Homegrown Flour Tortilla Business Del Norte Keeps Things Local

Del Norte doesn’t have a website or a storefront, and until now, its press coverage has amounted to a fleeting mention in a Raleigh Magazine sidebar.

But the Durham-based flour tortilla company, which accepts orders via Instagram DM and delivers them once a week, has nearly sold out through the end of this month. November dates are starting to fill up, too.

This is normal, according to owner Arturo Perez.

“We just can’t make enough,” Perez says.

If you don’t want to wait a month to try it, you’re in luck: Del Norte is holding a pop-up this Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Cocoa Cinnamon location in Lakewood. $2 from each pack of tortillas sold will go toward victims of Hurricane Helene.

Perez launched Del Norte last year with his sister Karina. The two had originally hoped to sell breakfast tacos at area farmer’s markets, but their mom thought that idea was too involved—and they really needed her to be on board with the business, Perez says, because she was the one with the tortilla recipe, Perez says.

Eventually, they found a compromise in selling tortillas, sans fillings.

“It took a few months to convince her that it could work,” Perez says, “and then it took a few more months to nail down the actual recipe because she had never measured the ingredients before.”

The business is a family affair. The Perez siblings, along with their parents, start early on Saturdays, mixing the dough, portioning it, and using a heat press to shape dough balls into six-inch rounds. By the afternoon, they’ve made 500 tortillas—50 orders. Then Arturo delivers them to homes across the Triangle.

Perez attributes Del Norte’s success to a few factors. While there are a number of local corn tortillerias nearby, there’s a dearth of places to get a homemade flour tortilla, he says. Also, local sourcing makes for a quality product: the flour in Del Norte’s tortillas comes from Lindley Mills , in Graham; the lard comes from Left Bank Butchery , in Saxapahaw, and the salt comes from Sea Love Sea Salt , which produces salt using sea water collected at Wrightsville Beach.

A shout-out earlier this year from Bill Smith , the longtime chef of the now-closed Chapel Hill institution Crooks Corner, boosted Del Norte’s following on social media, Perez says. (“Score!” Smith wrote in a February Facebook post. “Even the salt is from North Carolina. Thanks, Del Norte Tortillas. I feel shrimp tacos coming on.”)

Perez, his sister, and his father were all born in Tamaulipas, a state in the Northern part of Mexico where flour tortillas are most common.

“The little play on words in the name of the business is because we are from Del Norte, the northern region of Mexico,” Perez says. “But also we live in Carolina Del Norte, which is Spanish for North Carolina.”

Perez’s mother grew up on a remote, mountainous ranch in a different part of the country. She learned to make corn tortillas through the traditional nixtamalization process at a young age, Perez says, but didn’t know how to make flour tortillas until she met her husband.

Perez says the family hopes to expand Del Norte’s production in the coming months to meet the demand. A website is in the works.

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