Made in New Mexico: State builds on manufacturing base

Aug. 27—Eddie Garcia walks the 9,000-square-foot commissary on a Tuesday morning, monitoring his roughly 50 employees doing everything from processing thousands of pounds of green chile to baking biscochitos and making tamales.

The commissary, nestled between Old Town and Downtown, is in many ways the heart of Garcia's Kitchen — the nearly 50-year-old Albuquerque institution with six restaurants across Albuquerque.

Here, the food is made before it makes its way to plates across its eateries. The work that takes place at the commissary represents how manufacturing is rooted deeply in a city like Albuquerque — small, yet mighty. There's the in-house manufacturing to supply Garcia's Kitchen restaurants and other operations like Marpac Medical, a company that makes breathing tube holders that are largely sent out of state to intensive care units in hospitals across the U.S.

Economic impact

In New Mexico, manufacturing runs the gamut — from the creation of medical devices to solar and food products. It's a sector that supports thousands of jobs, billions of dollars in output and is as weaved into the fabric of the state as much as green chile.

Across the country, manufacturing output stood at $2.87 trillion in the first quarter of this year, according to the National Association of Manufacturers, citing data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The organization said there were some 13 million manufacturing workers in July, hundreds of thousands above pre-pandemic levels.

In New Mexico, NAM said manufacturers accounted for $4.26 billion in total output and employed 30,000 workers at the end of 2021.

Jennifer Sinsabaugh, CEO of the New Mexico Manufacturing Extension Partnership, said that number for employment only accounts for those that are strictly manufacturing employees. She said when you account for workers in other roles employed by manufacturers, the number is closer to 100,000.

Moreover, an updated state report last year said 47% of manufacturing companies have 50 employees or less. But Sinsabaugh said that percentage is closer to 94%, meaning most manufacturers in the state are small businesses.

She said that's a plus for those businesses.

"The benefit to smaller manufacturers is the agility and innovativeness of them, so typically you see them respond to volatility in the market a little bit better," she said.

But, she said, there are also downsides — those companies have to compete for workers with global manufacturers that have a New Mexico presence.

One of those larger companies, Intel Corp., has expanded this past year in Rio Rancho with the completion of its Fab9 factory, the site of the company's 3D advanced packaging technology.

A recent report obtained by the Journal shows Intel employed 3,080 full-time employees in the state in the second quarter of 2024.

Others, including Maxeon Solar Technologies and Ebon Solar, plan to bring roughly 3,000 jobs combined to Albuquerque in the coming years with two separate solar cell manufacturing facilities that are planned in Mesa del Sol.

In southern New Mexico, Santa Teresa is becoming a hub for global trade and manufacturing, with a handful of manufacturers last year announcing expansions into the area.

Jerry Pacheco, president of the Border Industrial Association and executive director of the International Business Accelerator, said Santa Teresa has the largest industrial base in the state, accounting for 63% of New Mexico's total exports.

He said businesses in the region employ about 7,000 workers, adding that Santa Teresa has become a prime location for automotive manufacturers. For instance, he said, Vitesco, which makes auto sensors for vehicles, has operations in Santa Teresa, as do a handful of others.

"A lot of people don't realize that New Mexico has an automotive production base," Pacheco said.

Prototyping

Some 40 employees work day and night at Continental Machining Co. in Albuquerque, prototyping different parts and tools for federal entities like Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory, said Kelly Denison, the owner and president.

The company largely works with defense contractors who need the parts for research and development projects. Denison said because of the highly-sensitive nature of those projects, he and his workers aren't always aware of what it is they are making with their roughly 30 computer numerical control machines like lathes and mills.

The company has been around since 1965 and has been owned by Denison's family since 2000 when his father purchased the business from the original owner (Denison bought the business from his dad in 2020).

The company, for example, has made parts for Sandia Labs' Z Machine, one of the world's largest pulsed-powered accelerators focused on studying materials under high pressure.

He said they have also helped produce tools for assembly and disassembly of atomic weapons in the U.S. Everything was made in the company's facility in Northeast Albuquerque primarily designed by their customers. Denison said those designs are given to Continental Machining in a series of blueprints that the company's workers then input into its lathes and mills that carve out the products.

