Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast.
I'm Jill Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Tracy, I just want to start this episode by thanking you for those tomatoes you brought me the other day.
How many tomato references are we going to make it in our episodes going forward? How long can we stretch this out?
I don't know, something hit me when, like in my mid thirties. You know, it's like when you're a kid, the whole excitement of summer is like not being in school, and then you get a little older and the whole fun of summer is I don't know, like travelering or partying or something. And then something hit me in my late mid thirties or late thirties where it's like the best part of summer is like really fresh tomatoes.
I don't know if that's really sad or great that the thing we look forward to in our old age is fresh tomatoes. But I'm glad I could do that for you, Joe.
Yeah. So for listeners who don't know, Tracy hits a garden and she posted some tomato pictures and I was like, I need some. So Tracey brought some Anyway, they're the best produce I've had in a while. And I'm just gonna say, and this is a contested point, but there are people who claim that, by and large, the quality of produce in New York City is not what they would expect in a world classic.
Oh now wait a second, Joe, you're attributing this to other people. Now you say that New York City doesn't have good produce.
I'm just parroting something I saw. And some people say, like, all, the quality of onions here is terrible. I actually do. I kind of agree with that. With the onions, by and large, I don't really notice it, but I know this is popular. I searched on Reddit a bunch of people said this, What do people say it? On Twitter? There are some New York City produce is controversial.
So I don't cook enough in New York to have an educated opinion about this. I will say one thing I noticed moving from Hong Kong to New York is it's almost an inverse picture. So in Hong Kong you have incredibly chack and incredibly fresh, very accessible fruit and vegetables everywhere. You have the wet markets and things like that, and meat is very expensive, whereas when you come to the States, you can buy like a twenty pound brisket, it doesn't actually cost that much. But getting a bag
of onions is it seems more difficult. It's almost reversed.
That is interesting, and it does raise this question. And you know, it's like a miracle of a modern economic supply chains, capitalism, what have you that we can be in this dent area and by and large we get produce, but I don't know anything about where it comes from. Really, I don't know, Like I don't know anything about the supply chain of produce and so whether it's good or bad. And you know, New York is obviously so diverse in like the types of places one could go grocery shopping.
So you have the local change, you have Whole Foods, you have the China.
See what I was going to say, This is what I find quite interesting about New York is you do have that mix of different retailers, so everything from the big chains like Whole Foods that people are probably familiar with, all the way down to independent carts basically selling fruit and vegetables.
Yeah, it's super interesting. And I literally live on a block and at the corner of my block. There's a guy twenty four seven three sixty five who sells produce, and they say, I don't know how it does it. I should probably just go up and like chat with him one day about his business.
Get him on the podcast.
Yeah, maybe he'll come on the podcast. It's a great idea. Anyway, produce in New York City so many interesting questions, so much controversy, et cetera. I want to know, like how New York City gets its produce and where it's coming from, and whether the reputation in some corners is a deserved or undeserved.
I will say the hardest thing about bringing you those tomatoes was the actual transportation and figuring out a way to bring them into New York without getting them super bruised. So it seems challenging.
When you brought them that morning, they had like this nice, sort of like crisp fresh field of them. And then I left him on my desk and I brought him home that night. Oh no, no, no, they're fine. They were still delicious. I kind of like the cold tomatoes. But I think we're going to use the term the cold chain a lot in this episode. And what is the cold chain and what does that mean and how is that different from other supply chain Let's do it well.
I'm really excited. We do, in fact have the perfect guests, someone who knows all about food produce supply chains. We're going to be speaking with Karen karp of Karen carp and Partners about how New York City gets its produce. Karen, thank you so much for joining.
Us, My pleasure to be here.
So so many different questions. I could start by asking you whether the quality of produce in New York City is an undeserved reputation. I could start by asking you, like, you know, what does your background? What is Karen Carpon Partners. I'm just going to start though, what is the cold chain?
The cold chain is really a twentieth century invention which allowed produce from all over the United States and Mexico for example, and around the world to get to New York in a food safety safe way, in other words, so that produce wouldn't rot on the way from California to New York. As an example, in fact, Iceberg lettuce was the first product that was transported from California to
New York in a train. A railcar that was literally packed with ice, and thus it got that let us got its name Iceberg because it was packed in ice to get its way to New York City.
So I already learned something.
