Small Business: The Lucky Taco is no feat of luck

Sarah Frizzell, co-founder of The Lucky Taco, talks to Tom Raynel about how she and her husband Otis have brought Mexican flair to New Zealand shelves, and how it all started with the food truck scene in the United States.

What is The Lucky Taco, and what inspired you to start the business?

The Lucky Taco originated as a taco truck. It wasn’t an intentional starting point for a typical Mexican retail food brand. The truck came about after Otis and my honeymoon in 2012 when we went to Los Angeles. It was my first time in LA, and I fell in love with the whole food truck vibe, just the amazing quality of food from those trucks. I was a little kind of besotted, really.

Sarah and Otis Frizzell fell in love with food trucks and Mexican food on their honeymoon.

Of course, back in 2013, there was only Mexican Specialties in Ellerslie. We came back like, there’s nowhere to get many good tacos. There’s nowhere at all. And the food truck scene wasn’t really happening then, not quite like it is now, I suppose. We wanted to do it, and we wanted to do it right. If I was going to quit my reasonably well-paid advertising job, we’ve got to get this right. We wanted to bring that aesthetic of those California taco trucks to New Zealand.

The Frizzell's studied the culinary techniques needed for the brand in Mexico, bringing the cultural flair back to New Zealand.

Where did you learn to cook Mexican cuisine?

I had a passion for food, flavours and cooking that didn’t come until I moved to New Zealand. I’ve been here for 17 years, but I wasn’t in the culinary world before that. I don’t come from a culinary background that was all self-taught and learned, really when I moved here.

Obviously, we’re not Mexican. So we booked a big trip to Mexico and did a cooking course with some amazing chefs, and they’re still our friends to this day. We spent about seven weeks travelling around Mexico eating nothing but tacos and just learning and honing our menu, just to give us some credibility for doing what we were about to do. If you’re going to utilise another country’s cuisine, you want to do it proud. Lucky Taco was a bit of a different spin. It was everything we’d learned, and also catering to Ponsonby people’s requirements at the time. But we wanted it to be kind of street food, dirty, delicious, and, you know, moreish, addictive, but also with the lucky charcoal kind of vibe.

While on their honeymoon, Sarah and Otis fell in love with the food truck culture found in Los Angeles, inspiring them to foster the culture here.

Why did you decide to move into wholesale?

We were open between five and seven days a week in Ponsonby. Then we started getting a lot of private booking requests. As time went on, our journey progressed into making hot sauce. That was the first product we ever made. We used to buy from Mexican Specialities this chilli salt which they called “magic powder”. I suppose it’s kind of like food crack, you know, it’s just so good. We were buying so much from him, we thought why don’t we try and make it our own, like we did with the hot sauce?

In 2014-2015 we launched a Kickstarter campaign and we raised $100,000 to do taco kits. We went through a few twists and turns and got involved with a couple of big corporates that didn’t work out, and got involved with other people which also didn’t work out. Otis and I were then just so busy with the private bookings that we decided to stop being public-facing about two years ago.

It’s given me time to grow the business in the direction we wanted it to go, which was FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods). I’ve been trying for years in and out with the various products and it’s really tough.

But, you know, I think you’ve just got to choose your heart. And this was where we wanted to go. This is where we saw the potential to scale. We launched our current range of taco kits at the beginning of 2023, the Verde and the Roha, just meaning red and green. One’s got a red salsa, the other’s got a green salsa and different marinades. And that is as they are in the Lucky Taco truck, the perfected version of 10 years of work.

Sarah and Otis Frizzell at their home in Auckland. Photo / Dean Purcell

How did it feel to win the 2024 Foodstuffs Emerging Supplier award?

Phenomenal, like I cried at the actual event. It just meant so much to me. We’d have got there in the end anyway, but I think especially 10 years in and of trying so long and so hard, we’d just gone through so much. I‘d been working for about a year and a half on the Foodstuffs emerge pitch, because we entered it last year, and we got to the semifinals, but we didn’t win.

The main part of that prize is that we are going to be in 147 New World supermarkets from February next year. I’m still getting my head around lots of it, but I feel like it’s actually fortunate in a way that I’ve had a little bit of a head start for a few years, dipping my toe in that it’s not a complete shock.

What would be your advice to other budding entrepreneurs?

Learn the discernment between what’s right and wrong for your business, and know you’re going to make mistakes. You’ve got to be prepared to fail. I think that failure is not a failure, it’s just learning. If you just stop or quit, the failures define you. Rejection is just a redirection because you weren’t ready for that yet.

Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business and retail.