Conversations with Bailey Spears & Frank Covarrubias

Today we’d like to introduce you to Bailey Spears & Frank Covarrubias

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
We started as two strangers in a business development course offered to aspiring food entrepreneurs by Thrive Consultancy, Inc. and the City of Phoenix in 2022. Throughout the 6-week course, we realized our common values like sustainability and social equity, our interests in cooking and food from the desert, and goal to build a business based on the worker-owned cooperative model. With a few thousand dollars in seed funding we received from the course, we officially launched JUNTOS as a pop-up restaurant in June 2023. Since then, we’ve been popping up a couple times a month at markets, restaurants & bars, and events around the Valley.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
One of our biggest, most consistent challenges is finding balance between our menu prices and sourcing practices. We have intentional sourcing practices prioritizing local sources of origin, vendor locality and ownership, environmental impacts, and workers’ rights on top of price and quality. Because the current food system is dominated by conglomerates that don’t prioritize all of these factors, food produced with such value standards is often harder to come by and costs more to produce. This reality results in a premium price for the goods we source, and we have to recoup those prices somewhere. At the same time, it’s important to us that our food is accessible and affordable. The challenge we then face is how to uphold our values and meet our sourcing goals while pricing our menu so that people with various budgets can enjoy it.

To be honest, we don’t yet have a clear answer to that question. There are a few strategies we implement when it comes to pricing our menu that help, but at the same time, we have to accept that we can’t always meet all of our conditions and that trade-offs have to be made.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
JUNTOS stands out from other pop-ups and restaurants by putting local and heirloom foods at the forefront of our dishes. We focus on these ingredients not only because they taste good and give customers a sense of Arizona but also because it’s a way for us to promote agricultural biodiversity and cultural preservation in our food system. We specialize in the use of foods from Arizona, like tepary beans from Ramona Farms, nopales from TJ Farms, i’itoi onions from Coldwater Urban Farm, and grass-fed steak from Moon River Beef. We’re proud to say that in 2024, around 90% of the fresh produce and meat we used on our menus was grown and raised in-state.

We’re also proud of our community and educational work, which is another thing that sets us apart from similar establishments in the industry. In October 2024, with a grant from the City of Phoenix, we held a series of free workshops for residents of affordable housing that talked about local foods, demonstrated how to cook with them, and gave participants a chance to taste them through a 4-course meal. We also recently started hosting movie nights at the Coldwater Coffeehouse and Bakery, where we screen food-related documentaries.

Is there something surprising that you feel even people who know you might not know about?
One of the first things that we connected over was skateboarding. We even skate together sometimes, and Bailey, (who is still a beginner) is happy to have Frank (who’s been skating much longer) teach her a thing or two.

Pricing:

• Tacos: $3 – $5
• Gorditas: $7 – $12
• Huarache: $6 – $9
• Tostadas: $4 – $7
• Soups (e.g. pozole, fideo): $8 – $12

Contact Info:

• Website: https://juntosphx.wixsite.com/juntos
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/juntosphx/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/juntosphx
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/juntosphx

Image Credits
Erik Doose