Tortillas

INDUSTRIAL CODES

NAICS: 31-1830 Tortilla Manufacturing, 31-1919 Snack Food Manufacturing, not elsewhere classified

SIC: 2099 Food Preparations, not elsewhere classified

NAICS-Based Product Codes: 31-813001, 31-9300Y, and 31-19141

PRODUCT OVERVIEW

When Spanish adventurers reached the lands of a people called the Aztec Mexicas, in the region known as Mexico today, they encountered a round, bread-like food the natives called tlaxcalli. The Aztecs spoke Nahuatl. They used a grain to make this bread still unknown to the Europeans in the early 1500s. Hernando Cortez called it maize. He was using a word for it derived from another native language Columbus had already encountered, Taíno, in which corn was called mahis or mayz. To help the folks back home understand what this grain was, Cortez described it as Indian corn.

The round, flat bread the Aztecs made suggested a small cake to the Spanish. The Spanish for cake is torta; a diminutive form of the word is tortilla, meaning a small or a flat cake in this case—the name by which this product is still known the world over. In Spain a tortilla can also mean a flat omelette with potatoes and onions, fried in olive oil and salted. This type of tortilla is usually distinguished from the Aztec kind by calling it a Spanish omelette.

The same basic product appears in other forms called by different names. As Linda Stradley puts it, in "History of Tortillas & Tacos," "In Mexico, the word taco is a generic term like the English word sandwich. A taco is simply a tortilla wrapped around a filling. Like a sandwich, the filling can be made with almost anything and prepared in many different ways (anything that can be rolled inside a tortilla becomes a taco)." A burrito is another kind of wrapped food in which the outer layer is a wheat, rather than a corn, tortilla. Tamales are made of maize dough of the same kind used to make tortillas. However, this dough is stuffed with chopped meat and crushed peppers, is next wrapped in corn husks and then steamed, rather than baked. Corn chips are fundamentally the same product but, in common classification, are placed under the snack food category rather than treated as part of the tortilla industry.

Stradley's historical notes indicate that cultivation and hybridization of corn dates back at least to 3000 B.C. in Mesoamerica, or Central America. By the time Europeans made contact, corn had become the grain of the Americas and the chief source of food energy for its people—corresponding to rice in Asia and to wheat, oats, rye, and barley most everywhere else.

Types of Tortillas

In modern times tortillas come in two broad varieties—made of corn or of wheat. Wheat tortillas are usually referred to and are labeled as flour tortillas. There are two kinds of corn tortilla, those made directly from kernels of corn, referred to as the wet dough method, and those made with corn flour, called the corn flour method. The consensus of aficionados is that the wet dough method produces a superior product with much better taste. Corn flour of the type used in tortillas requires preservatives to give it shelf life. Traditional bakeries, or tortillerias, use the wet dough method. In Mexico virtually every neighborhood has a tortilleria.

The corn dough or corn flour preparation process is elaborate. The kernels are cooked in water in which a small amount of caustic agent, lime in modern practice, has been dissolved. Chemically lime is calcium hydroxide. The kernels are allowed to steep for eight or more hours after cooking. The presence of lime in the cooking water helps the very thin, fibrous outer skin of each kernel (the husk) to break apart and to detach, in part as a consequence of the internal swelling of the kernels. As Zarela Martínez, a renowned chef and expert of Mexican cuisine, points out, during the long steeping process, chemical reactions produce more easily digested nutrients; more niacin is made accessible to our metabolism; and the food that is produced retains more protein and other vitamins as well. Whether done by the cook or by an industrial process, steeped corn must be washed to remove the husks, known as the pericarp; the water is drained off.

