Murphy says Bad Hambres is now a million-dollar business, built on the back of a two-ingredient burrito and a scrappy operation held together with, as Murphy put it, "DIY stickers, baggies, and paper wrappers." That original setup "got the job done, but it wasn't gonna work at scale."
No margin for error
"When you're bootstrapping, custom packaging isn't even on the table," Murphy said in the video. "Order minimums are massive. Thousands of everything, and all in."
Bootstrapping, which is building a company on personal savings and reinvested revenue rather than outside investors, describes the vast majority of new businesses in the U.S. Founders get complete control, but it also saddles them with all the risk. In Murphy’s case, investing $106,000 would mean there was no fallback.
And Murphy wasn't just gambling on the price. He was also gambling on a product he had never physically seen. Bad Hambres had two flavors to get right: the original red-salsa burrito, and a spicy salsa verde born from a collaboration with James Beard–recognized chef LT Smith of the Phoenix restaurant Chilte, which was being promoted to a permanent menu item. Murphy's wife and business partner, Sam, spent eight months on the design.
“Sam turned into a packaging goblin,” Murphy said. "She obsessed over every inch."
On screen, everything looked finished, but then they booked their first production run with a new co-manufacturer before the packaging samples arrived, which the couple now considers a mistake. When the samples finally showed up, the two flavors "looked basically identical" side by side. There was no time to redesign, no time to reorder proofs, and a manufacturer waiting on them. "We were panicking," Murphy said.
So they picked a new color for the spicy verde and ordered blind, calling it "$106,000 and a prayer." Things unfortunately got worse from there, when Murphy learned the packaging wouldn’t arrive until after the burritos were already made; for a frozen-food company, that’s pretty bad. Basically means product has nowhere to go.
The Murphys put another $3,000 on a credit card to rush delivery — and thankfully, the boxes arrived and the colors looked great in person. "Seeing the burritos in the final packaging for the first time was emotional," Murphy said. "It was like, damn, the bean dream might actually happen."