The cold chain I'm here to teach you. The coal
chain basically says. It indicates that from the time a product, let's say a fruit or vegetable is picked in the field or from a tree or a bush if it's a berry, and we are in BlackBerry season, so we can talk about blackberries as well as fresh tomatoes on this episode, from the moment that it is harvested, how it is handled in a way that it gets to not only a city like New York, but gets through the channels in New York that make that iceberg, lettuce
or tomato results in the delivery of that piece of fruit or vegetable to a supermarket shelf, to a restaurant,
to a bodega, to your corner produce cart. And the whole notion of keep of creating a cold chain and keeping it intact from point A to point B right the fields in California to your produce cart or your refrigerator at home, is to make sure that the product doesn't break down in quality, that bacteria doesn't get into it, that it doesn't lose its flavor, and as I said earlier, that there are no food born illnesses that you could get from consuming something as fragile as lettuce that is
grown three thousand miles away.
So we talked just then about the cold chain, the temperature being important keeping things fresh. How big a factor is time.
Time is the enemy when you're transporting food, because if we're talking about fresh produce, which I think is the topic, Yeah, well let's stick to that. You know, time is the enemy because the minute something is picked, it starts to rot. I mean, that's like a very overstatement of the.
We're all dying from the day we're born.
Well, kind of.
Quite that grim, sorry, but it's kind of the same, right, Yeah.
I mean I actually said something like that to a really good friend yesterday on my mother's eighty seventh birthday. So we were talking about that. But yeah, so basically, the minute something is picked is it starts to decay and it starts to break down. And so the cold chain was created. And the cold chain really is just
a bunch of different mechanisms. It can be ice, it can be refrigeration, sometimes it's gas, depending on what the product is, what temperature it needs to be kept at, the duration, the duration for which the product needs to be in transport, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And when the cold chain is broken again, going back to that example from California to New York, when the cold chain is broken, that deterioration can set in really quickly.
Even if the refrigeration starts up again and it gets here, that product will not be the product that was promised to the buyer.
So now we are understand sort of the very general overview of what the cold chain is and what it aims to do. Let's zoom out, what is your background, what is Karen Carpon Partners and what do you do and what is your role within the sort of produce food delivery ecosystem.
Sure, so, I founded Karen Carpon Partners in nineteen ninety so a little over thirty three years ago, initially as just a small boutique restaurant consulting firm, because I had been working for about sixteen years or so before that in the restaurant business managing restaurants. Putting together a group of restaurants, building that group from from one to seven restaurants in the late nineteen eighties and then then thin it was I felt like it was time for me
to do something else. And there were two directions that I could have gone gone into. I could have gone to work for Danny Meyer the famous restaurant tour and been a restaurant manager in one and actually the only restaurant he had at the time. Or I was offered a job by a consultant who helps restaurants, hotels, etc. Start up their business or their food service, dining services, whatever. And I actually wanted to go work for Danny Meyer.
But and he interviewed me and he said, you know, I'm going to offer you the job, but I'm going to suggest. I'm going to recommend you don't take this job. My advice to you is don't take this job. And I said, oh, that's interesting. Why And he said, because you're an entrepreneur and you need to find out what it is that you're going to do. So yeah, it was very cool and it forged, you know, a lifelong friendship with him, which I'm very grateful to have. I'm
the fourth generation agriculture and food entrepreneur. My great grandfather came here from the Ukraine in nineteen o seven. I believe he drove a Breakstone cottage sheese card. If you remember those old commercials for Breakstones cottage sheees. He was one of those guys driving a buggy around the Upper east Side selling butter eggs and cheese and cottage she and milk to consumers who would come out of their apartment buildings and buy from a cart because there were
no supermarkets. Then my grandfather and he converted that into a wholesale business for butter eggs and cheese, operating out of the Washington market. And then in the nineteen my grandfather was born around nineteen oh nine, and then my father was born in Brooklyn in nineteen thirty two, and by then they had a feed and seed company for the farms in Brooklyn, but Brooklyn was rapidly developing because
of the existence of the Brooklyn Bridge. So they picked up everything and moved it out to Long Island to a town called Farmingdale, and ran this feed and seed company from Farmingdale, shipping feed and seed out to the farms on the east end of Long Island where I now live.
Oh that's so cool.
And my grandfather was recruited from the USDA in the late nineteen forties to go to Cornell University to learn how to make commercial fertilizer because farmers were trying to use this nitrogen and ammonia. They were mixing it up in their barns. As he used to say, they were blowing up their barns. So you know, somebody came the ye done.
I haven't mixed up any explosions, though I did find I did find a load of gunpowder that the previous owner left in there.
