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At 2:45 pm, the produce warehouse at 1100 Cesar Chavez Avenue is a ghost town.
Twelve hours later, as the surrounding city sleeps under blankets
of fog, this place is so awake it seems to buzz. Workers push
into damp coolers to retrieve boxes of x, y, and z, then push
back to stack them atop the pallets already towering with
countless other boxes. As they weave through the maze they
dodge a forklift shuffling 800-pound bins of pumpkins and
a new shipment of apples that’s moving against the tide,
back toward the coolers. The noise of the shrink wrapper rips
the air like the smacking of giant lips.
When they began working at 10 last night, these people took
their time. But the pace has now quickened, as truck drivers
arrive to whisk the pallets out of San Francisco and onto
highways that fan across the West. By the time the sun rises,
the warehouse will be empty.
Standing in the hollow building you can see why people traditionally
hate distributors and other middlemen: they don’t actually
make things, they just move them. The service is vital—all
food must somehow travel from grower to consumer—but
at most warehouses, the only product is profit. At 1100 Cesar
Chavez Avenue, a.k.a. Veritable Vegetable, all that furious
work in the middle of the night actually produces something
tangible: change.
Bu Nygrens is the purchasing manager and second in charge
at Veritable Vegetable, the country’s original organic
produce distributor. Watching the late-night frenzy, she joked
to me, “We’re no different from other produce
companies—except we’re 80% women.”
Credit
it to the estrogen or not, there is a pervasive fairness
and generosity about Veritable. The highest-paid employees
carry titles no higher than “manager” and
earn no more than four times the company’s lowest
wage. |
That’s an anomaly in the gruff wholesaling business;
not an advantage per se, but another long-time employee insists
that it makes the place superior. “I can’t stand
the big wholesale produce market on Jerrold Avenue,”
she says. “Over there the guys are swearing and smoking
and just being nasty to each other, like ‘Hey, get the
****ing nectarines.’ It’s not like that here.
We’re nice to each other.”
Credit it to the estrogen or not, there is a pervasive fairness
and generosity about Veritable. The highest-paid employees
carry titles no higher than “manager” and earn
no more than four times the company’s lowest wage. In
order to uproot the stereotype that, as Bu puts it, “white,
well-educated people work in the office and brown, non-English
speaking people work in the warehouse,” they give all
the workers decision-making power and duly reward labors both
mental and physical.
Also unlike most distributors, at Veritable food is a noticeable
presence throughout the office. The salesroom has a cutting-board
table devoted to tastings of produce in stock. Four times
a week the night workers have dinner cooked for them, and
all employees are welcomed to join the makeshift, all-you-can-eat
food co-op in the back of Cooler A. If produce can’t
be sold from the warehouse it is given to the food bank; if
inedible, it’s composted.
What makes the whole thing work is the respect and attention
Veritable directs toward the growers who supply them. “We
believe in the partnership paradigm,” Bu explained to
me as we toured the warehouse. “Really, if the farmers
aren’t there next year then we’re gone, too. At
this point, we’re a cross between a for-profit business
and an advocacy group.”
They started out as neither. Mary Jane Evans, the current
general manager, explains that they began as a co-op seeking
to “seize the means of production.” Dealing with
farmers directly started for the same conceptual reason, yet
through it the young radicals were inadvertently educated
about how America’s agribusiness was strangling small
farmers. When Mary Jane arrived in 1976, the co-op itself
was folding but three members were continuing the produce
distribution for a simple reason: the commitment to keeping
their small farmers in business.
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Twenty seven years later, Veritable Vegetable buys from 300
growers, and sells over $22 million worth of food to its 300
customers each year. Alongside them has grown the industry,
whose supply is met increasingly by large growers and conglomerates
drawn to the market for its profits. While gross organic food
sales may have grown, family-size farms have actually lost
some of their direct wholesale market share. Among other reasons,
they can’t supply the mass quantities—say, 10
pallets of Romaine all at once—that major retailers
need.
That’s where Veritable comes in. They sell some to
places as big as Safeway, but mostly their customers are co-ops
and other independent retailers. With other distributors,
those small stores would buy the same anonymous organic produce
as everyone else and the big growers would end up with that
market share, too. With Veritable, the small farmers are able
to reclaim that market.
It’s possible because Veritable’s mission remains
that original commitment to farmers. When Bu toured me around
the warehouse, we came upon a stack of peaches in the carrot
cooler. Veritable had plenty of the same brand and variety
already, but because the farmer had needed space in his tiny
storeroom, they picked them up early.
What
makes the whole thing work is the respect and attention
Veritable directs toward the growers who supply them.
