Born into humble beginnings in Cerralvo, Nuevo Leon, in 1930, Roberto Gonzalez Barrera began working at age six as a shoeshine boy, running errands and helping in his father’s dairy store after leaving school at eleven. While passing through Reynosa in 1948, he encountered a rustic mill grinding dried nixtamal into flour. Recognizing that fresh masa spoiled within a day while dried flour could last for months, he and his engineer father invested their life savings of 75,000 pesos into acquiring the technology.
In 1949, they launched one of the world’s first nixtamalized corn flour plants in Cerralvo under the brand name Maseca portmanteau of masa and seca. For over a decade, market acceptance was remarkably slow, requiring constant refinement of texture, flavor, and color to convince traditional households. Gonzalez Barrera persevered through the 1950s, eventually scaling production before launching an unprecedented international expansion.
He established operations in Costa Rica in 1973 and entered the United States in 1977 by acquiring the Mission brand in California’s San Fernando Valley. By introducing popular labels like Mission and Guerrero to American supermarkets, he provided millions of immigrant families with a taste of home. Today, GRUMA operates roughly 77 plants worldwide, employs 25,000 people, generates over six billion dollars annually, and produces nearly forty percent of all tortillas consumed in the United States. Though Gonzalez Barrera passed away in 2012, leaving leadership to his son Juan Gonzalez Moreno, his vision transformed a staple of Mexican heritage into a global enterprise.
