Green Chile Spices Up Food Production in New Mexico

Popular pepper takes the limelight in a state that also produces tons of cheese, snack foods, tortillas and more.

By Amy Antonation on December 19, 2023

Jeff Adkins

Food production in New Mexico is a key part of the state’s diverse and well-established agriculture sector. With companies in the state making cheese, snack foods, tortillas, roasted chiles and more, there’s truly a stunning variety of food products coming out of the southwestern state.

Enjoy Plenty of Cheese, Please!

For example, Leprino Foods, Southwest Cheese and Saputo are just a few cheese producers in a state that collectively turn out over 970 million pounds of cheese every year, making it the fourth-highest cheese-producing state in the country. 

But nothing says New Mexico like its most iconic product: the green chile.

Bueno Foods

During harvest season, the green chiles make their way to neighboring states and even across the country, where bushels are still often sold in tents along the roadside and roasted over live fire to order – but Bueno Foods, which was founded in the early 1950s by a trio of brothers from the Baca family, took that idea and ran with it. 

“Generations of New Mexicans had roasted green chiles during harvest season on wood stoves, on cast iron skillets or in ovens. They could only enjoy this tradition during the autumn season, though, because refrigeration and freezing were unheard of,” says Ana Baca, vice president of marketing and communications and daughter of co-founder Joe Baca.

As the first company to process green chiles in commercial quantities, Joe, Ray and Augustine Baca built their own equipment and developed processes for roasting, seeding and freezing chiles from scratch. 

Now, Bueno Foods processes millions of pounds of green chiles each year, Ana says, and in early 2023, it opened what it claims is the largest chile freezer in the country: “It’s chock full of a little more than 10 million pounds of chiles.” 

In addition to flash-frozen chopped green chiles, Bueno produces a red chile sauce, a line of salsas, tortillas, enchiladas and tamales. Still, its best-seller remains the product that’s central to the brand’s story: flame-roasted New Mexico green chile, available in mild, hot or extra hot. 

Food Production in New Mexico: On the Grow

Long-standing businesses like Bueno Foods have played an important role in not only the local economy, but the state’s culture and identity for decades. This track record of success has also helped to attract new food producers to New Mexico, continuing the growth of the industry in the state.

New Orleans-based Louisiana Pepper Exchange, which supplies pepper purees for use in hot sauce manufacturing, and vegetable processor Oro LLC both recently purchased land in Santa Teresa, New Mexico, in order to expand production and distribution capabilities.