KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Andrea Penaloza, the owner of Empanada Madness, strives to give her customers an authentic taste of food from her homeland.
Penaloza ships ingredients from Colombia to Kansas City.
“I want things to taste as authentic as if you were to eat it in my country,” she said
However, Penaloza says business has been extremely hard.
“I’ve seen the support when the Royals were here and when we won the world series,” she said.
She said when the team did well, her business did well, but unfortunately that no longer holds true.
Penaloza says there’s been a big increase in rent and an 80% sales drop.
“With COVID-19, ever since COVID, things have been very hard,” she said. “Not only my mom passing away from COVID, just itself being hard. Not enough customers, us having to shut down early because we don’t have enough employees, or sometimes we don’t have enough prep or customers to come in.”
She says that’s exactly what happened on Friday, her employees couldn’t come in and she had to shut down early.
Before the pandemic, she had 11 employees, but now she's down to two.
“If I have a slow day and only made $50-100 that day, I have to close that day because I can’t keep the employees here, because I can’t afford to keep the labor,” she said.
Rueben Alonso is the CEO of AltCap, who provides loans for under-served and overlooked businesses.
“There’s a lot of unique challenges that minority-owned businesses face,” Alonso said.
Alonso knows first-hand the failure rate of small businesses.
“It’s a weird economy to predict and understand, and a strange dichotomy," he said. "[There are] Some who are struggling and some who are thriving."
But for Penaloza, she hopes her culture and food stand on their own.
“I cannot allow COVID to take this away from me either,” she said. “I have to get back to where this restaurant once was and I’m going to work super hard to make it happen.”
