Crazy for croquettes
Producing a take on a popular Brazilian street food, Frittos & Co. finds a receptive — and rapidly expanding — audience
Photo: Wallace Franca, co-founder and director at Frittos & Co.
LET’S BE HONEST — hors d’oeuvres have grown a bit stale, haven’t they? Show up to a party just to see another plate of puff pastry whatevers? Yawn. Mini spring rolls? What else ya got?
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The Brazilian coxinha, also known as the Brazilian croquette, might be just what the doctor ordered, coming in with all the flavour and excitement of Carnival itself to spice up the snack space.
“Almost three years ago, my business partner [Marcelo Braga] and I wanted to do something unique, like street food in Brazil,” explains Wallace Franca, co-founder and director at Frittos & Co., a manufacturer and distributor of frozen Brazilian croquettes. “It’s very popular in Brazil, but in Canada, it’s so difficult to find.”
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Based on the coxinha, Brazil’s most famous street food, Frittos & Co. produce a half dozen croquette varieties (plus a couple of dessert churros) that range from traditional versions to flavours that put a spin on popular Canadian offerings, like pulled pork and pizza bites.
“The pulled pork is a twist on a Canadian flavour and a Brazilian flavour — you have a Brazilian dough with the pulled pork,” Franca says.
Braga — the recipe guy of the partnership – chimes in to say that the magic is really in the Brazilian dough. “We use Brazilian seasonings and it’s very special,” he says. “It’s different.”
Like many multicultural food startups we see in Canada, Franca and Braga launched the business in 2022 out of a combination of entrepreneurialism and the desire to scratch a particular food itch. “You don’t have these products here in Canada. It’s really, really hard to find,” Franca says. “So, we saw the opportunity to produce and wholesale it.”
“We just reach each store, introduce the products and say, ‘Hey, we offer a great margin on this product.’ Honestly, we have over 95 per cent of stores saying yes” —Wallace Franca
“I’ve been in the food business for 15 years — I’ve been studying the people, the food business here in Canada,” Braga adds. “We came up with this idea because people here love to do fast food — deep fried things and good quality.”
The partners began by wholesaling primarily to small, independent grocery stores in Southwestern Ontario. It didn’t stay at that level for long, though. Frittos & Co. products are now sold in over 100 locations in more than 40 cities in three provinces, including major grocery retailers like No Frills and Real Canadian Superstores (you can even find Frittos & Co. in Florida supermarkets, where they’ve been an easy sell to the Latin American market).
As Franca points out, Frittos & Co. offerings is the kind of product that many larger retailers crave — they’re frozen, easy to store, can be air-fried in about five minutes (ideal for in-store demos) and have a flavour lineup that shoots down the middle between exotic and familiar. On top of that, they deliver good margins for the retailer.
“We don’t have a big team to do the sales,” Franca says (a point hammered home by the fact that this interview was conducted as the partners delivered product). “So, we do most of it by ourselves. We just reach each store, introduce the products and say, ‘Hey, we offer a great margin on this product.’ Honestly, we have over 95 per cent of stores saying yes.”
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That has meant a rapid growth trajectory for the company. In 2022, they pulled in around $45,000 in sales. The next year, that jumped to $200,000, Franca says. This year, thing skyrocketed. “We’re going to do maybe $1.6 million over 2024,” he says. “For the first year, we ran the business and did Uber to pay the bills as well. We put everything we had into this business.”
The partners have also attracted a group of investors (“the four fellows,” Franca calls them) to help scale up. They’re about to move into a more permanent production facility at The Grove agri-business hub — a 3,000-square-foot space where they’ll be capable of producing 35,000 croquettes per hour. “It’s a lot. It’s really a lot,” says Braga.
“I want to be the snack brand that Canadians are looking for,” sums up Franca. “Snacks for kids, lunch for kids? Frittos. Snacks for gatherings with friends? Frittos. Whenever you need them — they are really good.” 
Kieran Delamont