The original caustic agent used by the Aztecs was lye obtained from ashes added to the cooking solution; the use of lime came later. Wood ashes contain potassium salts which, dissolved in water, produce potassium hydroxide. The Aztecs undoubtedly discovered the process by accident. They must have spilled ashes into the cooking vessel and found, to their surprise, that the resulting corn was pleasantly swollen in the process, easy to grind, and better tasting. We infer this from the fact that they called the drained product nixtamal. They joined two words to make this new one—the word for ashes and the word for dough (tamal—hence our tamale). Nixtamal, translatable as ash-dough, is still the word used to describe the unformed, basic, primal dough made at this stage. People in the trade call the entire process nixtamalization.

Ground nixtamal produces masa (sometimes rendered as maza). The word means dough in Spanish because the grinding of wet nixtamal makes a moist dough. Masa, however, is also sold in the form of a flour or cornmeal ready to be turned into dough by adding water. To arrive at corn flour by this method, dried masa must be reground. Nixtamal is also distributed in dried form. It is then ground at the time of preparation. Coarse or fine grinds produce different kinds of taste and texture in the final product. Expert chefs prefer to grind their own nixtamal.

Once a moist dough is ready, small portions are separated by hand or machine and are formed into balls. The balls are pressed flat and baked. Taco shells are baked in forms and then fried in addition. Corn chips are sheeted, cut, baked, and fried with salt and spices.

In the wet dough process the tortillas are made from fresh-ground nixtamal. The production of tortillas from corn flour relies on ground masa delivered as a powder. Corn flour made by other methods is not suitable for tortilla making according to Michael Meagher and Timothy Zimmer as reported in a Purdue University study. The authors state: "Nixtamalized corn masa flour is cohesive when wetted, due to the presence of partially gelatinized amylase and amylopectin generated during the cooking stage of production of masa flour. Corn meal (or regular corn flour which is finely ground corn meal), when wetted, is sticky, but not cohesive, and cannot be sheeted to make tortillas." Corn flour tortillas are said to have a flat or indifferent taste compared to items made by the wet dough process.

Once dough has been made, the production process is essentially the same whether the original grain is corn or wheat. The dough used to make flour tortillas is made with wheat flour, water, salt, and small amounts of oils or fats. Flour tortillas were first made in Texas close to the Mexican border. Traditional methods used lard as the fat, but vegetable oils have been displacing lard. Some producers add a small amount of baking powder to produce a lighter product. Producers prefer so-called soft flour made of wheat grown in temperate regions and used in cakes; these flours have low levels of gluten. High levels of gluten, present in flours used in bread, make the dough more difficult to shape because gluten renders dough sticky and likely to spring back to its original shape after flattening.

Consumption Patterns

If tortillas are viewed in a broad sense to include all basic forms of the product, thus including traditional tortillas, tacos, and tortilla-style corn chips, most of this product consumed in the United States is made of corn. When we look at product sales in grocery stores, however, wheat tortillas are the dominant form. A report by ACNielsen for a 52-week period ending in April 2005 showed that corn tortillas were 34 percent and wheat tortillas 66 percent of total category sales in the grocery, drug store, and mass merchandising channels. The ACNielsen data exclude Wal-Mart sales because the company does not share its checkout counter data with others, but it is reasonable to assume that all retail sales patterns were the same. These data are roughly in line with data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census for 2002. In that year's Economic Census the tortilla industry's consumption of major grains divided into corn, representing 41 percent of inputs, and wheat, 59 percent. If we combine the output of the tortilla industry with the corn tortilla chip segment of snack foods, however, we discover that 82 percent of all such products are based on corn.

Cousins Around the World

In one sense the tortilla is part of the much wider category of flatbreads, common across the world. These products are typically made of wheat, rye, barley, and other grains occasionally admixed with other ingredients; the Norwegian lefske, for example, is a potato and flour mix. Flatbreads are known on every continent and appear in all major cuisines. Most are made of unleavened dough and are eaten as snacks or parts of special food preparations. The pizza is an example, as are pancakes and the Hungarian palacsinta, which is used as a wrapper for meat and bean fillings or sweetened cottage cheese. Bread products, such as Jewish matzo can be very similar to a flour tortilla when prepared as a soft product rather than as a hard-baked cracker. Pita bread is a well-known product in the United States. It originated in the Middle East. The tortilla is unique in having originally been made exclusively of maize and of serving as the principal bread product in Mexico and some adjoining areas.