“We believe in the partnership paradigm,”
says purchasing manager Bu Nygrens. “Really, if
the farmers aren’t there next year then we’re
gone, too.” |
Around the corner, a man stood over a yellow garbage can
marked COMPOST. He was repacking some other cases of peaches,
eliminating the bruised ones. It’s hardly within the
middleman’s buy-low-sell-high strategy to cull the product,
but as Bu said, “Stores don’t have time to deal
with this. If we send them out unsorted, nobody will be happy.”
I asked whether the farmer who supplied the peaches would
pay, and she replied, “We’ll take this one as
a loss. If it’s really bad we’ll talk to the farmer.
They trust us.”
Joe Perry will vouch for that. He bought his first tractor
in 1949 and has sold at wholesale markets since he was 16
and trucking lettuce to the old Fisherman’s Wharf. He
has encountered buyers who accuse farmers of stealing, others
who buy too much then dump it off for painfully low prices;
still others who mean well but can’t stay in business.
“The people at Veritable are honest, though. They treat
you well,” Joe said over the phone from his farm in
Fremont. “Not only do they pick up the produce, they
check in to see when I’ll be ready and the truckers
call if they’re going to be late. And the buyers know
the market well. They never buy more than they can sell at
a good price. Small farmers have a hard time getting their
product out, but they make it easier.”
In addition to offering logistical help, Veritable educates
farmers about the market. When there rose a great demand for
green coconuts but no organic ones were available, Bu encouraged
her coconut grower to fill the niche. Every day Mary Jane
reminds farmers to calculate distribution costs into their
business plans—or create business plans to begin with—so
they won’t sell crops for less than they actually cost
to produce. Meanwhile, the buyers support growers as close
to home as possible; in mid-October, 90% of the stock came
from California.
And yet they still exist within an imperfect market, one
that separates availability from season, weather, and politics
as much as it can.
“The global market has had a big impact on buying habits,”
Bu said as we walked through the cooler that holds avocados
and citrus. “People used to get excited about the first
potatoes of the year, or the first stonefruit. Now people
expect them—everything—all the time.
“As
long as price trumps cost and quantity trumps quality,
the big players will dominate the market. Those are
big issues and I don’t pretend to know how to
solve them except in our small way.” |
“So we’re in a tricky position. Usually Washington
apples ripen later than California apples, but this year they
came sooner. If the customers are asking for Golden Delicious
and we can get them from up north, then what? Do we say no?”
Price, too, is a factor in the constant juggling of business
and beliefs. In early October, the tail end of the Santa Barbara
avocado season, pallets were already arriving from Chile.
Bu looked at the boxes sitting next to each other and sighed
heavily.
“Back when we weren’t such a frenetic society,
a retailer might say, ‘Yes, I could get that same cheaper
avocado that’s across the street, but taste this. Wouldn’t
you pay 20 cents more to have this in your salad?’”
But today the customers complained about prices and the retailers
obediently passed the wish on, demanding boxes of size 48
Hass avocados for $52, not $72.
Bu and Mary Jane and the rest of the heart behind Veritable
hope for a day when food prices are based in reality. They
talk often of nutrition and food miles, of incorporating social
values into prices, and of changing Americans’ opinion
of farming from anachronism to vital service. “As long
as price trumps cost and quantity trumps quality, the big
players will dominate the market,” Mary Jane told me.
“Those are big issues and I don’t pretend to know
how to solve them except in our small way.”
That way is to keep individual identities present in the
wholesale exchange. Veritable buys small amounts from growers
so they can represent many at a time. Each item on their quote
sheets comes with the name of the farm that grew it, sometimes
even an extra call for attention. On October 2nd, Molino Creek’s
Early Girl tomatoes came with the note: “dry farmed
goodness, so amazing”.
Likewise, the newsletter they send to retailers is gently
educational. On February 24, they wrote: “Supplies of
asparagus from the Imperial Valley are strong. Our local supply
from the Capay Valley and the Sacramento Delta region is still
three weeks away.” Last December they profiled Ferris
Family Farm, which sells them ginger. From it readers learned
that the farm is on the north side of Kauai, in Hawaii, that
the Ferrises have seven children and two acres of ginger,
and that all nine family members harvest by hand the young
rhizomes that Veritable was selling that day.
The idea is that the more buyers read these bits of information,
the more they will understand the breadth and power of their
choices. Perhaps the next time one buys ginger he will recognize
the Ferris name or wonder if there are actual people behind
the product listed with a lower price. Perhaps when his customers
are ready for asparagus season, he will wonder when it actually
starts in the land closest to him. Better yet, perhaps he
will be that grocer who takes the time to pass the knowledge
on. Perhaps he will become the one who convinces his customer
she must try the silky texture of this superior avocado, and
tell him that it isn’t worth an extra 20 cents. 
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