The scent of fresh, warm corn tortillas greets customers as a line grows in the mid-afternoon outside a bright yellow and green trailer on Sebastopol Road in Santa Rosa’s Roseland neighborhood.
Unlike the other trucks, trailers, and pop-up tents lining the busy street, you won’t find tacos, burritos, or tamales at Tortillería Apatzingán. Instead, you’ll find a machine inside churning out tortillas by the dozen, destined for dinner tables that evening, still steamy and pliable an hour or two later.
Tortillería Apatzingán is one of two mobile tortilla factories, or tortillerías, that have opened recently in Sonoma County, with yet another on the way.
“This trend is spreading fast,” says Tortillería Apatzingán’s owner, Cristian Alvarez. The 33-year-old opened the North Bay’s first mobile tortillería in early 2024, opting for a trailer over a brick-and-mortar store, which he was able to move easily from Modesto where he’d launched the business the year before. “It’s easier to move (your business) in a trailer,” he says.
Alvarez was soon joined by local radio host Ramiro Garcia, 55, who debuted his mobile tortillería late last summer on Stony Point Road on the southern outskirts of Santa Rosa. Garcia’s trailer, Tortillería La Lotería, is decorated with imagery from the Mexican bingo game. He and his family employ three people who brought their tortilla-making expertise from Mexico.
The trailers are outfitted with machinery imported from Mexico that can make up to 3,000 tortillas per hour. Local owners favor equipment from the Celorio company, which pioneered industrialized corn tortilla production in 1947. The invention freed women from hours of daily back-breaking work making tortillas by hand over a grinding stone and set the standard of how tortillas should taste for a new generation.
Local entrepreneurs credit Ramiro Ortuño, a 63-year-old Modesto businessman, for pioneering the mobile tortillerías. In 2020, Ortuño convinced a skeptical trailer craftsman to install a 5-by-13-foot tortilla machine inside a container roughly 16 feet long and the concept was an immediate success. Ortuño recently expanded his business to Sonoma, setting up in the parking lot of the Sonoma Valley Fruit Basket.
The tortillas from these mobile tortillerías are softer, more fragrant, and more flavorful than packaged versions. Each operator has their own special recipe that they understandably want to keep secret, though Garcia of La Lotería divulges he uses a secret five-flour blend that he mixes with standard masa harina and water.
“That’s all I can say,” he says. “Our recipe is what gives our tortillas their distinctive flavor.”
The mobile tortillerías provide a nostalgic taste of home or a connection to ancestors for many Sonoma County locals, who may have experienced or heard about growing up in Mexico where most towns have a local tortillería that people visit daily to pick up fresh tortillas.
Ulises Delgadillo, 33, a Santa Rosa property manager, loves La Lotería corn tortillas and picks up a paper-wrapped package every afternoon. He says even the click-clack sound of tortillas being pressed on the machine reconnects him with Mexico.
“They are so good,” he says. “I like them fresh to go, and they don’t stiffen up. They have a sweet and slightly salty flavor.”
Besides offering delicious tortillas, Delgadillo believes the mobile tortillerías are successful because they’re a place where the community can connect. “You always run into people you know when you go for tortillas.”