A Look Towards the Future for Los Roast

8/28/22

This year marks our 10th season roasting New Mexico Chile in Portland, OR. 

In the past decade, we have grown from a seasonal operation to a year-round business, stocking retail shelves in hundreds of stores in the Northwest, and are expanding across the U.S. 

We learn so much every season: like how to roast better and make our roasters perform better; which chile varieties are the best and who grows them. How to pick and transport truck loads of chile so they weather the long journey to the Northwest. Once it is finally roasted, how it is best stored, prepared, and processed.Every year our network in New Mexico has grown. We’ve introduced ourselves to the many amazing New Mexicans who plant, grow, pick the chile the rest of us enjoy so much. 

When we first branched out into retail, we used a contractor to pack our jars, and we sourced roasted, peeled, chopped chile from a New Mexico-grown supplier. After a few years we decided to jump into manufacturing ourselves and began making sauces, chipotle, and salsa in a small North Portland commercial kitchen.

The more we learned about New Mexico Chile, though, the more we discovered wavering quality, unpredictable consistency and supply, and, recently, direct competition from our supplier. All this created an unsustainable situation for us. And a David v. Goliath battle against a near-monopoly of New Mexico Chile.

So, we traveled suppliers in our homestate to try and chase the quality once inherent in all of our chile products. The pillars of New Mexico chile processing couldn’t conjure up the quality we searched for, one that we had grown up with but was being exponentially diluted.

In 2019, Los Roast Founder Marshall Berg moved back to New Mexico to build a more direct supply chain, focusing on quality above all else. 

We’re building upon our seasonal experience and unique roasting capabilities with a network of commercial chile growers. We’ve set out to build a process that takes Chile from the field-to-jar with techniques that are inherently traditional in addition to proprietary innovations. This is exciting. Our 10th season in Portland will be our first operating in New Mexico. The processing and packaging of Los Roast products will soon take place under one roof. We will control all aspects of our product quality and be in a better position to expand our reach and  increase our capacity. We’re calling our parent company Best in the West. And our mission will be to bring the very best Chile that New Mexico has to offer to anyone that seeks it. 

Working directly with New Mexico farmers, Best in the West pays for guaranteed quality and specific varieties. All our fresh chile is roasted and delicately peeled, leaving the flavor and look of the roast. The global challenges have pushed this project’s completion date up multiple times and this is the first official announcement concerning the launch. Much more information and exciting announcements will be coming soon.

We owe all of our success to the roots of our operation: Roasting seasonally, a bushel at a time, for displaced New Mexicans on some of the warmest days in Portland. The sound of the burners, the smell that keeps us coming back, and our interactions with some of the most passionate people over this spicy fruit. We thank you.