In the early days, Maspanadas looked like a lot of food businesses in Washington, D.C.—a catering company serving up a beloved family recipe. Founder Margarita Womack, a scientist by training, was focused on introducing more people to the Colombian-style empanadas she grew up with. The product had traction. The business model was a challenge.
Catering is a grind. It doesn’t scale easily and it requires a lot of capital to move into a storefront. When Womack joined Union Kitchen, she came looking for infrastructure. What she found instead was a new way of thinking.
Together, Womack and the Union Kitchen team analyzed every data point she had gathered from events and farmers markets. They looked at what products sold best, which flavors moved fastest, how pricing impacted demand. Then they paired those insights with sales data from Union Kitchen’s stores and layered in syndicated retail data. There was a winning product inside the catering business - the empanadas.
That realization was the turning point. Womack stopped thinking like a service provider and started thinking like a manufacturer. She launched MasPanadas into retail, starting with local shelves and building up slowly through Union Kitchen's retail network. She participated in tastings with Whole Foods Market, Yes! Organic, Streets, and other local retailers. From the beginning, she followed a phased approach: validate the product in-market, tighten unit economics, then expand into new regions only when the business was ready.
The next move was the most critical: she maintained manufacturing in-house.
Most early-stage food brands outsource production to co-packers. MasPanadas didn’t. Womack invested in building her own facility. That gave her control—over quality, over margins, and over growth. When demand increased, she could meet it. When other brands were slowed down by co-packer minimums or delays, MasPanadas kept moving.
Today, MasPanadas products are sold in grocery stores across the country. It is one of the few frozen food brands that owns its production and its path to scale. In 2023, Womack was named to the NOSH Notables list—recognized for building a business with strong fundamentals and a clear trajectory.
Her story is a case study in how food businesses scale the right way: by using real-world data to find product-market fit, by owning manufacturing to create defensibility, and by growing in deliberate, sustainable phases.
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