Roberto Rodriguez always believed he had a head for business. So when it came time for his father to pass on the reins of his grocery store in 1990, he jumped at the chance.

“It was a small store back (in 1976, when it opened), with a good clientele,” he recalled. Today, El Cubano Food Bag Market is actually two large stores in North Hollywood, generating a combined annual revenues of $25 million.

The original El Cubano, at Victory Boulevard and Tujunga Avenue, celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, allowing Rodriguez the opportunity to wax nostalgic.

“My father (whose name was also Roberto) always had a good sense for business and knew what he wanted,” said Rodriguez, whose wife, son and four daughters now handle aspects of the family business.

The elder Rodriguez’s dream was to open his own grocery store when he and his family arrived here from Cuba in 1962. But it would take until 1976 to finally establish the Food Bag Market, later dubbed El Cubano Food Bag Market.

Borrowed $23,000

Having run a small store with modest success in the 1960s, Rodgriguez’s father, Roberto P. Rodriguez, was able to borrow $23,000 and buy the market, then about half the size of a chain-store operation. “He wanted to start a bigger store that would serve the whole neighborhood,” Rodriguez said.

Sales that first year were about $300,000, but with high food costs, steep overhead and the industry’s notoriously low profit margins, the family made just enough to keep the business running. “We had everybody working back then, my uncle, my dad, my mom. Everyone had to help,” Rodriguez said.

Ran bakery in homeland

The market was miles and years removed from their native Cuba, where the family ran a small, neighborhood bakery. Rodriguez, his father, aunts and uncles left the island to escape Cuba’s economic chaos.

“Grandpa really wanted to get back into the grocery business,” said Alex Rodriguez, Roberto Rodriguez’s son, who is now general manager of the company’s two stores.

By the time the younger Roberto Rodriguez took over in 1990, annual revenues amounted to $12 million. But success did not come easily. There were battles with city officials and complaints from neighbors who first opposed the widening of the market’s parking lot and, later, the removal of a fence to expand the business. “It was always one or two people who complained,” he said.

He would later endure what he called a five-year battle with the city’s planning commission in an effort to rezone a corner lot he had acquired at Sherman Way and Tujunga Avenue, the eventual site of the family’s second market. “If I had to do it again, I don’t know if I would,” Roberto Rodriguez said.

Keeping the vision

Since his father’s death in 1993, Roberto Rodriguez, now 58, still tries to maintain his father’s vision: provide quality products to an often homesick Latino market. Averaging a 1 to 3 percent profit margin, standard for the industry, Roberto said he’s pleased with the company’s growth.

Even more so since the opening of the second El Cubano Food Bag market in 1996. “We knew we needed another market when the parking lot at the first market was completely full all the time,” he said.