24 hour chapatti people

It's a success story that will have rivals in the ambient aisles drooling with envy; an overflowing order book, a new factory in the pipeline and sales growth topping 20%.

Established in 1995 with five employees and a lot of ambition, Sonora is now a £22m company employing 250 staff at two factories on the Drayton Fields industrial estate in Daventry producing a whopping 7m tortillas and 50t of tortilla chips a week, plus chapattis, wraps and meal kits.

Turnover for the coming year is forecast to be £26.5m-£27m, a growth rate Ridgeway is confident he can sustain over the next two or three years if UK consumers' thirst for Mexican cuisine continues unabated. And despite the dearth of Mexican restaurants in the UK, his confidence looks well placed.

'Tex-Mex' dishes are now on the menu in almost every pub in the land; Mexican is the number three ambient ethnic cuisine in the supermarkets behind Indian and Chinese, and bread is rapidly being supplanted by the tortilla wrap in the sandwich fixtures of every major food retail and foodservice outlet, says Ridgeway. "According to TNS, Mexican will replace Chinese as the number two ethnic cuisine by 2007 if current growth rates continue [excluding chilled and frozen].

"We're at full capacity in Daventry and I'm currently commissioning a £5m, 45,000ft2third factory in Northampton that should be up and running by January."

Thanks to bespoke equipment from Californian supplier Casa Herrera capable of churning out 500 tortillas a minute, Sonora is the fastest tortilla-producer in the world, claims Ridgeway. "Prices have not moved in five years, despite the rising cost of raw materials and energy, so you have to be more efficient, faster, and more accurate."

£3m investment

"We've invested £3m into four Casa Herrera lines, with two more on order for the new factory," he says. "When this is running, we'll be able to make 12m tortillas a week. We're using up all of their capacity, which is great, as it keeps the competition out."

Two tankers of flour arrive at the tortilla factory a day, he says. This is mixed with palm oil, water and raising agents and made into dough, which is then accurately divided into balls, proved and then pressed into tortillas with circumferential consistency of ±6mm, claims Ridgeway. Tortillas are then baked, cooled, stacked and packed into modified atmosphere packaging by removing oxygen and pumping in carbon dioxide and nitrogen. While 30 days' shelf-life is standard using this technique, Sonora can also offer six months' life using similar technology instead of adding preservatives, says Ridgeway. "Other manufacturers add chemicals, which have a nasty acidic taste. We don't add anything."

Illegal food dye Para Red proved a costly headache for the company, which is currently attempting to recoup £300,000 from suppliers to cover the cost of product withdrawals, says Ridgeway. "We routinely tested for Sudan 1, but Para Red and some of the other dyes that are coming out of the woodwork were not routinely tested for in the trade. We're now insisting on certificates of analysis from suppliers confirming that products do not contain any of these dyes as well as stepping up our own random testing. Every supplier is also audited at least once every 12 months."

Perhaps the only dark cloud on Sonora's horizon is the difficulty in recruiting skilled staff, says Ridgeway. "There is high employment in this area, and getting a technical or quality manager or an engineer is extremely difficult in these circumstances.

"When you consider the numbers of companies that have been taken over, you'd think that there would be more qualified people on the market, but we've had vacancies for a buying and logistics manager since Christmas. We have good retention, but we need new people, and the food industry is just not seen as a sexy place to work." FM