El Pato Is LA’s 115-Year-Old Native Hot Sauce King

la.eater.com/2021/2/2/22251724/el-pato-hot-sauce-history-los-angeles-inside


TThe cans are hard to miss. Bright red, neon green, glowing yellow. At most grocery stores, they sit at about thigh height, in colored tins large and small, surrounded by countless other jars and bottles of corporate salsa. You’d likely recognize the throwback logo (it’s the one with the hand-drawn duck, which is really a male mallard, bright green head and all, standing on a sandy shoreline) having walked by it in the aisle or scrolled past it online for years. On Instagram, people fill their newly emptied containers with succulents or flowers; they get tattoos of the cans on their bodies. That duck is everywhere.



Despite the seeming brand ubiquity, this is no conglomerate sauce. This is El Pato, the 115-year-old, family-run, native-to-LA company that is still pumping out salsas, vinegars, mustards, peppers, and pickled items from a facility on the banks of the LA River — even (and especially) during the pandemic.




The manufacturing area is really just a collection of buildings, picked up over the years and paid for in full, that takes up what amounts to a city block. Weaving between the front offices and loading docks and holding facilities and duck-painted storage tanks takes time, especially these days, with everything slowed down and at a distance. Employees with hairnets and face masks continue their efforts, working inaudibly as machines beep and whir in the rooms beyond. It’s the kind of auditory jumble that Robert Walker, the current CEO of Walker Foods Inc., grew up with. His grandfather James founded Walker Foods, and with it the famed El Pato brand (as well as Golden State, which packages vinegars, chiles, and mustards) here more than a century ago, though he admits the firm details from those days are mostly “lost to the mists of time.”



Here’s what is known: The first whiff of Walker Foods began across the river on Santa Fe, with the elder Walker purchasing the current address on Mission Road in the 1920s. It was here that the do-it-all El Pato sauce became an anchor for the family as the company pushed further into the Mexican food market. This is where the young Robert Walker, now a spry 78, essentially grew up. “Salsa flows in my veins,” he says.