MARKET

Tortillas are one segment of a very substantial category of food products made of grain, together representing industrial production, measured in shipments, of $65.1 billion in 2005. This total is produced by adding all shipments of bakery products, breakfast cereals, cookies and crackers, flour and dough, tortillas, and pasta. Tortillas stand out in two ways. The first is that tortillas are a rather small segment of the total, representing 3.2 percent of shipments in 2005, but the category has increased its share of the total market from 2.1 percent in 1997, a share gain of 1.1 percent. Tortillas had the second largest gain in share, next only to bakery products, which gained 2.8 percent in share. The bakery products gain, however, was due entirely to the growth in frozen products. The second interesting fact about tortillas is that they had the most rapid growth rate overall in the 1997–2005 period, advancing at the rate of 8.2 percent per year over the growth of the total category of 2.7 percent per annum. Shares of the categories are shown in Figure 212.

The growth patterns of tortilla and its fellow grain-based industries are shown in Figure 213. Index values are used, instead of dollar magnitudes, so that the relatively tiny tortilla category will remain visible. Using this technique, all categories are indexed at 100 for 1997 and percentage changes from that time forward are used as the index. Overlaid on the growth bars are actual dollar shipments of tortillas. It shows the tortilla industry advancing from a level of $1.1 billion in 1997 to $2.09 billion in 2005.

These data are based on shipments as reported by the Census Bureau in its Economic Census years—those ending in 2 or 7—and on the Census Bureau's Annual Survey of Manufactures taking place in all other years. The data conform to the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS) categories. These usually correspond closely to definitions commonly used outside of government circles as well. In the case of tortillas, however, the NAICS definitions understate the tortilla category. Not all tortilla-style product sales are included in the Tortilla Manufacturing industry. Substantial products are also carried under Snack Foods (NAICS 31-191M), but with details only available for 1997 and 2002.

Using data for 2002, we can determine the total size of the tortilla snack market. In that year the Census Bureau reported shipments of tortilla chips valued at $3.39 billion as part of Snack Food Manufacturing. The corresponding shipment volume in 1997 was $3 billion, showing a growth rate of 2.5 percent per year from 1997 to 2002. Growth was more modest in this segment of products based on masa-type corn flour than in tortillas, which grew at a rate of 7.1 percent per year in this same period. The snack category, however, was substantially larger. North Americans consumed this special kind of corn flour predominantly in the form of flavored chips.

Growth trends in the tortilla industry rest on complex factors. The most important of these has been a growing Hispanic population and lifestyle changes in the United States.

KEY PRODUCERS/MANUFACTURERS

As of the 2002 Economic Census, 271 companies manufactured tortillas in the United States. In most manufacturing industries company counts have typically shrunk between 1997 and 2002. Consolidation had been the dominant pattern. The tortilla industry was an exception; its company counts increased during this period. They stood at 218 in 1997. Establishment counts grew as well, from 236 to 297. In 2002, 111 were large, with 20 or more employees; 186 were small operations serving local or regional markets. The industry was most visibly present in Texas in 2002 (with 96 establishments) and in California (with 66). According to the Census Bureau's County Business Patterns, twenty new establishments were added in 2003. Neither government nor private surveys offer sufficient data to show how many companies or establishments are engaged in making corn or flour tortillas—or both.

Despite these large numbers, one company, Gruma Corporation, plays a dominant role in the tortilla industry. Gruma Corp. is the U.S. element of Gruma, SA de CV, a Mexican multi-national company. Gruma had sales in 2005 equivalent to $2.5 billion. Of that total 50 percent was attributable to U.S. operations, 32 percent to Mexican, 10 percent to Venezuelan, 5 percent to Central American, and 3 percent to European.

