THE SECRET’S IN THE SAUCE, SUCCESS IN THE BUSINESS PLAN
Fairfield businessman Marcoantonio Rodriguez, 30, wins $50K in cash, prizes in a Bloomberg TV competition
Fairfield businessman Marcoantonio Rodriguez said his family’s Michelada sauce contains a tomato base, jazzed up a little with fresh lime juice, Mexican spices, “and our secret ingredients” from his family’s Mexican restaurant, La Costa Azul.
But like major corporations vaguely touting their special sauce, 11 herbs and spices, or cola recipe, the secret ingredients to the uniquely named sauce, Miche Miche Marlin Michelada, would remain a proprietary secret, he said.
Rodriguez certainly did not divulge the sauce’s secrets when he and three other contestants appeared virtually Feb. 26 on Bloomberg Television’s “2 Minute Drill,” when he pitched the sauce and a business plan in under two minutes to three successful businessmen/judges for a chance to win $50,000 in cash and prizes. He won.
No surprise, the national publicity has boosted business and Rodriguez, 30, a graduate of Fairfield High and Sacramento State University, plans to expand his sauce offerings in the coming weeks and months — 20-ounce bottles at $15 and a 1-liter bottles at $28, plus larger “commercial sizes” — to gas stations, retails stores, liquor stores, restaurants, sports bars, and breweries.
“I remember, as a kid, waking up with my mom and dad, jumping in a van, four or five o’clock in the morning . ... It built a different passion for food. — Fairfield businessman Marcoantonio Rodriguez
“Any retail outlet where the product is a good fit,” he said during a brief interview Thursday, adding, “We expect to have our very best year” in 2021, despite the economic pinch the pandemic may cause.
The sauce, made in the restaurant at 1972 N. Texas St., is meant to be mixed with carbonated or alcoholic beverages, and the product made its first major debut at the 2019 Sacramento Michelada Bash at Cesar Chavez Park, winning first-place in the competition.
“There’s been a really good response” to the product, said Rodriguez, so good, he added, that “We’re looking for a second location. Vacaville might be our second location.”
While the Bloomberg TV appearance netted some cash, which will be plowed into “mostly marketing,” the “most valuable part of the contract” was with show sponsors, including LaunchBoom, a top crowdfunding marketing agency, he noted.
His marketing effort includes a poignant video, “Our Story” (at https:// linktr.ee/michemichemarlin), which at first features his mother amid what looks like tomato fields somewhere in Solano County and her telling her family’s story of immigration to
the United States and struggling to make ends meet.
Rodriguez’s parents, Alvaro, a retired fisherman and auto technician, and Rosa, a homemaker and matriarch of the family, came from Ocotlan, in Jalisco State, Mexico. Once in the United States, they started off as farm workers and life was no day at the beach, he recalled.
“I remember, as a kid, waking up with my mom
and dad, jumping in a van, four or five o’clock in the morning. Farming, tomatoes, peaches, apricots. It built a different passion for food,” said Rodriguez, co-founder and CEO of La Costa Azul Food and Beverage Company, started in 2020.
And so the family eventually opened a restaurant, 2007, with a bank loan based on the family home, but everyone pitched in, he noted, saying, “We couldn’t afford to pay anybody else.”
In a video segment from “2 Minute Drill,” Rodriguez credited his parents, particularly his mother, for his inspiration to succeed, recalling struggles in the early days of the restaurant business to La Costa Azul being, as he described, “the most popular Mexican seafood restaurant in the area.”
One of the three-person panel of businessmen said that distribution would be key to the sauce’s success, and asked if he had plans for strategic marketing.
The answer appears to be yes and, since July, orders have flooded in from New York, Florida, Hawaii, Texas, Washington state, Virginia and half-dozen other states.
Rodriguez married his high school sweetheart, Jeaneen, and started and still maintains his own life insurance agency besides working at the restaurant, where “we make a large quantity once a week and ship it off. Our product is fresh.”