A family sauce, a Los Angeles label and a salesman who bought the business.

La Victoria is an American brand of jarred salsas, taco sauces, enchilada sauces and chiles, sold today by MegaMex Foods, the venture formed by Hormel Foods and the Mexican company Herdez Del Fuerte. Its story begins in Los Angeles in 1917. Writing in the Austin Chronicle on 22 August 2008, in a history of salsa that led up to the rise of Pace Picante in Texas, the food writer Mick Vann said that in 1917 La Victoria Foods in Los Angeles began manufacturing Salsa Brava, which he called a true Mexican-style salsa. Vann set that date against a longer American story of chile sauces, from a sauce made with chiltepin peppers in New York City between 1840 and 1860 to the Louisiana pepper sauce that Maunsel White produced in 1859.

The company’s own account names a family. A feature on the Hormel Foods website by David Munro, dated 4 December 2017, says the La Baca family began selling their homemade salsa to people in Los Angeles in 1917, and that the La Bacas made their name with Salsa Brava hot sauce. A press release issued through PR Newswire on 18 April 2017, for the brand’s centenary, says the La Baca family emigrated from Mexico to Los Angeles carrying the recipe for Salsa Brava. The Hormel feature adds that the family sourced fresh tomatoes from California’s Central Valley for their salsa fresca, at a time when much grocery cooking began with the contents of a can.

The next chapter opened in 1941. Vann wrote in the Austin Chronicle that Henry Tanklage formed La Victoria Sales Co. that year to market a new line of red and green taco sauces, and that by 1946 he had taken over the entire La Victoria brand. The Hormel feature tells the same turn from the company’s side. It describes Tanklage as a German immigrant and as the family’s top salesman, and says he was convinced that American cooks were ready for something new and bought the company to prove it. The feature quotes the La Victoria brand manager Sebastian Friedman saying that Tanklage loaded the trunk of his car with cases of salsa and drove across the West to sell it.

Under Tanklage the range widened beyond the original hot sauce. The Hormel feature says the La Victoria Sales Company introduced red and green taco sauces and enchilada sauces, and that by 1946 the salsas included blends such as a green chili salsa and a red salsa jalapeño. It quotes Gustavo Arellano, author of Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, saying that American cooks were only then getting used to tacos and that taco sauce worked as a gateway to stronger flavours. The 2017 centenary release says Tanklage, with his son Bob and grandson Jon, ran the company for decades.

A Chino sauce company, a Central Valley packer and a cross-border venture.

By the mid-2000s La Victoria belonged to a company based in the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. A press release carried by Food Online on 2 December 2005 said the brand was marketed by Authentic Specialty Foods, based in Chino, California, which the release described as a subsidiary of the Mexico-based industrial group DESC, a manufacturer and distributor of Mexican spices and sauces. The same company marketed the Embasa brand of Mexican sauces and chiles.

That release also set out where the sauces would be made. It said that beginning in 2006, the tomato processor SK Foods had contracted to process and package all products marketed by Authentic Specialty Foods, including all La Victoria and Embasa salsas and sauces, at its plants in Lemoore and Williams in California’s Central Valley. Ted Gardner, then president of Authentic Specialty Foods, was quoted calling SK Foods an experienced partner, and the release said sales and service would continue to run from Chino, with products shipping from Chino and from San Antonio, Texas.

The present arrangement dates from 2009. Minnesota Public Radio News reported on 19 June 2009 that Hormel Foods, the Minnesota meat and food company, and Herdez Del Fuerte of Mexico had agreed to form MegaMex Foods to market Mexican foods in the United States. The report said the venture would include existing brands such as Chi-Chi’s, Herdez, La Victoria, Embasa and Doña María, and that it would be a free-standing company with its own management team based in Chino. MPR News quoted Jeffrey M. Ettinger, then Hormel’s chairman and chief executive, saying the venture would serve both the growing Hispanic population in the United States and other shoppers who enjoy Mexican food.

MegaMex has held the brand since then. Hormel’s 2017 feature describes the venture as created in 2009 by Hormel Foods and Herdez Del Fuerte, and a Hormel press release of 17 October 2023 said the La Victoria brand is part of MegaMex Foods. The same release described MegaMex as founded by Herdez del Fuerte and Hormel Foods and headquartered in Orange, California, with facilities in Texas and Mexico, and listed its brands as including Wholly, La Victoria, Chi-Chi’s, Herdez, Embasa, Doña María, Búfalo and Don Miguel. In its 2023 release the company said La Victoria has been producing salsas, sauces, chiles, peppers and pantry staples since 1917.

Design and documentation.

The names in this group sit on supermarket shelves as salsa jars, tortilla packs, bean cans and frozen-burrito boxes. Packaging of this kind has to work at a glance: a shopper scanning a long aisle of similar jars or a freezer door of similar boxes reads colour, a name and a picture of the food before reading any small print, so a label’s job is to make one product easy to find again on the next visit.

Each format has its own constraints. A jar label wraps around glass and leaves room for the colour of the salsa to show through; a tortilla pack is soft and folds, so the name has to survive creases; a can label is printed flat and read on a curve; and a frozen box has to stay legible behind frosted glass. Heat levels, flavours and sizes are usually signalled with colour bands or small badges rather than new designs.

Each guide separates what independent, dated sources record about a brand — who started it, who owns it now and where its food is made — from what the company says about itself, and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A flagship hot sauce, a red and green pair, dinner parties and a limited salsa from an actress.

The company names Salsa Brava hot sauce as its flagship. Hormel’s press release of 17 October 2023 said the brand is known for Salsa Brava and for a full line of enchilada sauces, and that its range also includes taco sauces and salsas. The 2017 centenary release said the line is easy to recognise in the grocery aisle by its jars.

The brand has tied its look to California. The Hormel feature of December 2017 frames La Victoria as part of a West Coast story, from the Central Valley tomatoes of the early years to the food trucks of present-day Los Angeles, and names the Lime Truck, a food truck from Food Network’s The Great Food Truck Race, as a user of its salsa. The same feature quotes Tanya Rodriguez, a cultural anthropologist at Hormel Foods, describing Mexican food as something that starts in kitchens, markets and food trucks.

The centenary in 2017 was marked with events rather than a redesign. The PR Newswire release of 18 April 2017 said the makers of La Victoria would host dinner parties inspired by the modern West Coast in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland, working with local chefs, artists and musicians in each city. It also announced an art contest in each market: finalists would be asked to make a new work featuring the La Victoria brand that showed what the “Modern West Coast Lifestyle” meant to them.

Later campaigns used a named collaborator. Hormel announced on 17 October 2023, from Los Angeles, a limited-time line called La Victoria Salsa Crafted by Francia Raísa, made with the actress Francia Raísa. The release said the two varieties, a Fire Roasted Salsa and a Fire Roasted Salsa Verde made with roasted tomatillos, drew on her family recipes and her Los Angeles upbringing, and that the line was aimed at millennial shoppers in Los Angeles and beyond. The release described the partnership as bringing the flavours of “LA Mex” to consumers.

For a design guide, La Victoria shows how a sauce label can lean on a city, a flagship product and a two-colour red and green system rather than on a character or a slogan. Compare it with Herdez, a sister brand inside MegaMex Foods, and Pace, the Texas picante sauce whose rise the same Austin Chronicle history traced. For this guide we use salsa red, chile green, jar cream and fire orange with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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