Maryland company promotes empanada tradition while giving Latin workers a job

ROCKVILLE, MD — Margarita Womack never imagined she would be making empanadas for a living. She dreamed of spending her life in a lab making life-changing discoveries, she says. Colombian-born Womack is a Ph.D. scientist-turned-entrepreneur.

She’s the founder of  MasPanadas, a frozen empanada brand that's distributed nationwide.

The empanada is a popular comfort food in Latin cultures, and it’s grown in popularity in the U.S. in the last few years. The half-moon shaped pastries are either baked or fried with either sweet or savory filling. In 2021, empanadas became one of the top 10 most ordered foods, according to Grubhub’s “State of the Plate” report.

On a recent visit to the MasPanadas plant in Rockville, Md., Womack euphorically greets a visitor in Spanish, “Welcome to the empanada emporium!”

In the lobby of MasPanadas, visitors and employees are required to remove all jewelry and to don disposable bouffant caps and white lab coats before going into the production line. All for sanitary reasons, Womack says.

“The production line begins here,” says Womack, pointing to an area with massive stoves where Alonso Fernández cooks about 200 pounds of chicken with carrots, potatoes, red bell pepper, onions and other spices to use as empanada filling.

Then comes the area where the unbleached wheat dough is made in an industrial-size mixer, followed by an empanada machine where women feed it with dough on one side and chicken filling on the other. At the other end the fully formed empanadas come out, hundreds of them. A staff member moves them to a fryer where they are dipped in hot oil and quickly removed, the process takes about 15 seconds.

The name MasPanadas is an anagram of the word empanadas. Womack liked the idea of switching Mas for em. Mas means more in Spanish.

“Mas is really the ethos of our empanadas,” she says.

And though empanadas are a year-round delicacy for many in the U.S., it has become a tradition during the fall, starting with Hispanic Heritage Month and the holidays thereafter, says Womack.

It’s a fast-moving, bustling environment at the plant, thick with savory smells engulfing the space. The fryer was brought in from Colombia and once the empanadas roll out, they are inspected by staffers — those that are not perfect, either crushed, partly opened or deformed, are put aside and donated.

Empanadas' origin

Food historian and writer Sandra Gutierrez says Spaniards introduced empanadas to Latin America in 1492.

But their origin lies elsewhere.

“When Muslims conquered Spain,” during the Arab conquest of Spain in 711, “they brought all of their culinary ingredients and traditions into Spain, and they brought the empanada with them.”

Gutierrez, author of the book Empanadas: The Hand-held Pies of Latin America, says the original empanada recipe was filled with fish, mostly tuna cooked with olives and raisins, and often hard-boiled egg and spices.

But once on the newer continent, indigenous people from South and Central America, and Mexico, added other ingredients to the original empanada recipe — both the dough and filling.

“They started making the empanada dough out of corn or yuca. Once Africans crossed over with plantains, they made dough with that. And that’s how different forms of dough developed throughout Latin America,” says Gutierrez. All the different combinations of filling, doughs and cooking methods are specific to the culture and diet of each region of the Americas.

“Just within Argentina, hundreds of different variations of empanadas can be found,” she says.

“In Cordoba, Argentina, they have ground beef and potato empanadas and are always coated with sugar,” Gutierrez says. “But if you go to the Tucuman region of Argentina, the beef empanadas always have a very moist filling made with knife-cut meat, they don’t use ground beef.”

Argentinians also make small empanadas filled with Roquefort cheese and walnuts and they are served with honey.

Empanadas are not exclusive to Latin countries.

Similar foods are prepared in India (samosas), Jamaica (hot patties), Italy (Calzone) and Poland (Pierogi), among many.

Why have empanadas become popular in the U.S.?

“They are delicious, they are portable, they are great for school lunches and they are not expensive to make,” Gutierrez says.

It hasn't been easy

Back at the MasPanadas plant, Womack has fond memories of making empanadas with her dad in Colombia. He owned a couple of restaurants in Bogotá — one was a country restaurant where she spent weekends with her younger brother, she says, “there were cows, gardens and we chased frogs and snakes,” and that’s where her love of food and science began, she says.

In 2017, Womack says she and her husband were raising their three boys in the Washington, D.C., area. She started making empanadas in her kitchen, one by one to sell to neighbors and at a farmers market. Eventually she sold the pastries to event venues and hotels, she says.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, and the budding enterprise had to pivot, yet again, into a frozen packaged food line.

