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Texas Trey Rides Again! 🤠 🌶️

Texas Trey Rides Again! 🤠 🌶️

Winchester Wire #012: The return of Texas Trey, July 4th celebrations and more.

Winchester Wire
July 02, 2025

Texas Trey Rides Again!

From a turkey fryer on a back porch to becoming Wegmans’ #1 tortilla chip, Trey Johnston (aka Texas Trey) was destined for greatness. Then came the crash and the dreams dissolved…but you can’t keep good chips down. Now, with new investors and a new factory nearing completion, the beloved “Salsa Shovels” that are made right here in Winchester are making their triumphant return this August.

We sat down with Texas Trey to hear the full story of creativity, grit, failure and the sweet taste of a second chance.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Winchester Wire: How did this whole journey get started?

I moved up here in 2006 and I just missed good chips and salsa. We started making fresh salsa in 2012.

WW: Where are you originally from, and how did that influence your love of food?

East Texas. It's kind of a weird journey. Believe it or not, I really wasn't into cooking or anything like that. I've always loved Tex Mex, and then, somewhere around the age of 24 or 25, I started watching Food Network. And then I started messing around with stuff like soups and chilis and things like that. And then that just sort of generated a love for—I think it was a creative outlet for me. So I just started tinkering around. And it was just for fun. Not to say I was really good at it, but eventually I started winning some chili contests, and then I just fell in love with trying new things.

WW: What was the adjustment like when you moved to Virginia?

When I moved up here, it was a culture shock, because I could get cuisines from all over the world within a 20-mile radius. So, it just enhanced that love for food. And I got married, we moved out to Boyce, and I missed chips and salsa in the summertime. Since I grew up on a farm, we grew vegetables and gardening and all of that. And so we missed fresh salsa, and I was like, well, I'll just make it myself. I know how to grow tomatoes and onions and peppers, and I'll buy whatever else I need, cilantro, limes.

WW: How did you go from making it at home to actually selling it?

For birthday parties, New Year's Eve parties, whatever it was in our house, I always had salsa. People kept saying, “You should sell this.” Eventually, my wife and I met Billy Eyles, who was a local in Boyce.

WW: Yeah, he had the farm stand out in Boyce, right?

Yeah. We were chatting him up, and my wife mentioned, “Yeah. Everybody keeps telling my husband he should sell his salsa.” And I was like, “You know, you have to get a kitchen and inspections and all this money.” And he told us, “No, you don’t. You can just come up with your recipe. If you have a printer, you can print labels, and you get the Department of Agriculture to come to your house, inspect your kitchen, and you can start selling it.” And so that’s what we did. After about a year or so, we started selling to farmers markets.

I stopped at Gilbert’s Corner farm market where there was a really good barbecue guy there, he’s been there for years. And he was the only one there, early one morning. I was asking him how to get into the market, and I asked him if he wanted to try the salsa. So I went to my car, I got the salsa out, grabbed a bag of Tostitos and as soon as he saw me walking back he was like, “Man, you can’t bring me fresh salsa and you don’t have your own chips!” And I was like “That’s not what I do, I do fresh salsa. I don’t have chips.”

So he tried it, he’s like, “That’s really good salsa.” As I was walking away, he goes, “But you gotta do your own chips!”

WW: That sounded like a challenge.

It bothered me a little bit. It's almost like a challenge. It's not what I do, but it's also a kind of a challenge, yes. And then two weeks later I was thinking about it, I'm like, he's right. I should just have my own chips.

WW: How did you land on the chip recipe?

I started with some chips that were just regular chips, and after a while that bugged me. I'm like, I can't sell regular chips for $6 a bag when they could just buy the same thing in the store. So I really started trying to find something different. My wife and I—I got her to try so many batches of different chips. One day I fried some up and I'm like, “This is it. This is so different.” I came up with the name Salsa Shovels because they're so sturdy. They're big, thick and crunchy.

WW: How’d you get them into stores?

It's a long story, but my wife worked at Leesburg Cardinal Park Dental, and she was talking about getting our product into a place like Wegmans or Giant. It just so happened that the guy who opened up all of the Wegmans stores in Virginia—I believe his name was Bob Farr—overheard the conversation. He said, "Well, you know, if you want, we can try to get you in there.” So he told us to send a bunch of samples to the Leesburg location, and he would meet with the manager there and the product buyer. He said they would try it, and if they thought they could sell it, then they would give us a shot. That's exactly what they did.

We got into that Wegmans, and then eventually, after a few years, we got into the Ashburn Wegmans. I didn't realize we were number one in profits generated out of 200 tortilla chip and snack food products until I got a call from the corporate office. The caller said, "Hey, I'm the buyer for all the Wegmans stores for this category. Can we get some samples of your chips?"

So I sent them samples and they were like, “These are great!” And they're like, “We'd like to order 14 pallets for all 14 Virginia stores.”

WW: That’s a lot!

They wanted the display palettes, and we couldn't make that. By that time we graduated from a turkey fryer on our back porch to counter top fryer to a concession trailer and then a rental kitchen. But we still could not produce (the 14 pallets). So we set out to find a co-packer. I went through 14 co-packers. Found one that made the chip, but they were so inconsistent that right before I placed the order for a whole tractor trailer load… I was like, “I need you to send me one more batch, just to show consistency.”

They sent me boxes of them and it was a totally different chip. So they hadn't actually documented and filed the specific recipe and fry times and all of that. Since they couldn't do it consistently, and we couldn't risk ordering 14 pallets of…not Texas Trey chips. So then we tried to find last minute, 11th Hour, investors. We just didn't have the connections to those kind of people. I didn't want to give away 98% of the company to Shark Tank or something. We’re making no money, and we knew that we had to flip tractor trailer loads in order to make money wholesale. So, so we liquidated and just admitted failure.

WW: That must have been devastating. How did you get back into the business?

Two months later I get a call from one of the owners of a brewery and he tells me a guy's here with his wife and they're wondering, “Where are the chips?” They come there for the nachos, they buy bags of chips when they leave. I'm like, “Yeah, you can give them my info, and they can contact me if they want.” We got in touch, and he's like, “These chips are too good for to go away forever. We should restart, do a reboot.” So we went back and forth with numbers and all kinds of stuff for a few months. And then him, his family, another guy and his friends and family invested. We’ve built this factory, it's almost complete. We have a packaging machine that will auto bag everything, a form fill seal system coming. Now we're just waiting to produce. We've got all of our previous customers that want to carry the product. Wegmans has a new buyer and it's getting difficult trying to get traction on that, but hopefully we'll do that and and then we'll be back in business. But that's the story.

WW: So now that you’re back up and running, what’s the goal? Are there any other directions you’re considering?

I'm constantly distracted with where I want to go because…I think it's great to have a factory and do the wholesale, but I think the Texas Trey brand, which is built around creativity and family and good times and good food…I just think there's a huge market for restaurant space or a destination/event space. We have so many products that we're not doing now that we have done that were big, like guacamole and salsa and queso. We did really good when we had a food trailer with quesadillas and fajita platters and all of that. So there's ways to go. But the goal is to build it as big as we can build it and have a blast along the way. Yeah, it's a lot of fun.

WW: Anything else you’d like to mention for the record?

Yes. There were a lot of ups and downs along the way and there’s no way we’d be where we are today without the strength of my wife, Heather. She’s always been positive, she’s always been in my corner and she put her heart and soul into this business alongside me. All of our successes, we get to enjoy them together.