How This Business Stands To Gain From Spain’s World Cup Win

On July 19, 2026, Spain beat Argentina one to zero in extra time. This was Spain’s second World Cup title. When it happened sixteen years ago, at least one business noticed a change.

“Spain became fashionable,” says Cristina Llerandi, owner of Delicias Import LLC in Miami. She remembers exactly what the 2010 title did for her business: suddenly, ordinary U.S. consumers who had never given Spanish food a second thought wanted to know what many of traditional foods tasted like.

From A Family Restaurant To An Import House

It’s around three decades of a family business absorbing a financial crisis and a pandemic. A war on the other side of Europe and scrambled global shipping.

Delicias Import LLC didn’t start as an import company. During the late 1990s, Llerandi’s parents opened a small restaurant and grocery store called Delicias de España in the corner of Bird Road and 57th Avenue.

The products on sale at the store and the demand of traditional Spanish meals grew as needs developed. It was really small at first. There were very few products from Spain in Miami or in Florida, for that matter. Only a handful of scattered outposts served the community. One important brand was Cinco Jotas, a local classic for many and that, interestingly, it once stood on the site now occupied by Delicias de España II.

There was also a big Spanish ceramic store in a strip mall that has since closed, and an importer of goods called R&M. Beyond that, there wasn’t much besides maybe a tin of Cola-Cao or some Spanish cookies in a supermarket.

Jamón itself took years to arrive in any real volume. Llerandi remembers spending a lot of time in the early days explaining to curious customers what it even was: “This is not prosciutto, it is jamón serrano.” She reckons they still have to do it a lot.

The Business Of Spanish Goods In South Florida

The need to bring authentic Spanish products grew slowly and almost accidentally. The first products were canned tuna and sardines, olives, some figurines, and some ceramics. They coordinated one shipment, just enough for their own store. They also occasionally split shipments with other businesses in the city: “I bring this, you bring that.” Llerandi tells me.

Delicias Import became a separate corporation by around 2004. They did that part of the business, but they were not an independent business before that. The first time the company brought in a full ocean container rather than a shared pallet occurred around 2009. By 2011, Delicias Import was freighting at least four full containers.

It’s a detail that Llerandi delivers almost as an aside, but the timing lines up with the same year Spain lifted its first World Cup trophy.

Ask Llerandi what’s actually hard about running an import business today and the answer has almost nothing to do with cuisine and everything to do with regulatory compliance, geopolitics, and climate.

Since 2010, the single biggest structural shift, she says, came from the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), and specifically its Foreign Supplier Verification Program (FSVP). The law shifted legal responsibility for food safety onto the importer. Delicias Import doesn’t manufacture or even physically handle most of what it distributes. However, they are the responsible entity for keeping safety protocols to meet labeling U.S. standards.

The labeling requirements alone can derail a shipment. Spanish nutrition labels list values per 100 grams and identify additives by their European “E numbers.” American labels require a defined serving size and named ingredients, not codes. Llerandi remembers one supplier in northern Spain arguing with her that serving size of anchovies was so subjective. “How could there be a single correct number?”, the supplier complained.

Her answer, essentially: it doesn’t matter which number you pick, you just have to pick one and label consistently around it.

But she understands. For a small producer, meeting the standards could be an expense that isn’t always worth it for the volume Delicias Import can commit to.

Everyone wants to export, but not everyone is ready to.

Then there are disruptions nobody could plan a label around.

COVID-19 shut down Delicias Import’s restaurant customers overnight, and some never reopened. Almost as quickly, online retail demand surged, and consumer behavior flipped in ways that caught Llerandi off guard. Sales of large-format items like whole hams, wheels of cheese, and big cuts of meat slowed, while chocolate and cookies took off. “People developed that sweet tooth during the pandemic,” she mentions laughingly.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the shock arrived at Delicias Import’s warehouse indirectly. Some of the glass used to bottle Spanish olive oil, and other raw materials Spanish manufacturers relied on, had been sourced from Ukraine. Suppliers scrambled to rebuild their packaging supply chains from scratch.

And climate, yes, this one is also becoming more impactful. Recurring droughts, wildfires, and torrential rains in Spain have periodically wiped out harvests of specific crops.

Asparagus were a recent example.

A very recent gut check was tariffs. When talk began of duties as high as 35% on European goods in 2025, she was at the Salón Gourmet trade show in Madrid, surrounded by fellow importers and Spanish producers who were, in her words, “terrified.”

Even conflicts with no direct bearing on her shipping lanes, like the US-Iran current war, ripple through global freight capacity and pricing in ways her longtime freight forwarder has learned to warn her about in advance.

Uncertainty Is Where Is At

The company creates its Christmas catalog and places holiday orders as early as May, committing to prices for customers months before the goods clear customs and months before anyone knows what tariff rate will actually apply by the time they land.

Import duties must be paid upfront, regardless of whether the product has sold. Heat waves in Southern Europe remain a serious threat and are likely to continue. Beyond that, almost anything can happen: fishing yields in the Atlantic may decline, or wars may continue to disrupt global shipping, affecting everyone along the supply chain.

The company now runs a fleet of four delivery vehicles and occupies three interconnected, climate-controlled warehouse units. The business has not ceased to grow and adapt to uncertain times.

Llerandi doesn’t know yet what a second World Cup title will do for Delicias Import’s numbers the way we can point to what the first one did in 2010. Spain’s World Cup victory sixteen years ago may have been one serendipitous factor in putting the country and its products on the map.

Having been “the bigest World Cup ever,” the Spain – Argentina final in New York will surely have some impact as well.