Startup Launches Plant-Based "Chili Leather"
Desserto’s last expansion beyond cactus came with a supply story attached. Its agave material upcycles waste collected from tequila factories, a crop the company is explicit about not growing itself, unlike the nopal it farms for its flagship line. The guajillo chile material it presented on September 14 came with a cultural story instead.
Desserto, the Mexican bio-based materials brand developed by Adriano Di Marti, announced what it calls a new material exploration built from guajillo chile, timed to Mexico’s independence month. The company says its development process preserves the chile’s own visual characteristics, including its natural color, reddish tones, and texture. It frames the work as part of a wider move into other plant raw materials meant to connect agriculture, design, technology, and circular economy.
The input stays visible
Desserto’s cactus material is sold as fully customizable, pitched on performance across a wide variety of applications. The chile material runs the other way. Desserto is keeping the guajillo’s red in the finished surface instead of processing the feedstock into a neutral base and coloring it afterward. The material’s appearance becomes a function of what went into it, which narrows the design options and puts the sourcing story on the surface of the product.
What the announcement leaves out
Exploration is the word Desserto uses throughout, and the release carries no composition breakdown, no bio-based percentage, no named brand partners, and no commercial availability. It also carries no sourcing detail. Guajillo is the dried form of the mirasol chile, and the crop has a substantial industrial base. Zacatecas ranks first in the country in area planted for dried chile, and a 2023 study in Agricultura, Sociedad y Desarrollo found 80% of 66 surveyed producers in the state growing the guajillo variety. Whether this material draws on that harvest, on processing waste from it, or on something else is the question the announcement does not answer. A brand wanting to evaluate it has Desserto’s general contact and materials pages and nothing chile-specific.
The agave precedent sets a realistic ceiling. Three years on, that material has its own registered mark and its own website, and the company still describes it as a limited edition. The thing to watch with guajillo chile is whether a supply chain shows up behind it, because that is what would move it out of the same category.
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