Gruma is principally a manufacturer of corn flour and, based on the estimates of the Meagher and Zimmer report, controls approximately 80 percent of that market through its wholly-owned Azteca Milling LP division. Most of Azteca's production is sold to Mission Foods Corporation, also owned by Gruma, and to Frito Lay, the chip producer. Azteca flour is also used by Taco Bell's taco shell producers. According to Gruma's own investigations, 52 percent of all tortillas sold are made of purchased corn flour and 48 percent produced by the wet dough process. Gruma's own flour would thus account for approximately 42 percent of all corn tortilla sales. Azteca's production plants are located in Amarillo, Edinburg, and Plainville, Texas; in Madera, California; in Evansville, Indiana; and in Henderson, Kentucky. The company's two retail brands are Maseca and VGP Masa-Mixta.

Mission Foods owns the leading brands of tortillas sold at retail (Guerrero, Mission, Azteca, and others). The Mission brand alone consists of 41 different products, including four flour and two multi-grain tortilla types. Production facilities are located in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington. Mission is headquartered in Irving, Texas. The company had approximately 39 percent of the retail food sales market in 2006.

Other leading producers in the industry, arranged here in order of leading brands on the market, are General Mills, Bimbo Bakeries, Olé Mexican Foods Inc., La Tortilla Factory, B&G Foods, Hormel Corporation, Kraft Foods Inc., Albuquerque Tortilla Company, Inc., and El Milagro, Inc. The company rankings (and the shares cited below) are based on 2006 data assembled by Information Resources Inc., on retail channel sales of $963 million, excluding Wal-Mart, for the 52-week period ending in July 2006—thus a subset of the total market. The data were published by Snack & Wholesale Bakery in its August 2006 issue.

General Mills participates in the industry through the Old El Paso line of products that it acquired in 1995 when purchasing Pet Inc. By that time Old El Paso was already a leading factor in the Mexican food category. The company offers several varieties of both corn and flour tacos, both hard and soft. These products represented a 14.3 percent share of the market.

Bimbo USA is a major regional baked products company owned by Mexico-based Grupo Bimbo. The group's U.S. operation had sales of 13.5 billion Mexican pesos in 2005, equivalent to US$1.27 billion. Bimbo's participation is through its Tia Rosa brand of tortilla products imported from Mexico. The company had a 4.2 percent share of the retail market in 2006.

Olé Mexican Foods Inc. has had a 4.2 percent share of the market with its La Banderita and Olé brands alone. The company also offers three other brands—Verolé, La Centralamericana, and Mucho Taco—making its overall share greater. Corn and flour tortillas are both on offer. The company began in 1988 in Atlanta but distributed its products in 40 states by the late years of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

La Tortilla Factory began in Sonoma County, California, in 1977. It has since developed a national distribution system. The company offers 19 types of products under the La Tortilla Factory brand and had a 2.9 percent share of the market in 2006.

B&G Foods, a $411 million (2006) diversified food company, acquired the Ortega line of Mexican foods from Nestlé in 2003. Ortega began in the nineteenth century as a chili pepper canning enterprise and eventually developed into a diversified producer of Mexican foods, including a line of taco shells. In 2006 the Ortega brand of tacos also held a 2.9 percent share of the retail market.

Hormel Foods Corporation, best-known perhaps as the manufacturer of Spam, acquired Arriba Foods, Inc. in 2005. Arriba's best-known brand is Manny's, Gringo Pete's, and Mexican Accent. At the time of its acquisition, Arriba had sales of $30 million. The Manny's brand of tortillas is sold in the retail channel, the other two brands in the food service channels. Hormel itself had sales in 2006 of $5.7 billion.

Kraft Foods Inc., with 2006 sales of $34.4 billion, is a highly diversified food company. Kraft's participation in the tortilla market takes the form of selling Taco Bell Originals. These are tacos made by Kraft suppliers. Kraft's use of the Taco Bell brand is by special arrangement; Kraft may only sell this product in retail outlets. Hormel and Kraft had shares in the tortilla industry of 1.5 and 1.3 percent, respectively.