So plenty of blowing up opportunity, yeah, exactly.
So anyway, fast forward, my grandfather grew that company. He sold it to a company that eventually sold it to DOO, So you know, fertilizers, those kind of fertilizers or chemicals. My father then became a sales that became a real estate salesperson, working with the farmers on the east end of Long Island. And while he did broker lots of deals to help farmers sell their property to developers, he also broker the first transfer of development rights deal in
the country. And that is where kind of my story begins. By creating that kind of real estate mechanism. It was giving Long Island farmers a financial opportunity to stay farming when the land values were going up all around them, and it would have been much better and more profitable to sell to developers. But because of the preservation or the transfer of development rights, there is still and it
is actually growing again. A I don't even it's not even nascent, because it's already been going on for fifty years, but a very exciting kind of regional local food production community.
And so when I a few years after I quit working for the consultant that I went to work for and I started KKA and P, I actually went back to school and got a master's degree in sustainability because I really wanted to understand the whole ecological, environmental aspect of producing food and why, to your point earlier, why it's so difficult for local food to get into New York City, and why it is difficult and challenging to get produced that tastes good one hundred percent of the time.
So history steeped in agriculture and food, we're gonna have to ask you for some Anthony Bourdain style tips about like when to order fish or salads in New York restaurants.
I'll try to channel him as best.
I can't excelent, but maybe before we get to that. I mean, you mentioned it being difficult to get local produce into New York. So A, what are the difficulties? Exactly? What are the challenges? And then B to Joe's controversial point, which he won't take responsibility for in the intro, does New York in fact have bad produce?
Okay, so we need to, I think, start this conversation and in a moment in time, right okay, up until let's just say the nineteen fifties, let's just put it in the middle of the twentieth century, there was some produce that was coming in from across the country, as I mentioned earlier, coming in a box cars, et cetera. Before there was and I think we're going to get
to this later in this conversation. Before there was the Hunts Point Produce Terminal Market, which is responsible now for receiving and distributing upwards of twenty five percent of New York City's produce. There was an open air market down in Tribeca on Washington Street. It was called the Washington Street Market, and there were vendors there selling everything fresh produce, beef, chicken, eggs, pork,
you name it. It was just open air markets. The produce that was coming from outside the country, I mean sorry, from across the country from the West Coast, for example, or from the Midwest would come in by rail and then be transferred by rail to ferries that would come to the Lower West Side and then be picked up by a middleman and brought to the vendors that were
selling in the Washington market. In those days, the priority and the priority, and it made most sense in season to buy whatever was possible to buy as close to New York City as possible. When you ate those tomatoes, yeah they were good.
Tracy grew the Tracy grew them.
They were Tracy grew them in Connecticut. They were brandy Wine brand, and they were brandy Wine so wonderful. The way the food system used to work in any metropolitan area is that whatever the transportation methods existed would bring the produce either from as far away as possible to create a year round supply of things. But it wasn't always possible to get tomatoes year round like it is now. And when you get those tomatoes year round, in any
time from October to July. They're gonna be not great in a city like New York for the most part, because a tomato needs to really be consumed very close to when it's picked, its flavor will deteriorate way quicker than for example, iceberg lettuce, which doesn't really have much flavor per se. It has crunch, it has texture, it has water, but it doesn't really have flavor like a tomato does. So pretty much it was almost like intuitive how food kind of was brought into New York and
was consumed. And there were always the extraneous things like lemons. For example, citrus does not grow does not grow close by to New York anytime anytime of the year. Climate change, maybe that will change, hopefully not. Things don't get that bad. So those things were brought in from far away. But it was however, you could get to something when it was ripe and ready to be eaten. Those things were brought to New York. And so that whole kind of
intricate web is called the food system. So going back to KK and P, what we are. We are food
systems consultants. So our job is to help our clients, which range from government agencies to nonprofit organizations to businesses to help them solve their food problems, and the food problems they are asking us to help solve is it includes creating more access for fresh and healthy food for low income people, to rebuild regional farm and food economies, which is kind of I think the crux of what we're going to be talking about here, to work on
supply chain issues, such as for some of the big corporations, help them understand where their ingredients are coming from and how they could get better and more sustainable ingredients, as well as designing and sometimes teaching higher education programs around this whole thing that we call the food system.
You mentioned one stat already about Hunt's Point and you said, roughly a quarter of New York City's produce ghosts through there. I don't know much about it. I mean my impression is and I think it's, you know, the grocery store for grocery stores and this gigantic sort of facility of produce.
