The fourth year as catering entrepreneurs is running for Leandro López Padros, Mauricio Roldán, Mateo Kawaguchi and Franco Noseda.
They are 27, 21, 25 and 20 years old, and located in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They went to school together; they have been friends ever since.
For years, López Padros, Roldán, Kawaguchi and Noseda had tried to enter the job market in many ways. All four have Down’s syndrome.
Their teacher, whose name is also Leandro López, encouraged them to team up to form a business. They were already doing the cooking workshop at school. So the project became pizza catering –which means going to events and not just making the pizza, but serving it– called Los Perejiles.
When they started in July 2016 they made an event for 50 people. Soon the contracts began to multiply. After six months, they served their pizzas hundreds of kilometers away from Buenos Aires: in Salta, in the northwest region of Argentina; Bariloche, to the south, in Patagonia; and Pinamar, at the east, on the sea coast. By the end of the first year they had already served in 250 events
“My dream is to work on pizzas because I like it. It’s the only thing I like. I like to work so that many people hire us,” Leandro López Padros told The Guardian.
So it has been. Today Los Perejiles has 25 employees, the majority of them with Down syndrome.
They started at Leandro López’s house. As demand grew, they moved to a larger facility. They’ve catered birthdays, weddings, corporate parties. Having attended event of 600 people is already a landmark in their resume.
They diversified after a while: to pizzas and brusquettes they added empanadas, craft beer and bakery.
Pizza is still their main course, though. They bring their own oven to the parties. In three hours they prepare the pizzas and serve them.
“I see him happy, happy, with a chance for him that he wouldn’t have. And, well, it is a concrete possibility”, Marcela López, Leandro López Padros’ mother, tells The Guardian.
One of the four founding partners of Los Perejiles, Mateo Kawaguchi, also founded his own project, Amasando Prejuicios. With the support of Javier Labaké, director of the Association of Pizza Shop and Pie House Owners (Appyce in Spanish), they give free talks at different institutions about Kawaguchi’s experience while preparing a pizza, Belén Corvalán reports for Crónica.
In 2017, Mateo Kwaguchi, encouraged by Appyce -where he took a master baker’s course-, participated in the Pizza World Cup in Italy: he got the fourth place in the category of pizza in baking tray (in teglia), with a pizza made with red onion, mozzarella, parmigiano reggiano cheese, oregano and olive oil. Kawaguchi was not only the first person with capacities like his to participate in this championship, but he was also the first Argentinean to reach such a high level in the competition, according to Perfil. He competed against 700 other people.
The founding members of Los Perejiles also go to schools to talk about what they do and show it off with freshly made pizzas.