Albuquerque Tortilla Company, Inc. began operations in 1987 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a small shop selling flour tortillas to local customers. The company began its expansion by selling to restaurants. It later added a line of corn tortillas to its offering. The company now serves a regional market (Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas) with seven distinct tortilla products in addition to salsas, spices, and prepared foods. The company had a 1.1 percent share of the retail tortilla market in 2006.

El Milagro, Inc. began operations in 1950. The company now has operations in four locations in Illinois as well as in Texas and in Georgia. With sixteen distinct corn and flour products, the company had a 1 percent share of retail tortilla sales in the United States.

Albuquerque and El Milagro are good examples of operations that began as small and local startups but worked their way into the top ranks of producers. They are privately held but, based on their reported market shares, are multi-million dollar operations. Much of the rest of the industry consists of small tortillerias or companies that produce products for private label or sell directly to the food service industry. A good example of the latter is La Reina, Inc., a West-Coast based tortilla and prepared Mexican foods producer founded in 1958 to make flour tortillas. Since then La Reina has also added corn tortillas to its array of products. The company sells its production in the United States and exports its products to England, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea, China, New Zealand, and to Australia.

By their sheer prominence in the mind of U.S. consumers, two other participants in the business deserve special mention. One of these, Taco Bell, is principally a buyer from others rather than a producer of tacos. Of the two major suppliers of tacos one has been mentioned above, Mission Foods. The other is Sabritos Mexicali, owned by PepsiCo, Inc. Taco Bell is owned by Yum! Brands Inc., a global operator of major fast food chains (A&W Root Beer, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Long John Silver, Pizza Hut, and Yum! International Restaurants—in addition to Taco Bell). Yum! is a $9.5 billion corporation. The second company, Frito-Lay, is a division of PepsiCo, Inc., and is the brand leader in tortilla chips, a product reported as part of the snack foods industry.

MATERIALS & SUPPLY CHAIN LOGISTICS

The principal inputs to tortilla production are the grains from which the product is made. Packaging materials, fats, and oils are other purchased components. These are widely available. In general the industry has no unusual logistical requirements.

White corn is the variety ideal for making tortilla from scratch or to produce masa flour. According to the National Corn Growers Association nearly 82 million acres of corn were planted and harvested in the United States in 2005 but of that total only 700,000 acres were white corn. White corn has lower yield per acre (ranging from 3% to 10% lower depending on variety); as a consequence it costs more. Production has been declining because exports have been dropping; around 25 percent of white corn is exported. Mexico, the major buyer of U.S. white corn, has raised tariffs on the product to protect its own farming sector. The leading states producing this type of corn are Kentucky, Nebraska, Texas, Illinois, and Indiana, making the product widely available. Gruma has flour mills located strategically across the country so that those using the corn flour method have reasonable access to this key input for making corn tortillas.

Hard white wheat (HWW) is ideal for making flour tortillas. It happens also to be a desirable grain for producing whole wheat bread with a white color; most such bread is darker, reddish in hue. Costs of this wheat variety have increased. Demand for HWW has risen along with demand for whole wheat products along the entire grain-products sector. The dominant producing state is Kansas, located centrally.

DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL

The total production of the tortilla industry appears to enter three different channels of distribution. Of these the largest is the retail channel, approximately 67 percent of total shipments. Food service is next in rank and accounts for 28 percent. Institutional purchasers (the military, hospitals, government, nursing, and childcare, etc.) represent approximately 5 percent of the total. This categorization is approximate because no precise data are available. Market research firms report on the retail channel but exclude Wal-Mart. With Wal-Mart added in (the company is said to control 17 percent of all retail grocery sales), the total retail component can be estimated. Institutional purchasing may be inferred from input-output data published by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The remainder, by inference, is sold to the food service industry.

