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Sonia Vaca and her son Edwin Espinoza pose in front of an Anaconda Burrito sign at Taqueria Yarelis’ new store at 6929 N. Willow Ave. in Fresno. Photo by Edward Smith

published on November 8, 2019 - 4:20 PM
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“I wanted followers, not customers,” said Edwin Espinoza, co-owner of Taqueria Yarelis, about the social media storm surrounding the now-famous Anaconda Burrito.

The Mexican restaurant celebrated the opening of its second store Tuesday at 6929 N. Willow Ave. Ste. 106 in Fresno, near Herndon Avenue. The three-foot burrito Espinoza and his father Juan created in 2016 turned the restaurant into a phenomenon after four years of trying to secure a place for the family business in a crowded Mexican food market.

“We wanted to invent something different, so it was idea after idea until we hit the jackpot with the Anaconda Burrito,” Espinoza said.

But it wasn’t the burrito alone that brought Espinoza’s family restaurant nationwide acclaim from celebrities such as Jimmy Fallon and websites such as BuzzFeed.

In fact, when they debuted the burrito they were relying on selling fresh fruit and returned goods from big box stores at the Sunnyside Swap Meet just to keep the lights on at their restaurant.

“It was looking hard for us at the first location,” Espinoza said. “We were not having too much success with business.”

Even though it was the swap meet sales keeping them afloat, they didn’t want to abandon the restaurant. Before they moved into the original location at Fresno and Belmont avenues five years ago, his father, Juan, kept the family fed by selling tacos from a cart. He had multiple run-ins with the City of Fresno for operating without a license.

“He didn’t know this was going to happen. We honestly thought we were going to be selling tacos all of our life,” Espinoza said.

Finally, authorities said if they caught him again, they’d put him in jail. So they gathered what money they had to open their first location.

Even then, they had tapped into the little savings they had to survive. They were selling $30 worth of food a day — not enough to even pay the rent.

It took two years for the family to find their recipe for success with a Facebook video. The video showcased cooks combining three pounds of meat, one pound of rice and a pound of beans with veggies, cheese and salsa into five tortillas.

A film crew from BuzzFeed captures a segment on the Anaconda Burrito for the show “Worth It.” Photo by Edwin Espinoza

 

That 2016 video has now garnered 36 million views, according to Facebook. But while the little walk-up stand quietly offered the behemoth of a meal, people were clamoring for it in places like Chicago, Colorado and Ohio before they were in Fresno.

“I’m going to tell you my secret,” said Espinoza about his strategy to turn the food into viral success.

He started by joining Facebook groups throughout the country, going as far as Paraguay and Chile, even. But his local presence remained limited.

He established his presence there, starting with only a thousand followers.

His name grew as people throughout the country saw the food he posted and followed his page.

“When people start seeing that you have followers, they start following you too,” he said.

So while people in Chicago were sharing his video, it eventually found its way to Fresno.

Now, when you do a search for “Anaconda Burrito” on YouTube, the results show multiple pages of videos with thousands of views each. Nearly all of the videos document attempts of people eating the Fresno-based burrito.

Buzzfeed’s duo of Andrew Ilnyckyj and Steven Lim of the series “Worth it” took the three-foot challenge, eating it end-to-end. Their video garnered 9 million views on YouTube.

Talk show host Jimmy Fallon wrote an imaginary thank-you letter on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” to “the Mexican restaurant in California that’s making the three-foot long burrito called ‘the Anaconda.’”

Espinoza’s outside-in approach established credibility in Fresno, a market that many influencers have called hesitant when it comes to trying new things. But as people in bigger cities gave Taqueria Yarelis traction, the Fresno market was more willing to accept the food as something of their own.

“People don’t know where those followers are from,” Espinoza said. “I’m a restaurant in Fresno — they are going to think those followers are from Fresno. But they weren’t. They were from all over the world.”

The restaurant now has nearly 400,000 Facebook followers. If you scroll the dozens of videos from the restaurant, even footage of workers assembling a regular burrito gets 21,000 views.

And it was that burrito that let them open their new store at Willow and Herndon avenues. They now employ 22 people between the two stores.

“The Anaconda burrito bought us a house,” Espinoza said. “It’s given us a lot of opportunities.”

Taqueria Yarelis is open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.


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