stores?
Jane Hartgrove: Right. Sales, marketing, promotion, quality assurance, everything other than the actual production, which is, you know, inside the food production facility working the production line.
Lee Kantor: So, how do you develop kind of new brands? Like, are you doing kind of R&D and saying, “Okay, maybe there’s a space in the market for something else”?
Jane Hartgrove: Yes, absolutely. We do that. We work really closely with our customers. Our primary channel is the convenience industry, which is also known as convenience retail. It’s our favorite channel. It’s where we started. And we’re expanding into grocery and food service as well, which I’ll tell you about our secondary brand in just a few minutes. So, with the convenience channel, because we have such great strong relationships with our customers, we often are able to fill their needs. Just recently, a customer came to us with a suggestion for the fillings for inside of a quesadilla. And so, we’re launching this as one of our quickie burrito mixes under the Naughty Chile Taqueria line. So, we’re very, very responsive to our customer needs.
Jane Hartgrove: I would like to tell you about the Naughty Chile Taqueria product line. I established the brand Tres Picosos in 2005 with my family’s company. Then, when I bought the brand in 2011, I ran it with the outsourced business model. And then, in 2015, I launched another brand called Naughty Chile Taqueria. We always had the idea to sell the great food that’s on the inside of the burrito in bulk for retailers and food service operators to be able to run a Mexican program on their own.
Jane Hartgrove: So, with Naughty Chili Taqueria, it is a scalable platform and the food service professional or the retailer can take just beans and rice and our bare breast chicken, use it with our green chili sauce, and make burritos all day long in-house. Or they can run an entire Naughty Chili Taqueria set up, like a quick serve restaurant that’s inside their other location, think airports, hospitals, universities, coffee shops, convenience stores. They can run it as a licensed outlet of Naughty Chili Taqueria.
Lee Kantor: And then, why would they choose this path rather than partnering with a Mexican restaurant brand, maybe a franchise?
Jane Hartgrove: Well, it has to do with ease of operations. All of our food is completely cooked, so it’s very easy to execute. It’s also infinitely scalable. So, it’s all thaw, heat, and serve. Now, the recipes are authentically Mexican. We’ve always had Mexican chefs. And we want to take the back of the house labor way, way back for whoever is serving the food. I mean, beans take six hours to boil. And our barbacoa beef, it boils all night for the slow braise and that very, very delicious infused carne. It’s just delicious. So, we’re taking the labor out of it for the retailer, streamlining the process so that they can serve their food and put their workers on frontline where they belong.
Lee Kantor: And then, they could still offer kind of an authentic Mexican product?
Jane Hartgrove: Exactly.
Lee Kantor: So, they’re not skimping on quality or authenticity. They’re just having a more efficient way to execute that and deliver value to their customers.
Jane Hartgrove: Yes. Because in these retail establishments, we’re seeing that labor is really stretched. And so, they want to take the difficulty out of food service. And Tres Picosos has done that for them by having the authentic Mexican food with very, very high quality recipes, but it’s way easier to execute than if they made it in their own kitchens.
Lee Kantor: Now, when they choose to partner with you, are you kind of giving them like a playbook on how to execute and how to deliver the food in a delicious manner?
Jane Hartgrove: Yes. Our operations training manuals, we’ve got instruction videos, we have job aids. It makes it really easy for the operator to execute perfectly.
Lee Kantor: Now, typically these customers, have they had any type of food before? Or when they’re switching to you or partnering with you, is this kind of a new adventure for them?
Jane Hartgrove: Sometimes yes and sometimes no. We play very well with others. In a retail establishment, we find that variety lifts everybody. It doesn’t cannibalize sales. So, in the convenience channel, you frequently see fried chicken, pizza, a roller grill, and having the Mexican components there, it lifts everybody’s sales. It doesn’t cannibalize them. The variety is what keeps the customer coming back day in and day out.
Lee Kantor: And then, how are CPG sales relative to other channels? Is that a growing area?
Jane Hartgrove: For Mexican food, yes. Mexican food is the second most popular food type in the United States, second only to hamburgers. So, we’re finding that a lot of retailers are under skewed on Mexican foods. In other words, they’re just not offering enough variety. And Tres Picosos and Naughty Chile Taqueria are able to fill that void.
Lee Kantor: Now, how do you kind of dial in the spice level?
Jane Hartgrove: I love that you asked that. The green chili sauce is one of our staples. We use hatch green chilies. And there’s the bell curve, right? You’ve got some people who are like, “Oh. Too hot. Too spicy.” That’s only 10 percent at the very, very top – I’m sorry, at the bottom. And then, at the top you’ve got the people who are like, “Man, bring it on. I need some more hot sauce. Where’s the Tajin? Where’s the Tabasco? Where’s the Tapatio? And so, between those two extremes, you’ve got 80 percent who just want the delicious infused smoky flavor of green chili sauce, and that’s where we always want to be.
Lee Kantor: Yeah. That’s always interesting to me, in a lot of the especially authentic Mexican restaurants, is, how they cater to so many people by having so many choices in terms of getting that spice ratio just right. Because people are particular. They have their favorites.
Jane Hartgrove: Indeed. So do I.
Lee Kantor: And then, is that an area of growth for you? Is that where you’re continuing to explore and go through the Mexican cuisines to give them and deliver those kind of delicious recipes and deliver delicious brands?
Jane Hartgrove: I believe that our growth progression will be toward other channels, maybe not so much in other items. Because once we’re making the black beans and cilantro-lime rice and the barbacoa and the pork carnitas, et cetera, adding another flavor is only one track of growth. But, really, because Mexican food is so popular in the U.S., I believe that the growth is going to be in grocery, other retail, other food service. I’d very much like to serve airports and hospitals, universities. So, I believe that the growth will be in those diversified channels, maybe not so much in the diversified product line.
Lee Kantor: Right. So, taking what you have and just expanding it into more places.
Jane Hartgrove: Right.
Lee Kantor: So, what compelled you to get involved with WBEC-West? What was the thinking behind that decision?
Jane Hartgrove: Well, I’ve been a woman-owned business since I bought the brand, but I just didn’t have the bandwidth to actually finish the application until we had the quarantine. During the quarantine, I was able to accomplish some big projects that had been hanging out there for quite some time. And top of the list was applying to be the certified woman-owned business with WBEC-West. And I’ve enjoyed every single minute of it. I’m thrilled with the opportunities, the training, the networking. It has just been a joy.
Lee Kantor: So, if somebody wants to learn more, where should they go?
Jane Hartgrove: Well, all of our spec sheets are on trespicosos.com, and that’s T-R-E-S-P-I-C-O-S-O-S, trespicosos.com. And I’m pretty easy to find through those channels.
Lee Kantor: And then, what do you need more of? How can we help you? Is it just kind of finding more partners in these different channels to have conversations?
Jane Hartgrove: Thanks for asking, Lee. I would encourage any of the women-owned businesses, if they’re in retail or if they’re in food service, when they need a Mexican food service solution, please think of Tres Picosos first.
Lee Kantor: And if they’re even thinking of exploring food, think Mexican and then have a call with you too, right?
Jane Hartgrove: Absolutely.
Lee Kantor: Well, Jane, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.
Jane Hartgrove: Thank you. I appreciate being here.
Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Women In Motion.
