If you’ve cracked open a jar of salsa recently, there’s a good chance it was made just outside downtown Fort Worth. Mrs. Renfro’s salsa — produced by 86-year-old Renfro Foods Incorporated — has grown from a small family operation into what the company says is the largest independent sal sa brand in the nation. Today, the Fort Worth-based business produces 27 Renfro items, along with custom blends for household-name clients across Texas and beyond. At its Fort Worth headquarters, production moves fast. “We’re here in Fort Worth, Texas, at our intergalactic headquarters, where we make 195 jars per minute of salsa,” said Doug Renfro, president of Renfro Foods Incorporated. That speed is a far cry from the company’s early days. “When my dad was a child, they filled the jars with a spoon. You can imagine how slow that was. When I was a child, I think we ran about 22 bottles a minute. So over time, we’ve used automation increasingly to be able to go faster, to be more efficient,” Renfro said. The Renfro’s salsa production line in Fort Worth, Texas. The process may look simple once the jar reaches a grocery shelf, but employees say it’s anything but. “Really fast pace. You really got to stay on top of everything out there,” said Marsha Galarza, office manager of Mrs. Renfro’s. “When you go to the store, you open a jar, it’s, you know, ‘Oh, look, it’s so good … no, there’s a lot of steps that go into producing a jar of salsa.” Inside the facility, five 500-gallon kettles are used to cook different varieties of salsa. “Each of them will have a type of salsa, either our green jalapeño salsa. It may have our mango habanero salsa,” said Becky Renfro Borbolla, senior vice president of Mrs. Renfro’s. Each kettle can hold about 4,000 jars worth of salsa. “Once the product is cooked for about an hour, we pump it across to the filler. We have inline metal detection and we have magnets on the lines. There’s a lot of QA and safety processes that you can’t necessarily see when you’re touring. Then we fill the jars, put the lid on, cool it down, apply a label that has my grandmother smiling at you,” Renfro said. “We put an inkjet code on it, telling us exactly when it was made. So if you have a question two years from now, we can tell you exactly which lot of salt we used and tomatoes, etc.” Doug Renfro, with Renfro Foods, holds a bottle of salsa with his grandmother’s smiling face on the label. Ingredients are sourced months — sometimes more than a year — in advance. “When you open a jar at home, the process started probably 18 months ago when I had to sign my annual tomato contract six months before we actually took any product. So we’re thinking about these things far in advance. We have to bring in the jars, the lids, spices from all over the world. The peppers might come from Mexico, the tomatoes from California, onions from somewhere else,” Renfro said. Each batch requires precise measurements before thousands of pounds of ingredients are mixed and cooked. The company runs its glass jar line at 195 jars per minute and its labeling line at 270 jars per minute. It also produces plastic gallon jugs for restaurants and food service clients. On a full production day, the factory turns out the equivalent of 100,000 jars. Most of it doesn’t sit long. “The product doesn’t stay in the warehouse very long. So we make it and it’s shipped out probably within five to 10 days of being produced,” Borbolla said. Renfro Foods headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. From two city blocks and roughly 50,000 square feet of production space in Fort Worth, Mrs. Renfro’s products now reach all 50 states, every Canadian province and countries including Australia, Spain, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Dubai, the Caribbean and South Africa. For the Renfro family, that global reach is a point of pride. “My grandparents would just be blown away that we’re in Australia or Spain or the UK or Canada, you know, they would just be so excited and proud that their two sons built the business and then three of their grandchildren came in and just took it to another level,” Borbolla said. “My dad is 88 and he comes by and just sort of goes, ‘Golly!’ you know? It’s amazing what we’ve accomplished. And it’s all relative. It’s all incremental progress. But he really gets a kick out of finding out that our product is in Alaska and London and different places,” Renfro said. Inside the Renfro Foods headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. Fort Worth Mar 9, 2021 Fort Worth Salsa Maker Bill Renfro To Be Laid to Rest Fort Worth Mar 9, 2021 Fort Worth Salsa Maker Bill Renfro To Be Laid to Rest ...read more read less