This article is part of Bísness School, a series that highlights one of the fastest-growing groups of entrepreneurs in the United States, Latinos. You can hear or watch the full conversation with Mafe Römer-Cabezas below.
Mafe Römer-Cabezas and her sister, Coco Cabezas, were first introduced to the concept of entrepreneurship at a young age through their grandparents.
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“My grandfather and grandmother are both immigrants from Spain,” Römer-Cabezas said. “They came to Venezuela right after the Spanish Civil War and started a steel distributing business. They [would] basically buy steel materials like sheets, tubes and construction materials. And then they would sell those as a wholesale business.”
The two sisters grew up in Venezuela up until Coco was in high school and Mafe was out of college.
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“[It got] a little bit dangerous,” Römer-Cabezas said of living in Venezuela. “I was mugged a few times and I was afraid to go out in the streets. It was actually three times that I got mugged, if you can imagine. I was even afraid to go to work because this could happen any time in the day, like midday. This could happen to you. And so at some point I was like, ‘I can't really live like this anymore because I'm afraid to even go to work.’”
The Cabezas sisters moved to Miami to continue their education. Mafe eventually earned an MBA from the Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business and got hired as a financial planning analyst for Pepsico. Coco landed a job in the banking industry.
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It didn’t take long for the sisters to get homesick for their country’s cuisine, particularly arepas: a popular type of flatbread in Colombia and Venezuela made of corn dough and stuffed with fillings like meat or cheese.
“When we lived back home in Venezuela, our mom used to make arepas every day for breakfast," Cabezas said. "And so living in the U.S., we both had hectic lives and corporate careers. We didn't really have the time to cook, as many Americans and immigrants have the same issue. And then Coco started thinking, 'How can I have a waffle in my freezer that I can make in two minutes or a toast or a bagel, but I don't have an arepa, which I would love to have.'"
Mafe Cabezas spoke to NBC's Bísness School about why she and her sister Coco decided to leave lucrative corporate jobs to launch their brand of healthy, read-to-eat arepas, Toast-It. Their answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Bísness School: You and Coco think, “Toast-It is a good idea.” What’s the next step?
Mafe Römer-Cabezas: We both started with the idea of testing the waters. We weren't initially like, “OK, let's just raise a ton of capital and make this really big.” And I'm actually thankful for that because we were able to really listen to the very few customers we had at the time and refine the product in a way. It was such a small operation that we were able to be agile in changing things and making the product just the closest thing that our customers wanted. And it also gave us the opportunity to learn every step of the business from scratch. We were both making arepas in our kitchen. We were packing everything in the packaging bags, in boxes, and driving around Miami.
BS: You go from making arepas for friends and family to eventually knocking on doors for retail. What's the first store to take your product in Miami?
Mafe Römer-Cabezas: We started knocking on smaller independent grocery stores, the mom and pop grocery stores. Because we were such a small team, we didn't even have the bandwidth or the volume to hire brokers or distributors or any of that. [Eventually], we submitted applications for other larger retailers not thinking that anyone was going to pick them up, but maybe just to get the ball rolling and get on their radars. And we eventually got a call back from Publix saying that we had gained distribution in 500 stores. So we came from 30 independent grocery stores that we had gained by knocking on doors to 500 Publix stores, which is like a third of the entirety of all Publix stores in the U.S.
BS: You and Coco end up on "Shark Tank." What do you remember from that day?
Mafe Römer-Cabezas: The whole experience, I was just very nervous about it. But Coco was very zen. Right after we walked in the Shark Tank tunnel, it was just like a switch that came to my mind. And I was just like, “This is game time, and this is your opportunity. You have to do it right. There are no retakes. So if you mess up, you mess up,” you know? And also, being a fan of the show, I knew that they're very candid with their questions. They're not there to sugarcoat things or just to be nice to people. If something doesn't really ring to them or sounds strange, they'll tell you and they'll be like, “I don't think this is a good idea. I don't think this is a good business. I don't like it.” I've seen them say things like, “I don't like this at all,” you know, with food. So that's all of the things that I was a little bit worried about. Thankfully, that wasn't the case.
Watch the full conversation with Mafe Römer-Cabezas to learn when she decided to leave her job at Pepsico to launch her own business, how she and her sister Coco got their products into Walmart stores and how Coco’s passion for “Shark Tank” helped them get on the show.
