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The Texas Rangers were the first team in professional sports to sell ballpark nachos, and the original pitch from the man later known as “The King of Nachos” wasn’t an easy sell.
The idea took shape in 1976, when Frank Liberto, founder of Ricos Products, saw an opportunity. Nachos themselves had been around since 1943, when Ignacio Anaya improvised the dish just across the border in Mexico. By the 1960s and 70s, nachos were popular in Texas restaurants and fairs, but the traditional process took 10–15 minutes to prepare, far too slow for stadium concessions. Liberto believed the snack could work at scale, if it was completely rebuilt for speed. He brought that vision to the Rangers at Arlington Stadium.
The Rangers were hesitant. Nachos weren’t proven. Team officials worried the unfamiliar food would cut into hot dog and popcorn sales, slow concession lines, and disrupt a system built on efficiency and predictability. Still, they struck a cautious agreement. Liberto could sell nachos only from separate carts, had to build and operate them himself, and would take on all the financial risk. One more key condition: jalapeños would be included on every order, not optional. The logic was simple: spicy food makes fans thirsty, and thirsty fans buy more beer and soda.
Liberto responded by reinventing nachos for stadium scale. He developed a pourable, shelf-stable cheese sauce that could be heated quickly and served instantly, no baking, no plates, no waiting. What the Rangers feared would hurt concessions ended up expanding the entire concession economy.
The impact was immediate. In the first season, Rangers fans bought nachos at a rate of roughly one order for every 2.5 fans, generating around $800,000 in revenue. Popcorn. once the king of ballpark snacks, was purchased by only one in 14 fans. By 1979, the Rangers sold approximately 531,000 orders of nachos in a single season, compared to just 92,000 orders of popcorn. Nachos didn’t just catch on, they dominated.
After the success at Arlington Stadium, nachos were popularized nationally. Word spread to other teams, and a mention by broadcaster Howard Cosell on Monday Night Football in the late 1970s helped accelerate their rise beyond baseball. Within a few years, what started as a cautious experiment in Arlington became a stadium staple across the country.
The cheese sauce created for those first Rangers carts became the foundation of Ricos Products, launching a concession empire. The company is headquartered in San Antonio, but still operates a manufacturing facility in the city where its famous nacho sauce was born.
Today, Ricos products are featured in 100+ stadiums nationwide, appear in roughly 60% of U.S. movie theaters, and generate over $150 million in annual revenue.
All because the Rangers took a hesitant chance, and became the first team to prove nachos belonged in the ballpark🧀⚾️
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