After 75 years, Renfro family still working together to turn out salsa

Jack and Bill Renfro used to spend eight hours a day using only a spoon to fill glass jars with chowchow relish.

“We had a copper kettle they made it in, and we would hold a bottle and take a spoon and it would go into a cup,” Jack Renfro, 78, said about the early days of his parents’ food distribution business. “We were making, like, 20-gallon cooks.”

Now Renfro Foods, celebrating its 75th anniversary, uses 500-gallon kettles, cooking batches of salsa, relish and barbecue sauce, and making 135 jars per minute at its factory in Fort Worth.

With 33 products marketed under the Mrs. Renfro’s label, the family-owned business has grown into a multimillion-dollar operation with salsa available all over the world, including South Korea, Morocco and Germany.

Despite its global presence, Renfro Foods maintains its family culture just southeast of the Interstate 30-Interstate 35W interchange in two nondescript buildings. About 40 employees, including third- and fourth-generation Renfros, keep the salsa cooking and come up with new products, like its line of barbecue sauces, all with Fort Worth proudly stamped on the front.

“It’s such a joy, getting to create products and see them on the shelves and work with your family,” President Doug Renfro said.

How it began

In 1940, George Renfro realized he wanted to work for himself after a fellow salesman was fired simply because the boss didn’t like him.

“He decided that if he failed, it would be because of him and not because somebody didn’t like him,” Jack said of his dad. “I think that’s what made his mind up to buy a truck and start his own business.”

Initially, George Renfro bought spices from U.S. Coffee and Tea Co. in Dallas and sold them to Fort Worth stores. He also bought Dalton’s Best Maid salad dressing and mustard and Pendery’s garlic and chili powders to sell to grocery stores, Jack said.

For the first eight years, the family business didn’t make anything. George sold packaged spices and sauces while his wife, Arthurine, kept the books. But that changed in 1948, when George bought a local syrup manufacturer and began making Dixieland syrups.

“We had waffle syrup, ribbon cane and a honey-flavored syrup, but we have no idea where that recipe ended up,” Jack said.

George then purchased the factory on Stella Street in 1951, where the company is still located today, and bought out another local food company and added chowchow relish to its list of products. Dixieland Chow Chow soon became the company’s bestseller, and by 1960, it was the only product Renfro was selling.

In the early ’60s, Renfro was selling two chowchow brands — Dixieland in grocery stores and the new Mrs. Renfro’s label of chowchow at local fruit stands.

View an interactive timeline of Renfro Foods’ history

From picante sauce to salsa

As good as chowchow is — a mixture of cabbage, onion, sweet pepper, vinegar and pickling spices — Jack and Bill Renfro knew their parents’ business needed new products.

Bill would sometimes buy tomatoes in Arkansas and resell them in the Dallas markets, but one time, no one was buying.

“My dad was not happy,” Jack said. “So we brought them back and said, ‘We got to do something with them.’ So we made tomato relish.”

But the hottest new product came to Renfro Foods when Jack and Bill decided to buy Ole Foods, a west Fort Worth taco sauce company, in 1972.

“They only had hot, mild or green,” Jack said. “It wasn’t called salsa. It was called taco sauce.”

Consumers were just learning about hot sauce, and Renfro Foods quickly took advantage of the trend. Picante sauce was renamed salsa, and soon the company was shipping its hot, medium and mild salsa products to Milwaukee and Boston.

“Pace [Foods] is the best thing that ever happened to us,” Doug said. “They taught the world how to use salsa a million different ways, and you need it every day. Chowchow, you don’t need every day.”

Bill’s daughter, Becky Renfro Borbolla, started working at the family business in 1984. Since Pace wasn’t available on the West Coast, Renfro Foods was able to sign on with distributors to put Mrs. Renfro’s in stores there.

“We would be shipping truckloads every two weeks to the West Coast of our product, but we weren’t in the grocery stores in Texas,” said Borbolla, a vice president at Renfro Foods.

Not until the early 1990s could Texans find Mrs. Renfro’s salsa at their local grocery stores, when Minyard’s added it to the deli section.

Adding cheese and BBQ

Renfro Foods has steadily added more salsa products to its lineup, ranging from black bean to raspberry chipotle to pineapple.

About 15 years ago, the company redid its label, embossed the Renfro name on the jars and put an image of Arthurine Renfro (Mrs. Renfro) on each lid.

“We call it the rainbow effect on the shelf — red, green, purples — you can see it is Mrs. Renfro’s, but you have to look at it longer to see what it is,” Doug said.

The company’s hottest seller is its Habanero Salsa, followed by its Green Salsa and Ghost Pepper Salsa, which was introduced only three years ago. Renfro Foods also reintroduced its classic nacho cheese sauce in 2013.

Doug said the company comes out with new products usually every three years and allocates about $100,000 to get each one to customers. Some have been home runs, like the Ghost Pepper Salsa, he said.

This year, the company branched out in barbecue sauce, introducing classic, chipotle and ghost pepper varieties.

“There were serious questions internally if anyone would care [about barbecue sauce] but it was a way not to cannibalize our salsa sales,” Doug said. “It has really taken off.”

The company now distributes its products to dozens of countries, including South Korea, the United Kingdom and Australia. It sells about $500,000 worth of products in Canada each year, Borbolla said.

“Consumers know that Mrs. Renfro’s puts out a good, quality product, and at a great price,” Borbolla said.

Still family-owned after 75 years

Usually every Tuesday, you can find two generations of Renfros sitting at Lili’s Bistro in Fort Worth, talking about what the company should do next. Recently, they decided over salmon lunches to buy an $85,000 cooker.

Bill, 80, and Jack, 78, are semiretired, although they still give input to the third generation of Renfros. Jack’s son, Doug, is president while Bill’s son, James, handles production and Bill’s daughter, Becky, oversees the office and distribution agreements.

All three fondly remember working in the factory when they were in high school and college. Doug worked in the spice room, and Becky liked working with the women who chopped the cabbage for the chowchow relish.

James said: “During the hot summer days, we would lift the cabbage and there was ice over the bags, and we’d throw it on each shoulder and the ice would run down your back. That was the best way to work.”

Two fourth-generation Renfros are in the factory. James’ son Blake mixes spices each day for the production line while Bill’s grandson, Jarod, works in the warehouse, packing and moving thousands of jars of salsa each day.

And on each lid, Arthurine Renfro’s smiling face looks up at the current generation of Renfros.

“We like having our grandmother on the jar,” Doug said. It reminds the family that “we need to work hard and do a good job and be honest and have high integrity, or grandmother’s going to come get us.”

This story was originally published August 7, 2015 at 12:20 PM with the headline "After 75 years, Renfro family still working together to turn out salsa."