Maspanadas Built a Factory Before It Built a Brand. Walmart Just Rewarded the Order of Operations.

A frozen street food nobody asked for, from a founder nobody predicted

Maspanadas announced on July 13 that its new bite-sized Poppers format is launching in Walmart stores, the Rockville, Maryland company’s largest retail expansion to date. Founder and CEO Margarita Womack framed the launch in her own July 13 post as going “From Open Call to shelf,” confirming the placement came through Walmart’s Open Call program, which the company had said in April was scheduled for this summer. The launch lands as an in-store play. No Walmart.com listing for Poppers existed as of July 14, consistent with a store-first rollout not yet indexed online, and the company did not publish a store count or shelf price with the announcement. The initial launch runs two flavors, Beef Picadillo and Chicken Tinga. One wrinkle worth noting honestly: the title of the company’s release describes Walmart stores across key U.S. markets, while both Nosh’s coverage and the brand’s investor Angeles Investors describe the expansion as nationwide. The likeliest reading is a nationwide program landing first in key markets, but the company has not published a store count, so the placement’s true size remains unconfirmed.

The company behind it clears every bar a challenger feature demands. Latin Goodness Foods is independent, founded in 2017, with venture backing from Angeles Investors, which confirmed the portfolio relationship in its own announcement of the launch; an investor, not an owner. And its founder has one of the least likely resumes in frozen food.

The scientist who chose the freezer aisle

Margarita Womack grew up in Colombia in her father’s restaurant kitchen, came to the United States as a teenager, and built a career about as far from food manufacturing as a career gets: a biology degree from Tulane, a doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology from Princeton, four years teaching middle school science, a Georgetown MBA. The business began in 2017 as a home catering operation, started partly to help a Colombian friend stay in the country on a business visa. The visa fell through. The empanadas did not.

Her family was skeptical of the frozen pivot, and Womack has told the story herself. “Empanadas are street food you buy on a corner from a cart,” she told Nosh in 2024, comparing the idea to selling frozen hot dogs in Japan. By the company’s own account it had grown from 2 to 90 employees as of early 2024, with a workforce that is largely Latin American immigrant and, per figures Womack cited in a 2022 Technical.ly interview, about 75 percent women, supported by company-run English classes and childcare benefits. That interview put production at roughly 20,000 empanadas per day, a company-supplied figure. The products themselves run 150 to 180 calories with 3 to 7 grams of protein per serving, per the brand’s site.

The Golden Ticket was the easy part

Here is what makes Maspanadas instructive rather than just likable. The Open Call placement was never the achievement. The achievement was everything the company built that let it say yes. By late 2024 Maspanadas had opened a 12,000 square foot facility running 24 hours across three shifts, with room for two more production lines, a buildout Womack told Nosh had a nearly two-year runway. It stacked channels in a deliberate order: foodservice volume through Sodexo and university dining first, a private label arm alongside, then natural and specialty retail through Whole Foods, Sprouts, and Costco Northeast rotations, with the company at the time projecting a Wegmans rollout and a footprint of roughly 3,200 doors. In April it added a Dot Foods redistribution deal, national reach without added operational complexity. Only then did the Walmart freezer arrive, and it arrived with a new format, bite-sized Poppers, which Womack says was built from what the company has learned so far, with a better price point among the changes, though the shelf price itself has not been published.

For suppliers, the channel mechanics matter, including what remains unspecified. Open Call deals can route to stores, Walmart.com, or Walmart Marketplace, and the company has not detailed its arrangement. What is visible is an in-store shelf placement with no online listing yet, the reverse of the digital-native playbook, and a path that favors brands whose manufacturing can absorb a supercenter purchase order on day one. Open Call wins can take a year or longer to become an actual shelf. Womack built the factory first, and when the program opened its door, it opened onto a machine already running three shifts.

The open question now is the one every foodservice-first brand eventually faces: the capabilities that won the shelf are not the ones that defend it. Maspanadas had made no serious marketing investment as of late 2024, by its own account. In the Walmart freezer, velocity is the only argument that counts. Can a company built on operational excellence teach itself demand creation before the first category review asks?

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