Madera, CA. Julio López is the new owner of the successful recipes that facilitated Basque Company to end up selling, monthly, around 15,000 bottles, throughout 48 states, as indicated by Ramón. The firm produces two wine-based sauces: a meat tenderizer and a fish marinade. Michael was thinking of commercializing a third one, “a hot sauce that I came up with –says he−. I use it myself and it is very good,” but his father was not drawn by the idea.
“I wanted additional products to get more marketing space at the grocery stores –continues the son, who holds a business and marketing degree−. The more products you have, the better from a marketing perspective. So I wanted someone else to make the sauces, and us to spend more time selling them.” But Ramón liked managing the company the same way he had been doing it for over three decades.
“We were only two or three people working at the company –says the founder, with a deliberated lack of accuracy, worthy of a former sheepherder−; nobody knew the recipe. I don’t like to talk about these things because everybody tries to copy what you do. The less you say, the better. Here, you get the underpants stolen even before dropping your jeans.”
The factory were they produced the sauces −that has been sold to a different buyer− was 1,000 square feet. “It was a small company working like a big one,” added Ramón, who thinks that, nowadays, it would have been more complicated to create Basque Company, because “before, most of the stores were family ran and it was easy to talk to them and sell your products.” He would leave a number of bottles at each shop, with the promise of going back to pick them up if they were not sold. “It never happened, I never had a single bottle unsold.”
Another characteristic that made Basque Company special was that they never asked for a credit. “The more money you ask for, the more you spend, and that’s a vicious circle –believes him−. I can say that I don’t owe a single penny.”
There are not many businessmen like him, these days. But what makes Ramón special is not his method, but his “great imagination and curiosity,” in the words of his son. “He is a very curious man. Even though he is older now, he still has that curiosity that pushes him to try new things.” And Ramón is aware of that: “I have a great imagination, like no one else has, and that’s how I created the best recipe in the country.” It might sound presumptuous, but coming from an immigrant that arrived to the US, at the age of 25, “with nothing else than a half-empty suitcase,” it makes sense.
From Navarre to California
Ramón Ylarregui was born in Itsaso (Navarre), in the year 1930. Not long after, his uncle Miguel fled to California to work as a sheepherder. He was the one who convinced Ramón to go to America, to work with his sheep. It was 1955 and the young man had “nothing, but a half-empty suitcase.” “I didn’t even speak the language,” he pointed out.
Ever since his arrival, he’s lived in California, always in the Fresno area. He worked for five years as a sheepherder, but had to stop for a back injury: “I got the surgery done and couldn’t work with the sheep anymore.” He bought a truck and started delivering alfalfa; he always had something in mind. “Before creating Basque Company, I wanted to register the patent of foosball in America, but there were already some Germans working on that.”
Having an imagination in constant work and acknowledging that “Americans really like lamb,” he came up with the idea of creating “a different sauce, the best one, made of quality ingredients.” And he added: “It was not cheap, but good products sell well.” The slogan of his creation said it all: “Try me, you’ll like me.”
Now, Ramón, 85, thinks that in America there is “almost an obsession with growing and growing, non-stop.” “This will end up exploding,” he added. The future will hopefully be more promising, and Basque Company’s sauces will continue brightening American’s palates, for many years.
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