But I don't know. Give us a little bit more sort of description of the role that this Hunts Point terminal plays in the New York City produce market and how unusual or common it is for big cities in the United States to have a facility like this.
Sure, so I will answer that question, but I want to say first, if you don't mind, please fresh produce gets to New York City now today in twenty twenty three, one of three principal ways okay, okay, going from sort of small scale to big scale. The small scale is well, the small scale is Tracy bringing you a fe for brandywine to me. But a little bit larger than that are farmers markets. Right so, there are dozens of farmers
markets in New York City right now. I don't know the exact number, but it could be close to one hundred and those markets, however, many days they operate rely on farmers, individual farmers picking and packing their produce, trucking it into New York City and selling it to people like you and me selling it direct to customer.
Okay.
The next level up is the level that a wholesale market plays, such as the Hunts Point Produce Terminal Market in New York City. And later this year they will be a wholesale farmers market opening right across the street from the Hunts Point Produce Terminal Market. This is a project I've been working on since two thousand and two, so we're really ready to see a question.
A wholesale market like could trace it even if it's a wholesale could we walk in there? Would we have to be like a licensed buyer for.
Hunts Point or for the wholesale farmers market for either.
Yeah, I mean you let me mention how tomatoes are you buying, Joe.
Yeah, let me just mention the third way because and then you can go back.
Yeah.
So the third way that produce gets to New York City are through distributors that are picking product up from distribution centers that could be vertically integrated. Supermarket chains have
now vertically integrated supply chains. So your Whole Foods, your Dagasino, Sea Town Who or a key food they have very much vertically integrated supply chains now, which means those companies are contracting directly with farmers across the country for the best possible produce at the best time of year, and they come directly to their distribution centers which are outside of New York City and then in fact many in Cheshire, Connecticut just so happens that they're there, and then those
are trucked into supermarkets and put on the shelves for consumers.
Sorry, So, just to emphasize this point, the way a supermarket like a Whole Foods is getting its produce is going to be different to the way an independent seller with a cart on the street is going to be getting out.
Yes, and even different from how an independent grocer. So a small scale grocer or your fresh fruit and vegetable vendor on your corner. Who, by the way, those guys sell a lot of stuff, so you know if they were in a store, they sell enough stuff to have a small store. They're really the good ones, the good ones anyway. So the second part of that question was.
Well, just like, give us Hunts Point how unusual, you know, just tell us a little bit more about how the terminal system works.
Can we buy from it?
Right, So let me go back to the answer that question. So typically not, you're not going to go to Hunt's Point market and buy produce.
You could.
You could. You could show up in a car. You would have to pay a gate fee to get in. You'd have to go at two or three in the morning.
That's no problem. Problem, Yeah, neither of both of us can do that.
Okay, And then you would have to buy cases of product, right, that might be the problem.
Maybe we should set up some sort of grocery cooperative and just buy cases of tomatoes every week.
I think we should start, you know what I think we should do. We should start what's CSA like those like like farm. But our trick was we're just actually going to the hunt Point market earlier.
That would be really bad.
Yeah, okay, sorry, sorry, we'll talk about it after.
Yeah. But anyway, so you could you could do that, and you know, but the thing is you're not going to because you're not going to buy a case of cantalope for example, Right, You're just not going to do that. But the Hunts Point produce terminal market is essential for these small fruit and vegetable vendors, whether they be your street carts, whether they be a bodega.
There's like those chains, like I think they're more in Brooklyn than Manhattan. They're called like mister Coco and mister Mellon, you know those.
But they're produce stores, right, yeah.
But would those be the level in which they're part Okay?
Absolutely, And so those guys will typically send their own vans, okay up to the hunts Point Produce Terminal market, they'll get an order, maybe the order is pre set. Now COVID is actually kind of stimulated a whole technological innovation at the Hunts Point Produce Terminal market where you can order ahead of time, and even some of the distributors at Hunt's Point are delivering now, which they didn't used to do. But yes, you'd send your guy in a van up to the Hunts Point market at three in
the morning. He have his shopping list. He would probably be either with a buyer in the van with him, or he would be the buyer himself, trained to find the exact right product for that particular market. And I don't mean the physical market. I mean the customers that shop in that market, and the customers who shop in any particular market have a certain price mentality around food, or even a price ability around food. So often what happens in those markets is that you're not going to
find the most pristine, perfect product. It's gonna be good, but it's going to be more perishable, perhaps than what you would find in a supermarket like Whole Foods or Associated or some of the others, and especially some of the real high end stores because they're buying for how the product looks. Right, you go into Whole Foods. That's what Whole Foods sold us, all right, how the product looks, and they're trying to deliver on flavor, but it's not really always possible.