It hasn’t been easy, Womack says. “Creating an efficient, industrial production line while maintaining the quality took learning, some tweaking, some upgrades.”

Womack also went back to school in 2017 to get an MBA.

Financing has been challenging, she says. She used credit cards, loans, like SBA’s, U.S. Small Business Administration loans. She and her husband have used personal savings, and her family in Colombia has pitched in. But she has also attracted investors, she says.

Then there is the staff, which Womack says started with one employee, then five. “We all evolved organically. We were all on the same page, but managing the growth of the company with a larger staff has proven challenging,” she says.

“How do you make everybody buy into the mission, into a shared idea of where we are heading as a company?”

She asks herself the question almost in disbelief of having overcome that challenge. Especially when the staff is made up of 12 different countries, 98% is made up of Hispanic workers.

“Training and supporting employees, providing opportunity, good wages and treating everybody with respect, are the bedrock of our company culture,” Womack says.

Employees wearing green bouffant caps indicate that they are new to the plant. “It shows they are in training and they get more help,” Womack says. Employees wearing a red bouffant cap are pod leaders. Those visual cues help everyone because they know who needs help or where to get help. Womack says there is no shame in seeking it, it’s one of the company's values.

Building a brand and a social enterprise

MasPanadas offers its employees, mostly immigrant women, English language lessons and professional development, among other benefits.

“It’s a way to pay it forward for me,” says 44-year-old Womack.

Carmen Mariela Sis says she couldn’t ask for a better boss than “Margarita,” as employees call Womack.

Sis has worked at MasPanadas for five years. “I started in production, in the frying section and I’m now a supervisor,” says 25-year-old Sis. She oversees the afternoon shift with a staff of 24.

“I make sure the plant runs smoothly, from the kitchen all the way to the packing warehouse, and if there are issues, I resolve them,” says Sis proudly. “Issues like a machine breaking down or a staffer calling in sick.”

She’s not only grateful for the promotions and the trust Womack has placed in her, she says she also feels supported at work as well as in her personal life.

“When one of my cousins died, the company supported me financially and emotionally,” says Sis, who came from Coban, a city in the Guatemalan highlands. “I was allowed to take time off to mourn my cousin.”

The mother of a 4-year-old boy, Sis says that for years she worked the morning shift, and she and her husband leaned on her mother for child care, but last year her mom moved out of state. Sis asked her boss if she could work the afternoon shift. Now, she takes care of her son in the morning while her husband works and he does child care in the afternoons.

“I bring my son to work with me at 3 p.m. and his father picks him up around 4 p.m.,” she says and adds she’s grateful to be able to take care of her son.

She also loves MasPanadas work environment. Sis says she feels seen by her boss and her co-workers.

“We help each other, we are all human and we show it to each other, we show respect to each other,” she says.

Sis has some perspective. Her first job in the U.S. was cleaning homes for a small company. “My boss took advantage of me, often I wouldn’t get paid,” she says.

Employee pride and company’s success

Margarita Womack’s MasPanadas business is booming. She says that in 2023 demand for her empanadas grew about 600%. She now sells them to supermarkets like Whole Foods, Giant, MOM’s Organic Market, Costco, Wegmans and others.

Currently MasPanadas come in four flavors: chicken and vegetables, beef and vegetables, spinach and mushrooms, veggie and pizza.

At the end of 2021, Womack says, she had 40 full time employees. Last year, the plant ran two work shifts. Today, the staff has nearly doubled, and the plant runs 24 hours a day with three shifts. It produces about 5,000 pounds of empanadas a day.

Womack recalls that last August, when Costco became a client, MasPanadas didn’t have the staff to handle the orders. “We asked employees to extend their hours,” while the company made new hires.

“Even managers worked the production line,” she says. “All the orders were met, staff went the extra mile because they have a huge sense of ownership. They are vested in the success of the company, and I know I can rely on them 100%.”

This month, the plant moved to a larger space and Womack has invested in a second empanada-making machine, freezers, loading docks and other machinery to accommodate the growing demand. More importantly, she says, “I have an office!”

Margarita Womack says there is still a lot more to do. She dreams of expanding to producing breakfast and sweet empanadas in the future. She says the idea of showing the diversity of Latin countries and their cultural richness through their foods pushes her to keep going.