El Rey Super Mercado

 

When Ernesto and Heriberto “Beto” Villarreal opened Super Mercado El Rey over 30 years ago, they had no idea how big the company would become.

“[We envisioned] nothing of this magnitude, nothing,” said spokeswoman (and Ernesto’s wife of over 40 years) Olivia Villarreal. “All we wanted was to fill a need for the Hispanic population of Milwaukee.”

According to the company’s website, Heriberto, the older brother by eight years, came to Milwaukee by way of Mexico in 1960 with their father, Octavio. The rest of the family, including Ernesto, followed four years later. Both brothers worked at Mercury Marine while their father ran a small corner grocery store on South 3rd Street. A few years later, Ernesto and Beto went into business together, opening the first El Rey on S. Cesar Chavez Dr. in 1978.

El Rey’s bread and butter was, and still is, corn tortillas.

 

“Nobody was making them,” said Villarreal. “We’d have to go to Chicago once a week, somebody would pack a truck up and bring them, and by the end of the week, they’d be hard … you have to make them daily.”

Today, El Rey has three thriving stores, with a fourth soon to open, as well as corn tortilla manufacturing facility on the city’s south side, which wholesales tortillas to many Milwaukee grocery stores as well as most of the area’s Mexican restaurants. In the ’90s, El Rey products were even introduced in Germany, which went well until the Germans started making their tortillas.

Much of El Rey’s success stems from its commitment to the community, which is manifest both in the products they offer and the ways they reinvest in those respective neighborhoods.

“Recently we had a visitor from the East Coast, and we took her to one of the El Rey stores, and she was just amazed by the quality and the diversity of what they had in the stores,” said Luis “Tony” Báez. “They ask, ‘What do you need?’ and then they go out and get it.”

Báez is the Executive Director of El Centro Hispano, a nonprofit organization that has served Milwaukee’s Hispanic community since 1964. He says El Rey matches funds to the tune of $10,000 with the center during its annual Christmas and Thanksgiving food drives for the needy.

The Villarreal family are also supporters of UMOS (United Migrant Opportunity Services), an organization formed in 1965 to advocate and provide services for migrant and season farm workers in Wisconsin. Today, UMOS offers employment, education, health, and housing resources for Milwaukee under-served populations. El Rey contributes to these efforts by helping provide school supplies for neighborhood for kids each fall, and is also a sponsor of Mexican Fiesta’s scholarships, including an annual golf event named in honor of Heriberto Villareal.

“They have always been at the forefront of revitalizing the area, and bringing about the renaissance that’s happening in this area,” said Maria Monreal-Cameron, president and CEO of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin.

El Rey also contributes to neighborhood causes by letting community groups use their facilities to hold gatherings and informal meetings.

“Saturday and Sunday at any of our stores, it is a zoo, and everybody that lives in this area will visit one of our stores,” said Villarreal. “If you want your product or anything  put out to the community, that’s where you need to be … [it’s] a grassroots kind of thing.”

Even in a bad economy, the company continues to grow. In recent years, El Rey  has purchased two tortilla machines, which can do the work of three of the machines they previously used (they still keep one smaller machine as a back-up). Packaging has also come a long way since 1978, allowing tortillas remain fresh longer, although many customers still buy fresh tortillas daily.

“People still have to eat,” said Villarreal. “They don’t eat as extravagant, but they still have to eat, and we still look for deals for them.” Villareal said that having several stores and a warehouse allows them to keep prices down, and that they’ve shrunk their margins in order to continue to provide good prices to customers.

The company now employs around 300 workers, and about 50 of them have been with El Rey 10 years or more, though it’s still very much a family business.

“All my children went away to school, finished college, and they decided that this is where they all wanted to be, with us,” said Villarreal.

As much as things have changed, El Rey is still guided by its original principle: giving people what they want.

“52nd and Oklahoma will be our farthest west store … we will have our Hispanic products, but we will also cater to what that neighborhood wants,” Villarreal says of the newest El Rey store, which will open in May. “We understand there’s a large Serbian (population) there … What is Serbian food? What do they want to buy? We are neighborhood stores, and we want people to walk in and say, ‘Oh, I feel this is where I fit in.’”