Well, just on this note, talk to us about what are the sort of controversies in the food network right now? Because you mentioned, you know, the look of food of produce versus the taste. I remember that's been a long running one. People talk a lot about food deserts in America. I imagine that might be less of an issue in New York. But what are people sort of debating, you know, if you go to the farmer's market, like, what is the hot topic of debate?
Yeah, I mean the hot topic of debate no matter where you are are, where you're functioning anywhere in the food system, including as eaters, the hot topic at the moment is how are we going to be able to grow fruits and vegetables with climate change raging through the world. I mean, that's the hot topic. That is the only topic, and I mean it's not really the only topic because the second topic actually is access. So we do not
use the term food dessert at KK ANDP. In fact, policymakers in New York have not used that term for many, many years. There day, I'm sorry, that's okay, we'll bring up to day.
What do people say food scarcity?
Well, we don't talk about the neighborhood so much as we talk about the people who Again, I wouldn't want to label a person food insecure, but that's the word that's used food and security. And people are food insecure not because there's no food available. There might not be food available right in their neighborhood, but because they don't have money. There's not a food problem, there's a money problem.
Wait, but there are parts of the country where it is incredibly difficult to actually get fresh produce.
Including many neighborhoods in New York City. Absolutely, okay, And why is that? You want to know why that is? Why that is is more to do with the kind
of technological and policy innovations throughout the twentieth century. So we're going back to the nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties, nineteen seventies when the the USDA really started subsidizing farmers to produce essentially a handful of crops, corn, soy, cotton wheat as an example, and they were subsidizing those crops because those are the biggest export crops that the United States has, And because as there was kind of consolidation in the
farming sectors all across the United States, there was food manufacturing also growing at the same time. Right, there weren't supermarkets in the nineteen twenties because I mean there were neighborhood stores, because there wasn't a lot of manufactured product at the time. It was fresh or minimally what we call minimally processed or dried like pasta, rice, etc. Things like that. So as the agriculture sector got more industrialized,
the number of ingredients got fewer. The food manufacturers picked up on that and started producing manufacturing what we now call highly processed food, right, high process food turning corn into corn syrup instead of using sugar, for example, and lots of lots of chemical processes to add flavor, to add durability, to add texture, whatever. And we ended up getting a diet that didn't include a lot of fresh food,
which is subsidized by the US government. So the US government pays commodity farmers of those crops to either grow or not grow to the market sort of like the market movements, the things that are happening in the market, and the USDA does not give subsidies or any favor at all to what they define as specialty farmers. Specialty
farmers are the people that produce fruits and vegetables. So people ended up ended up consuming a very highly processed diet by the nineteen sixties and into the nineteen seventies, which resulted in the diet related illnesses that we have now, which we could go into if you want to, because there's a fruit and vegetable approach to diet chronic diet
related illnesses. But what the other thing that was happening, And I mean, this is a perfect topic for you know, for here in this building, right because it's about finance and markets. As manufacturing jobs in New York City were declining and more people from the South were migrating to cities for opportunity, landlords got very nervous about having more people from very diverse backgrounds living in their buildings, and white people left and went to the suburbs. So it's
like everything happening at the same time. The commodification of food, the industrialization of food, manufacturing, the decline of manufacturing in cities like New York, which sent white people to the suburbs, which created an influx of housing for non white people, and supermarkets at the time or the stores that were available basically were like, we have to sell the cheapest possible food we can to these groups of people because they don't have enough money, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So there was a former New York City Commissioner, Tom Farley, great guy. He actually was one of the first people, first policy people in New York to basically say, we can't call this a food desert. It's actually a food swamp. So it's a food swamp, meaning there's tons of food, it's just very bad quality.
I really like the way you frame it around money and income because I mean it's intuitive as you describe it, which is that there are plenty of rich people who live in very you know, might live in a rural area away from a grocery store, and they don't have a problem with food and security. I mean, you know, somehow they get their food. Maybe they might not have
a grocery store than a mile, but they do. It's the people who simply do not have much income, and no one is trying to No one is trying to create a market for them or trying to deliver fresh produced.
But that's I don't want to say that you're incorrect about that. I think you just don't know. Actually, there's tons of organizations, dozens in New York City, maybe even hundreds in New York City of organizations that are working really really hard to get that fresh produce into these neighborhoods.
