The Fascinating Story of Goya, the $1 Name That Became a $1.5 Billion Food Empire

In 1936, a fifty-year-old man in Lower Manhattan had a food business and nothing left to sell. A war four thousand miles away had cut off every supplier he had. So he bought a shipment of sardines out of Morocco — and then paid one dollar for the name printed on the tin. A name that was not his. That name is Goya. Nine decades later it moves $1.5 billion of food a year across more than 2,500 products, and it is the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the United States. Prudencio Unanue had left a village in northern Spain at seventeen. This is the story of what he understood that every competitor missed and of the one decision that separated Goya from everyone else selling to the same customers. CHAPTERS 0:00 A dollar for a name 1:51 Villasana de Mena, 1886 2:18 Puerto Rico, 1903 3:08 Carolina Casal, and the New York trade 3:42 The war cuts off every supplier 4:07 A shipment of Moroccan sardines 4:31 One dollar for the name 5:14 Duane Street 6:02 The migration that built the catalog 6:52 Building the supply chain backward 7:43 Bodega by bodega 8:46 A note on the record: sources disagree 9:37 1976 9:56 The decision nobody else made 11:15 Three customers, one product 12:34 The second generation 13:39 Three fights in fifty-six years 14:36 July 2020 14:56 What actually happened to sales 17:32 The sequence ON THE RECORD Goya's own official history does not always match the dates in the business press or in court filings. Where accounts conflict, this episode says so rather than picking the tidier version. SOURCES & CREDITS Archival photographs: Library of Congress, FSA/OWI Collection (public domain); photographs by Jack Delano, Russell Lee, John Vachon, Arthur Rothstein and Walker Evans. Goya Foods float, Union City NJ — Nightscream, CC BY 3.0. Supermarket interior, Miami — Phillip Pessar, CC BY 2.0. Boycott sales research: Cornell University, Northwestern University, and Imperial College London. Goya Foods is not affiliated with this channel and did not participate in this video.