Local company makes Mexican pastries 
for vending machines

STERLING – Inside his Snack-It Vending shop, Alfredo Cervantes mixes eggs, flour, shortening, sugar and pink food coloring, making sure the dough is gooey enough to go through a mechanical cookie cutter.

Felipe Torres rolls carts filled metal trays that rattle along the floor; Cervantes will feed the trays under the cookie cutter.

After making a few adjustments, Cervantes throws the pink dough into the cookie cutter, which spits out 15 3.5-ounce-round cookies per tray, ready to bake. Torres, 27, puts the trays on a rack, ready for the  oven.

The two Sterling men are making galletas, Mexican sugar cookies, one of the three Mexican pastry products made by Mama Cucas Cosina, the vending company Cervantes started 13 months ago.

Cervantes, 37, and Torres, 27, also make puerquitos, which are molasses cookies, and cuernos, which is cinnamon bread. They hope to add apple and cherry empanadas to their repertoire.

Cervantes, a machinist at Raynor Garage Doors in Dixon, has owned Snack-It Vending for 12 years. He came to realize that there was a void in the market that needed to be filled.

“We noticed some of our accounts ... liked Mexican products, but we found out nobody made prepackaged Mexican pastries in the whole nation,” Cervantes said.

Cervantes brought in a baker from Dubuque, Iowa, to teach him how to bake.

When Snack-It distributed the treats to two local customers, they outsold its other pastries, and became the first in the U.S. to prepackage Mexican pasteles, or pastries.

The first order, 2,000 pieces, took Cervantes and Torres four 14-hour shifts to complete, all by hand.

Since then, Cervantes has invested $75,000 for a mixer, oven, packaging machine and cookie cutter. He’s working with Chicago Vendor Supply, which distributes to Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, and the vending company Vistar, which distributes nationwide.

Cervantes chose the name Mama Cuca’s Cosina hoping it would have the Granny Smith connotation – Mama Cuca was his nickname for his grandmother, and cosina means kitchen.

He hopes by spring to have five employees running the bakery, producing 10,000 pieces in an 8-hour shift.

“It’s a really long process developing a product you don’t know how to make,” Cervantes said. “The more we do it, the more experience we get.”