"It's a great career that not a lot of people know about," Dennison said. "When my wife and I first started dating, I told her I was a machinist and she asked, 'What is that?' It's very fun to be kind of unique in that realm.

"As far as knowing what you're building and not knowing what you're building, you kind of get used to not knowing. It's fun to find out and sometimes we get to see what we build, and that's very rewarding. But what we do, ... you can't go anywhere in the world and see something that's not touched by a machine shop."

About 20 minutes south of Continental Machining in Albuquerque's Mesa del Sol, a new company, Kairos Power, operates a campus called KP Southwest on 32 acres of land where the company is manufacturing parts for its nuclear reactor technology that it someday plans to deploy to decarbonize the electric grid.

The company, which has more than 100 workers in Albuquerque — more than half that specifically work in manufacturing in-house parts, like vessels and valves, for that tech — is also expanding, said company co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ed Blandford.

Blandford, a former University of New Mexico professor, said New Mexico was a frontrunner when the company was looking for a place to set up shop about five years ago. He pointed to local talent, state and local incentives like the Job Training Incentive Program, and proximity to its California headquarters as reasons for choosing Albuquerque for its research and manufacturing campus.

"We've got the two big national labs nearby, with Sandia National Labs and Los Alamos, and then (Air Force Research Laboratory) ... so there's a lot of existing talent and capabilities that's very attractive," Blandford said. "The ability to have a second location that, quite frankly, isn't multiple stops in terms of travel for our staff, was also very advantageous. We knew we'd have to tap into local manufacturing talent and technician talent, and finding locations that had a lot of this capability was also very attractive. And so for a number of different reasons, New Mexico was very attractive to Kairos."

The company can minimize supply chain risk by manufacturing its own parts, said Craig Gerardi, Kairos' senior director of engineering and testing and development manufacturing.

"You can't go out and buy advanced reactor components," Gerardi said. "One approach is we could go and put in a bunch of money into other vendors around the country to get them to build out their supply chain, but we worry that we wouldn't be able to control our own destiny in that case, and that's a big focus for us.

"One of our big approaches is to minimize supply chain risk by manufacturing the most important or critical components in house. We've really been building the capability and capacity to build things like our vessels, our pumps, our valves even — things that are really fundamental."

Food, medical

New Mexico, and particularly Albuquerque, has its fair share of food manufacturers — some that make products for local businesses and ship them out to stores, and others, like Garcia's Kitchen, where products are made in house at a commissary for distribution to its local eateries.

Eddie Garcia, Garcia's Kitchen vice president, said the company is currently processing about 225,000 pounds of Hatch green chile that will be used throughout the year. Garcia's workers began processing chile in August and are doing everything from roasting to sweating 13,500 pounds a day, he said.

The commissary is also making a large number of biscochitos — about 400 dozen a day — hand-rolling taquitos, producing chile sauces and cooking pounds upon pounds of chicharrones.

It's organized chaos, and Garcia's workers are in sync like a well-oiled machine, leading to what has been, for years, a consistent flavor on the plates of patrons at the company's restaurants.

"One thing that we really don't want to change is the good, homemade, quality food we serve," Garcia said. "I don't want to compromise that."

Like Kairos, and other manufacturers in the state, Garcia's is also looking to expand its commissary at 1766 Central SW, said Vicki Garcia-Golden, president of Garcia's Kitchen.

Garcia-Golden said the expansion, which she hopes to get finished sometime next year, would allow for more dry storage and move the production of biscochitos to a larger space. She said the expansion would more than double the space of the commissary and could help with the future expansion of restaurants across the city.

"We have to do something," she said. "We can't grow (in this space)."

Growth has been the word for Jeff Alcalde's Marpac Medical, which in the last two years has also expanded its manufacturing capabilities to the world of skincare.

Alcalde, who owns the business and is also the president, employs roughly 75 employees between its medical manufacturing and skincare side, referred to as Skincare by Marpac.

The company, he said, primarily creates products like breathing tube holders. The skincare side makes everything from lip balms to hand soaps to shampoos.

Alcalde said many manufacturing companies work directly with government agencies, whether that be federal, state or local. He works primarily in the private sector, shipping many of Marpac's products to customers across the globe.

"I feel proud of our company in that I think we are doing a great job of being a sector that I think is underrepresented ... in New Mexico," he said.