Texas Highways, Volume 70, Number 2, February 2023 Page: 66
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CannedGoodness
Ro-Tel's Rio Grande Valley origin story
By Omar L. GallagaSmall South Texas town of
about 5,700 may seem an
unlikely birthplace for a brand
synonymous with Super Bowl
parties and Southern casseroles.
But Elsa, about 25 miles north of the
U.S.-Mexico border, is where Ro-Tel'spopular canned tomatoes and peppers
originated. Though production moved
out of state in the late 1990s, the popular
brand persists, producing tens of millions
of cans each year. Ro-Tel (stylized as
RO*TEL on the cans) was founded by
Elsa's Carl Roettele in 1943. The vegetablej
66 texashighways.com
A i
Photos: Eric W. Pohl
canner-turned-entrepreneur combined
locally grown tomatoes and green chiles
and canned them for decades in two
area factories-one in Elsa and the other
in Donna. Roettele helped simplify the
process of roasting, peeling, chopping,
and cooking the vegetables for many
home cooks who were making chili
recipes and cheese-based concoctions
that were popular throughout Texas
midcentury.
The ties to the South Texas town were
strong in those early days, says Jaime
Gutierrez, a grant coordinator for the
City of Elsa who has been research-
ing Ro-Tel's local roots. "It was canned
by the Elsa Canning Company, and for
a long time they were one of the major
employers here in Elsa," he says. "If you
were downwind from it, you could smell
the jalapenos cooking."
Though the Elsa area was settled by
ranchers before the 1800s, the town
itself was incorporated in 1930 when
the population was only around 400.
Named after Elsa George, the wife of a
local landowner, the town was a rail-
rinat road company city, laid out on the Texas
and New Orleans Railroad in the late
1920s. "We grew the tomatoes and the
onions here," Gutierrez says. "Every-
thing that went into that sauce, we grew
it here, and they used the railroad to
transport it."
Ro-Tel began to reach larger Texas
cities including San Antonio, Houston,
and Dallas. But it exploded in popu-
larity in 1963 when Lady Bird Johnson
included it in her Pedernales Chili recipe
published in The Washington Post.
"She talked about Ro-Tel being the
secret ingredient in her recipe," says
Dan Skinner, the brand communication
manager and Ro-Tel historian at Conagra
Brands, the company that has owned
Ro-Tel since 2002. "By that time, it was
being sold in border states like Arkansas
and Oklahoma. That was its first national
exposure, and then the brand really took
off and grew from there."
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Texas. Department of Transportation. Texas Highways, Volume 70, Number 2, February 2023, periodical, February 2023; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1623752/m1/68/?rotate=0: accessed July 16, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.