Major producers for the retail trade ship products to supermarket distribution centers, food wholesalers' distribution centers, and also employ wholly-owned and independent delivery routes. Most small producers operate their own retail outlets and/or use their own trucks to supply local grocery stores. Local and regional tortilla producers also utilize farmers markets where they maintain permanent booths to sell fresh products.

The institutional and food service distribution systems have similar features. Customers routinely selling or serving tacos or tortillas in large quantities have permanent supply relations with two or more producers and are fed their streams of product by routes, either from their own or supplier-maintained distribution centers. Occasional buyers get their products from wholesale food distributors or buy supplies for special occasions or menus from wholesale produce markets where tortilla makers also maintain a presence.

KEY USERS

By the twenty-first century the tortilla had achieved a generic status as a common food product in the United States so that very few people are surprised by the product when it is offered or served, and the vast majority have eaten the product as a taco in a fast-food outlet. Key users, however, are those who see the tortilla through a cultural lens. Its something they've known since childhood and have eaten daily. These people are either immigrants from Central America or native-born descendants of Hispanic heritage. Industry observers of the rapid growth in tortilla production in the United States routinely explain the phenomenon by pointing to the equally rapid growth of the Hispanic population. Increasing numbers of Hispanics, including their own enterprise in introducing foods that they prefer, have generated interest in the wider category of Hispanic foods, from cheeses and salsas to peppers and salads of novel composition. Tortilla sales ride on this interest.

ADJACENT MARKETS

Adjacent to the tortillas market are other Hispanic food categories such as meat products prepared in the Mexican manner, salsas of various kinds, and Hispanic cheeses. All of these products have exhibited similarly striking growth trends in the United States. The most rapidly growing product category in the dairy field, for instance, is Hispanic cheese.

In another sense of adjacency, bread is the closest substitute for tortillas—as tortillas are for bread. This is illustrated by developments in Mexico. As Tom Philpott points out in an article for Grist outlining reactions in Mexico to the increasing use of corn flour tortillas and rising tortilla prices, tortilla consumption in that country has begun to drop slowly—but consumption of white bread has been slowly increasing.

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Work in this industry is concentrated principally on product improvement focused centrally on masa corn flour. The wet dough method of tortilla production is traditional, results in the best taste, and sets a standard that more efficient (because more industrialized) methods fail to achieve. The traditional product, however, also has relatively limited shelf life. It is meant to be consumed soon after making. Efforts are underway in the industry to achieve by industrial means the qualities of traditional products while streamlining production and extending product life. The examples that follow come from Azteca Milling's discussions of its R&D activities. Azteca is the dominant flour producer in the industry, both in the United States and Mexico.

Tortilla taste and texture are significantly affected by the moisture content of the flour, affected by the corn variety, the preservatives and additives, and also by production methods. Finding ideal combinations to deliver a finished tortilla with the right water content is an R&D aim. Perhaps because corn tortillas compete with flour tortillas, the lighter in color corn tortillas are the better, thus as close to white as possible; in snack applications, brighter colors add to marketability. R&D is also focused on enhancing the brightness of tortilla dough. An inherent conflict exists in producing more shelf-stable products. Longer shelf life requires preservatives, but these affect taste adversely. Efforts are underway to find substances that preserve both shelf life and flavor. The breakage factor associated with taco shells is also receiving special attention from Azteca. More careful packaging is one of the approaches to reduce breakage, but it is expensive. Azteca is working on flour formulations that make tacos inherently stronger while keeping them crisp.

CURRENT TRENDS

In 1998 the Hispanic population of the United States was 30.3 million people, representing 11.2 percent of the entire population. By 2005 Hispanics numbered 42.7 billion and accounted for 14.4 percent of the people. Looked at another way, the entire population grew at a rate of 1.3 percent per year in this period whereas the Hispanic population increased at the rate of 5 percent per year. In 2005 Hispanics had become the largest ethnic minority in the country. Projections out to the year 2010 by the Census Bureau indicate a continuation of this trend, with the Hispanic group in that year representing 15.5 percent of population using the Census Bureau's middle series of projections, thus not the highest possible nor the minimum rate. To the extent that the presence of Hispanics is the principal driving force behind the growth of tortilla consumption, which appears to be the consensus of observers, the future of the product is bright indeed.

