‘She’s our hero’: Goya CEO says they made AOC ‘employee of the month’ after her boycott call BOOSTED their sales by 1,000%

Goya Foods president and CEO Bob Unanue revealed that the company declared Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “employee of the month” after she joined the chorus of Democrats calling for a boycott and their sales skyrocketed.

“I love her,” Unanue told podcast show host Michael Berry on Monday. “She was actually our employee of the month. I don’t know if you know about this, but when she boycotted us, our sales actually increased 1,000 percent. So, we gave her an honorary – we never were able to hand it to her – but she got employee of the month for bringing attention to Goya and our adobo.”

She’s our hero. She helped boost sales tremendously.

It was a case of life imitating Turning Point USA memes, when the company mockingly bestowed the title on the New York Democrat, along with celebrity Chrissy Teigen, over their calls to boycott the biggest US supplier of Hispanic food staples in response to its CEO’s praise for President Donald Trump.

“We’re all truly blessed at the same time to have a leader like President Trump, who is a builder,” Unanue said at the White House on July 9. This outraged some Democrats, who called for the company to be punished by consumers. 

“Make your shopping decisions accordingly,” tweeted activist Igor Volsky, only to get retweeted by Ocasio-Cortez with a quip that she was looking up “how to make your own adobo,” referring to a special marinade.

“It’s interesting that AOC was one of the first people to step in line to boycott Goya, to go against her own people, as supposedly a Puerto Rican woman, to go against people of her own Latin culture,” Unanue said Monday. 

Instead, the boycott backfired, as Goya kept its base of Hispanic-American customers while also attracting “so many new people” as a result of the publicity, the CEO said.

“To some extent, I can understand AOC. She’s young, she’s naïve, she doesn’t get it,” he added, referring to the young congresswoman’s commitment to socialism – before blasting her political mentor, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) as someone who “still doesn’t get” that “communism works until you run out of other people’s money to spend.”

Goya was founded in the 1930s by Unanue’s grandparents, who immigrated to the US from Spain.

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