The tortilla king of La Reina.

The tortilla king of La Reina Mauro Robles came to America with an immigrant's dreams of success in his new country. Today, 36 years later, the man from Teul de Gonzales is president of the largest manufacturer of flour tortillas in the world.

Mauro Robles had a favorite way of joking with his future wife in the 1950s.

"Some day I"m going to be so successful you'll need an appointment to see me," Robles would say.

Ricardo Robles, Mauro's son, says his mother thought the joke was especially funny because his father had just emigrated from Mexico and was eking out a living making tortillas.

Estela Robles doesn't need an appointment to see her husband, but an appointment is probably a good idea for just about anyone else because Mauro Robles, a native of a small town in Mexico who emigrated to Los Angeles in 1952, has a busy schedule as president of La Reina Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of flour tortillas and the second-largest minority-owned business in Los Angeles County.

The company that Robles dreamed of founding in those days has evolved into a manufacturer of tortillas and other Mexican foods that today has six locations and 710 employees. It will close 1988 with revenues of $52 million from sales of tortillas and related products to major restaurant chains and thousands of small markets throughout Southern California. The privately held company does not disclose profits.

Robles has expanded even beyond the bounds of his original vision. Among La Reina's holdings today are Monterey Park-based West-Bag Inc., a manufacturer of plastic bags used in packaging La Reina's products and those of other Mexican food companies; La Reina-Robles Bros. Inc., a maker of corn and flour tortillas in San Jose; Anita's Mexican Foods Corp., a maker of tortillas and other Mexican foods in San Bernardino; Queen International Foods Inc. in Monterey Park, the frozen foods producer; and La Colonial Mexican Foods, a Monterey Park tortilla maker that La Reina recently bought.

An example of how Robles has parlayed his tortilla-making business into a far-flung enterprise is Queen International Foods Inc., which produces frozen foods sold under a variety of labels. One of those for whom Queen International produces frozen foods is Spago restaurant celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck, for whom the company makes Puck's frozen pizza.

Robles, 65, says it all became possible because of the company's basic business, manufacturing tortillas. And to understand how his tortilla factory became possible, he says, one must understand something of the history of tortilla-making.

When he came to Los Angeles 35 years ago, Robles explains, most Mexican markets and restaurants made their own tortillas. They made them by hand in a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, but there was no alternative because large-scale tortilla manufacturing had not yet evolved.

Robles saw the potential in centralized tortilla-making's cost savings. If he could supply them with all the tortillas they needed, he reasoned, they would gladly buy tortillas from him and stop making their own.

About this time, Robles says, a machine called the "union rounder" was invented that speeded up the tortilla-making process. It still required relatively large number of workers, but it was one of the first steps in automating the process.

By specializing in tortilla manufacturing and centralizing operations, Robles says, he was able to sell tortillas to the markets and restaurants cheaper than they could manufacture them themselves.

The company also expanded by selling to other Mexican food manufacturers and by making tortillas for sale under other brand names, an arrangement called "co-packing."

Another reason for his company's growth, Robles says, was the growth of Mexican fast-food chains like Naugles, Del Taco and others that have provided a ready market for La Reina products.

Robles says the growth of the Hispanic population of Los Angeles contributed to some extent to his success, but he says Hispanic population growth played a smaller role than other factors.

For example, he says, the acceptance of Mexican food by Anglos and other ethnic groups, and the spread of Mexican restaurants to other parts of the country both contributed to the company's expansion. La Reina now sells its products in 44 states and also has customers in a number of foreign countries, including England.

Ultimately, Robles' dream evolved into the automated system in place today at La Reina's 65,000-square-foot factory in an unincorporated portion of Los Angeles County near Monterey Park. The La Reina factory employs 300 of the 710 workers employed by the six companies Robles owns.

Men and women in white uniforms tend huge ovens and tortilla-rolling machines that turn out 2.4 million tortillas a day at the La Reina location, which operates 21 hours a day, six days a week.

The combined La Reina operations, which include three other tortilla-making locations, produce up to 4.6 million tortillas per day. Morales says the company is without question the world's biggest maker of flour tortillas.

Although most major supermarket chains now carry tortillas, Robles says his company grew more by selling to "mom and pop" markets and restaurants.

Supermarkets didn't start selling tortillas until the 1960s, he says, and even today many small markets sell far more tortillas than supermarkets do. It's not unusual for a mom and pop market to sell 500 or 1,000 packages of tortillas daily, a dozen tortillas to a package.

One reason his company prospered, Robles says, is that he refused to reduce quality.

At one point in the early years, he explains, some competitors began reducing the weight of their tortillas as a way of reducing the price. But they did this by cutting back on the amount of flour and other ingredients, which he says reduced the quality.

Such changes can make a big difference in quality, he explains, because tortillas differ greatly when ingredients are changed. They can be soft and chewy, stiff and chewy or not so chewy, depending on ingredients and how the dough is handled. They can taste good or not so good, depending on the type of flour used.

Farshid Dini, quality control director for Foodmaker, the company that owns Jack-In-The-Box restaurants, says one of the biggest concerns for large fast-food operations is finding suppliers who can deliver the same product every day, reliably and consistently.

His company chose La Reina when it needed a tortilla supplier, Dini says, because "Tortillas are not all the same...The machinery, the flour, the recipe can all make a difference."

A native of Teul de Gonzales, a small town in the south of Mexico, Robles says he has no plans to retire. But he plays golf three days a week, starting out early in the morning so he can still be in the office by 10:30 a.m. His schedule has changed since the early years, when he often worked 14 hours a day.

"We would make tortillas from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m.," Robles recalls. "Then we would begin delivering them at 6 a.m." and work into the afternoon.

Morales says Robles still keeps on top of everything going on in the company, partly by virtue of a seemingly unfailing memory.

"He'll come in and mention four or five things that he wants each of us to get done by the end of the day," Morales says. "He remembers everything that he tells everybody, and he'll ask about each one before the end of the day."

Asked when he began his business, Robles says without hesitation, "May 4, 1958." That's when Robles and his three brothers -- Alfonso, Daniel and Alberto -- opened a tortilleria (tortilla factory) at Sixth and Indiana streets in East Los Angeles. The company remains very much a family operation, with all of the brothers and numerous other family members involved in all phases of the operation.

The company recently began efforts to expand its sales at major supermarket chains, Robles says, and continues to look for ways to modernize and automate the tortilla manufacturing business. Currently, for example, it is having a custom-designed computer software program to aid in going after the supermarket business.

Robles says he pretty much pulled out of the supermarket business to concentrate on small markets and Mexican restaurants. But now, he says, he sees a lot of potential in the supermarkets.