Leal's Tortilla Factory — Muleshoe, Texas, Est. 1957
Irma and Jesse
started it.
Sergio still runs it. Sixty-eight years in Muleshoe, making tortillas the same way. No preservatives, ever.
Irma and Jesse Leal opened the factory in Muleshoe before most of our current buyers were born.
In 1957, Irma and Jesse Leal started making tortillas in Muleshoe, Texas.
Muleshoe is a small town on the Texas–New Mexico line, sixty miles south of Clovis, in the flat agricultural country of Bailey County. It is not a place that gets mentioned in food media. It is a place where people have been growing corn and feeding families for a long time, and it is where Irma and Jesse Leal decided to open a tortilla factory.
The founding was not a lifestyle business or a culinary project. It was a manufacturing operation: make a real tortilla, sell it to restaurants, keep up with the orders, do not add anything to the product that was not in the recipe. That mission has not changed in sixty-eight years.
Irma and Jesse built the factory around a volcanic stone mill — the kind of grinding equipment that processes nixtamalized corn into masa the way it has been processed in Mesoamerica for several thousand years. Three ingredients: corn, water, food-grade lime. The equipment has been updated over the decades; the recipe has not.
Sergio took over in the 1990s. He has run it the same way ever since.
There was no rebrand, no new concept, no updated mission statement. He just kept making tortillas.
Sergio Leal grew up around the factory. When he took over from Irma and Jesse in the 1990s, the factory was already thirty-plus years old. He had the option to modernize the product — to switch to a roller-mill process, to add preservatives to extend shelf life, to scale faster with cheaper inputs. He did not.
The volcanic stone from Mexico is still the grinding surface. The corn is still nixtamalized with food-grade lime and water. The flour tortillas still go out without preservatives. The chips are still made from the same corn tortillas. Sergio has run the factory since the 1990s and the product that comes off the line today is the product that Irma and Jesse built in 1957.
He will tell you the same thing if you call him: (806) 272-5772. He answers the phone. He knows the product. He has been making it for his entire adult life.
The factory, Muleshoe Why we have not changed the recipe in sixty-eight years.
A recipe that is three thousand years old does not need our input.
Nixtamalization — soaking dried corn in water and food-grade lime before grinding — was developed in Mesoamerica roughly 3,500 years ago. It is not a heritage technique; it is a chemistry process that works. The alkaline treatment softens the corn, makes the nutrients bioavailable, and produces a masa that cannot be replicated by any other means.
We bring the volcanic stone from Mexico because volcanic stone has the right surface for grinding nixtamal. Its roughness produces a masa with texture and grain that a steel roller does not. That texture is what gives our tortillas their chew, their flavor, and the structural integrity that lets them hold together in a taco or survive an enchilada sauce.
Irma and Jesse chose that process in 1957 because it was the right process for making a real tortilla. Sergio kept it because it still is. We do not discuss what we do not add to the product as a feature. We discuss it as a fact: the ingredient list has three items because a corn tortilla requires three ingredients.
Dried corn — where it starts The tortilla factory was the seed of something bigger.
The Leal family has stayed in the food business across generations and across the family. The tortilla factory in Muleshoe is where it started — Irma and Jesse's operation became a model for what the family knew how to do. Real ingredients. Real process. No shortcuts.
Sergio runs Leal's Tortilla Factory today. Other members of the Leal family have carried on in food manufacturing in the region. The common thread is the same one that runs through Irma and Jesse's original factory: make it right, sell it to people who need it, keep up with the orders.
If you are a restaurant buyer who has been sourcing from us for twenty years and you are reading this, you know most of this already. If you are new to Leal's, this is who you are buying from: a third-generation family factory in Muleshoe, TX, that has been making the same product for sixty-eight years without adding preservatives to it.
See wholesale ordering options- 1957
- Founded by Irma & Jesse Leal
- 1990s
- Sergio Leal takes over
- 3
- Ingredients, unchanged
If this is the kind of operation you want to buy from, let's talk.
Tell us what your restaurant goes through in a week and we will get you pricing within one business day. Available through Sysco, Ben E. Keith, and US Foods, or direct from the factory.