Blanco Niño: From Burrito Bar Detour to €10M Tortilla Chip Brand with Founder Phil Martin

Jan 6, 2026

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I'm thrilled to be interviewing fellow Irish person, Phil Martin, founder of Blanco Niño, to explore how an obsession with quality turned a burrito bar frustration into a multi-million-euro tortilla brand.... (cont'd below)

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The Brand Growth Heroes Mini MBA 2026 is back.

Built for founders, marketers and brand leaders who want to grow brands the right way — with practical frameworks, real case studies and honest insight.

Applications open: Monday 5th January 2026

Applications close: Midnight Sunday, 25th January 2026

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(Cont'd)
Phil shares the unlikely path that took him from Ireland to Mexico in search of real corn tortillas and why learning how things fail allowed him to build something better. This is a conversation about how to turn craft into something that scales and choosing the long road when shortcuts would have been easier.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Why Phil flew to Mexico with no contacts and asked to learn how to grow corn
How discovering real tortillas completely reset his understanding of quality
Why it takes three days to make a Blanco Niño tortilla chip and why that matters
The brutal realities of building a food factory from scratch (and nearly importing a “blowtorch attached to a tractor”)
How Blanco Niño scaled from foodservice to retail and towards €10M in revenue
Why knowing every way something can fail allows you to push quality to the edge
The personal cost of trying to do everything yourself and how founders avoid burnout
What it really means to build a challenger brand without shortcuts

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Useful links

Connect with Phil Martin on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipmichaelmartin/

Connect with Blanco Niño on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/blanco-nino/

Blanco Niño website https://www.blanco-nino.com/

Follow on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/helloblanconino

Follow on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/helloblanconino

The book Phil mentioned: The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

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