These Tucson-made square burritos are headed to market

Instead, head to the breakfast section of the frozen food aisle.

That's where you'll find Tucson Foods Breakfast Square Sonoran wraps, a square-shaped breakfast burrito that comes with chorizo, sausage or Hatch green chiles. 

"Kroger literally just called this morning and said they want to bring them to the Tucson Fry's stores and see how they do," said Todd Martin, who owns Tucson Foods with his wife, Sherry.

The Thursday morning phone call from the grocery store giant was a surprise, Martin said later Thursday from the couple's South Tucson production facility. As far as he knew, the only people who were familiar with Breakfast Square were the people who sampled it at any one of the handful of trade shows and Costco road shows that the couple has done since May; they have two more Costco events in July in California and Las Vegas. 

"It has only been available for five weekends," Sherry Martin said. "They took off so quick that we're scrambling to finalize everything. These are just blowing up. It's been really crazy." 

Breakfast Square is one of several new Sonoran-style Mexican products the Martins have developed since rebranding Tucson Tamale as Tucson Foods two years ago. The company also has two smothered burrito ready-made meals they are marketing to retail deli sections; and nacho bites — nacho cheese covered in a masa shell that is crunchy like a tortilla chip. 

"When we've done these trade shows, people take a bite of it and they're like, 'What is it? It's like a ball'," Sherry Martin said of people's initial reaction. "They're like, 'I did not expect it to taste like a nacho'."

Tucson Foods started working on their version of the popular breakfast burrito last fall, responding to retailers who have told them the breakfast aisle "is lacking," Sherry Martin said.

"We hear from retailers (that) breakfast people are wanting something," she said. 

Todd Martin said they started out with a standard rolled burrito, but after several iterations, decided it was too hard to fully reheat.

"The one thing that I hate about any frozen burritos is that they're almost impossible to reheat properly," he explained. "You just can't do it because if you put it in a microwave, by the time you get the inside hot enough, the ends of the tortilla are just horrible."

He said he realized the biggest hurdle was the thickness of the burrito.

"So I thought, well, what if we had a flat format? And that's when we came up with this," Martin said. "It actually microwaves really well because it can go quicker because it's not as thick as a burrito, even though it actually has more filling than a burrito."

The product went through months of testing, tweaking and revising before they arrived at the version they took on the road this spring.

"When we launched Breakfast Squares, we didn't just say, 'Here it is'," Martin said. "This is probably version 40. We do a lot of internal testing, a lot of blind taste-testing."

"When the industry talks about innovation, this is what they look at: How do you innovate and still make something that really people understand?" Martin added.

If Breakfast Square does well in the Tucson market, Kroger, which has stores in 35 states, could decide to take it statewide and possibly nationwide, Martin said.  

"I think this is going to be eventually bigger than the tamales," he said. "The breakfast aisle needs some innovation."

Martin said Breakfast Square is also available at Transit Tea, 2645 E. Speedway.