Trends in consumption may be affected by rising prices of corn owing in large part to speculative fever related to energy supplies, the latter caused by international conflicts and the role likely to be played by alternative fuels, of which corn ethanol is the chief and also the most actively promoted variety. The National Corn Growers Association points out that the relationship between ethanol and tortillas is tenuous at best because white corn, the preferred type for masa, is not used in ethanol. If focus on ethanol continues, however, and the bidding up of yellow corn indirectly affects white corn prices as well—and producers are induced by incentives to plant yellow corn instead of white—this general trend may have a dampening effect on at least the corn tortilla segment of the market.

On a more general plane, public interest in Mexican cuisine is definitely growing. It manifests in the advancement of food products across the board. This suggests that an ever widening segment of the public is consuming tortillas more routinely. Product growth, indeed, is greater than that of the Hispanic population. In part to support that trend, food producers are striving to enlarge varieties of tortillas on the market and have been introducing not only specially flavored varieties but also finished food product delivered in frozen form to cater to a public seeking convenience. Lifestyle changes signaled by pressures on time—due in part to dual-earner couples and growth in the number of single-parent households with children—favor consumption of fast foods of which one major segment is Mexican food riding on the taco shell.

TARGET MARKETS & SEGMENTATION

The major segments in this market are retail and food service. In retail wheat-based flour tortillas dominate. Regional differences are evident in that corn tortilla consumption is closely associated with states most densely populated by Hispanics, predominantly the West Coast and Texas. In the food service industry the corn taco is king.

RELATED ASSOCIATIONS & ORGANIZATIONS

American Institute of Baking International, http://www.aibonline.org

National Corn Growers Association, http://www.ncga.com

Tortilla Industry Association, http://www.tortilla-info.com

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Are Mexican Tortilla Prices Affected by U.S. Yellow Corn Prices?" Undated Release. National Corn Growers Association. Available from 〈www.ncga.com/ethanol/pdfs/032107MexicanTortillaPricesUSYellowCornPrices.pdf〉.

"Hormel Buys New Berlin Maker of Manny's Food Products." The Business Journal of Milqaukee. 7 February 2005.

Lopez, Daniel. "U.S. Tortilla Market Tops $1.5 Billion Annually." Santa Cruz Sentinel. 13 February 2006.

Martínez, Zarela. "Nixtamal Hecho en Casa—Homemade Nixtamal." Zarela. Available from 〈http://www.zarela.com/new_recipes/nixtamal.html〉.

"Masa de Maiz." Quaker Oats. Available from 〈http://www.tortillamix.com/Masa/Masa.htm〉.

Meagher, Michael and Timothy Zimmer. "Corn Masa Flour Enterprises." Agricultural Innovation and Commercialization Center, Purdue University. Available from 〈http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/planner/resources/CornMasaFlour.pdf〉.

"Mexican Tortillas: From South of the Border to Mainstream America." FMI/ACNielsen/Lemper E-NewsLetter. 16 May 2005. Available from 〈http://www.factsfiguresfuture.com/archive/may_2005.htm#5〉.

Petrak, Lynn. "Here, There, Everywhere: Supermarkets Are Stacking Up Tortilla Sales, Thanks to Expanding Product Lines and Merchandising Programs that Promote the Products Throughout Stores." Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery. August 2006.

Philpott, Tom. "How Mexico's Iconic Flatbread Went Industrial and Lost Its Flavor." Grist. 13 September 2006. Available from 〈http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2006/09/13/masa/〉.

"R&D." Azteka Milling, LP. Available from 〈http://www.aztecamilling.com/rd/〉.

Stradley, Linda. "History of Tortillas & Tacos." What's Cooking America. Available from 〈http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Tortilla_Taco_history.htm〉.

see also Bakery Products