When Culture Becomes Part of Wellness: What Brands Can Learn from Hispanic-Inspired Businesses 

A tortilla recipe. A curl routine. The scent of familiar ingredients. A Saturday morning breakfast, followed by running errands, while surrounded by people who share familiar references, experiences, and traditions.

At first, these may not immediately sound like “wellness.” Yet each can carry something that matters deeply to well-being: familiarity, identity, connection, and belonging.

That is part of what makes Hispanic-inspired businesses interesting to study. All these cultural colors and textures make understanding and embracing Hispanic consumers’ perspectives a strategy mandate.

Across food, beauty, personal care, and fitness, brands and communities such as Siete Foods, Rizos Curls, Nopalera, and Latinas Run are proof that culture can shape much more than marketing. It influences how people nourish themselves, care for their bodies, express identity, connect with others, and make wellness fit more naturally into everyday life.

Their stories also reveal something broader about wellness: sometimes progress comes from changing a behavior, and sometimes it comes from finding a way to change without giving up cultural identity.

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Wellness often asks people to make changes, whether that means eating differently, adjusting a routine, or finding new ways to care for the body. But change rarely happens on a blank slate. People bring traditions, routines, and personal definitions of well-being with them.

When Siete Foods co-founder, Veronica Garza, changed her diet while navigating health challenges, some of the Mexican-American foods she longed for became harder to eat. Her family supported the changes, but replacing a tortilla with a lettuce leaf altered something familiar about the meal.

Creating a grain-free tortilla the whole family could eat together without giving up the essence of her family’s culinary tradition turned mission into a multi-billion dollar business. That recipe eventually became the first product behind Siete Foods. The functional need was dietary, but the experience being preserved was participation in the family meal and in cultural tradition.

Rizos Curls’ founder, Julissa Prado, has spoken about spending years straightening her naturally curly hair before eventually learning to embrace her texture. Unable to find products that worked for her curls, she began creating her own. The company that followed was built around what Rizos Curls calls “Curls, Community and Culture.”

In both cases, the opportunity emerged from a tension between change and continuity. One person needed a new way to eat without losing a familiar food experience; another needed products that supported a different relationship with her natural hair. Both show how wellness can touch physical needs while also shaping confidence, identity, and connection.

For brands, that raises a useful profound question: when consumers are faced with making a change, what do they still want to hold onto? Understanding what people want to preserve can reveal opportunities that are easy to miss when marketing and branding focuses only on the change itself.

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Some cultural connections are easy to recognize. Others show up in smaller, more personal ways: a scent, ingredient, texture, flavor, phrase, or routine that feels familiar before someone has fully explained why. Within wellness, those details can make an experience feel more comforting or connected to a person’s sense of self.

Nopalera builds around that kind of connection, making Mexican heritage central to its body-care and fragrance experiences through nopal cactus and Mexican-inspired scents. Siete Foods draws on Mexican-American foods and flavors associated with home, family, and childhood, while Rizos Curls connects haircare with family practices, cultural expectations, and the decision to embrace natural texture.

Across all three, the product matters, but so does what the product stands for and brings to mind—a familiar flavor, scent, or routine can carry memory, comfort, confidence, or a sense of home.

Those meanings are difficult to capture through a simple list of preferred features. Open-ended human and culture-centric conversations, sensory exploration, and observation can help reveal connections consumers may not initially describe as cultural, or even as wellness-related.

For brands in wellness spaces, those connections can help explain why certain products become part of a routine while others do not. Function matters, but familiarity, identity, and emotional connection can also shape whether an experience feels worth returning to. And let’s be honest, there’s a certain sense of cultural pride and joy that can also amplify the appeal of a brand and its products.

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Wellness also depends on whether people feel comfortable participating. Someone can understand the benefits of an activity and still feel that the surrounding environment was not created with them in mind, or worse, like they have been intentionally left out.

Latinas Run was created as a space where Latina women could connect through running and fitness. The organization combines movement and community, welcoming people of all experience levels. The wellness activity is running; the surrounding experience can make it easier to enter and to return.

Siete’s story reflects family adapting together, while Rizos Curls and Nopalera show how culture can make self-care feel more personally relevant. The categories differ, but the underlying idea is similar.

For brands, that widens the research lens. Instead of asking only what motivates someone to adopt a behavior, research can also examine the environment around it:

• Who else participates?
• What makes the experience feel comfortable and relevant?
• Which relationships make a new habit easier to sustain?
• How do culture and community shape the wellness experience?

Sometimes the answer will be about product performance. Sometimes it will be about family or community. For Hispanics, those factors often work together.

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Looking across Siete Foods, Rizos Curls, Nopalera, and Latinas Run, culture shapes how someone adapts a familiar food, embraces natural hair, practices self-care, or finds community through movement. Together, these examples reflect a broader definition of wellness that includes nourishment, confidence, identity, and belonging.

What connects them is not a shared aesthetic or a single definition of Hispanic wellness. Culture is the connecting tissue.

For food, that may be the meaning attached to a family meal. In beauty, it may be the relationship between appearance and confidence. In fitness, it may be the social environment that makes participation feel welcoming.

There will never be one answer. Hispanic consumers differ across country of origin, generation, language, life experience, and connection to culture. A reference that feels deeply familiar to one person may mean very little to another.

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For brands, these businesses offer a useful reminder: some of the most valuable insights don’t always lie within the product. As great as they may be, functional benefits can miss the people, memories, environments, and identities surrounding a wellness behavior or decision.

Questions worth exploring include:

• What is someone trying to preserve while making a health or wellness change?
• What makes an experience feel familiar, comfortable, or relevant?
• Where does identity enter the decision?
• Who makes participation easier or more meaningful?
• How do culture and community shape what wellness looks and feels like in everyday life?

Those questions can lead brands toward products, experiences, and communications grounded in a deeper understanding of how people actually live and how wellness fits within those lives. Throughout Hispanic Heritage Month, Unidos Through Wellness will continue exploring how culture can influence physical, emotional, and mental well-being, including how the foods people keep at the table, the ways they express identity, and the communities around them can shape the wellness experience.

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