Yeah, you're totally right. I in my mind, the way I was thinking about it is like sort of like for profit chain grocery stores or for profit entities sort of like seeing this as a market opportunity.
But to your point, right, Yeah, But to your point of a wealthy person living in the suburbs or you know, exerbs or rural if they want to get a food item or food items that they want, they're going to find a way to get it. And you know what, poor people in New York City and in cities across the United States do exactly the same thing. There was a project many years ago where I was interviewing parents
of children that were in head start programs. The neighborhood was East Harlem, which if we were to label neighborhoods in New York City as food deserts, which we're trying not to do, it would be one and kind of like after the formal interview about how the kids were doing in this head Star program and the food that they were getting there and whether the parents thought that food was good for the kids or not good for the kids, et cetera, et cetera, I just sort of
off the cuff. I asked a group of parents of five year olds. I said, do you know the term food desert? And they were like, no, what are you talking about? And I said, well, do you know that some people would say the neighborhood that you live in is called a food desert And they say, what does that mean? I said, well, how it's defined is that you live in a neighborhood where you can't get good quality, fresh food. And they say, well, yeah, it's the truth,
but don't call my neighborhood a desert. That's really insulting to me. And I said, well, tell me what you do about getting food and they said, you know, wean this was a while ago, so like before Uber Bill, four of us will go in a taxi across the George Washington Bridge to a supermarket in New Jersey and stock up. Right, we will take the subway down to
Chinatown one day a week and buy buy fresh fish. So, just like upper income people, lower income people are very resourceful and will do the best they can to feed their family. But what happened in that period of industrialization is that people forgot how to cook.
Right.
This was going to be kind of my next question, which is, Okay, so incomes are clearly a factor here, but it feels like the other limiting factor is, especially if you're working a low income job, probably long hours, you might not have a lot of time to spend either sourcing fresh produce or cooking it correct.
Nor might you have a kitchen with a good refrigerator and a decent stove.
Right.
So, yeah, So I think what happened over maybe those years from like the sixties or seventies until I kind of want to say until recently, because I feel like there's been a little bit of a tipping point. Although there's still so much work to do, people just they gave themselves over to what was easy and convenient and cheap.
Right, those darn TV dinners in the eighties.
I mean, I'm guilty of with myself. I'm a busy work I have two kids. It's like sometimes, of course it's cheap and what I can put in the air fryer.
Totally, totally. We can't be faulted for making our lives, you know, as easy as easy as we can. The problem is that lower income people do not have as many options and choices as you and I might have.
For further constraints.
What what's the ideal food network landscape if you will in a city like New York. And the reason I ask is because you know, I've traveled a lot, I've lived in different places. In a place like Hong Kong, it's so easy to get fresh food. You know, on your way back from work, you stop at the wet market, you stock up on whatever you need for dinner, and you do the same thing the next day. In a lot of European cities, it's like that as well, you buy for the meal that you were actually about to eat.
Is that what we should be aiming for or how would you like to see it develop?
I mean in a city like New York, where everything is at your fingertips, in a way, but everything is also complicated logistically, right, you have to plan your whole day and how many bags you're going to be carrying by the end of the day, that kind of thing. Let me just kind of back up and say, you know, in probably starting in the nineteen twenties nineteen thirties, there
were retail produce markets all across New York City. And the way those things got developed was because like your guy on your corner, right, like my great grandfather driving a buggy around the Upper East Side selling cottage, cheese and butter. There were so much street activity, so many people selling and buying food on the street, that it was Mayor LaGuardia actually, so it's probably a little bit later, because I think he was the mayor in the fifties.
He basically was like, no, we got to get all this activity inside. So he and others built this sort of network you mentioned the word network, this network of retail produce markets across New York City, and then kind of tried to force the people selling on the street to go in those markets, which of course they resisted because you're gonna have a lot more customers if you're
just on the street with them. Nevertheless, that kind of that migration happened, and those markets really became the source, the primary source of accessing fresh fruits and vegetables in a neighborhood. And these markets exist in many, many, many,
many neighborhoods all across New York City. A lot of those markets have closed or changed or there or they're struggling, and there's there's but the infrastructure, for the most part is still there and many of them are being kind of rehabilitated and rethought to enable this access across New York City.
Can we just go back and talk like sort of like simple or not simple, but supply chain logistics. For a second, New York is a dense city. It's surrounded by suburbs, and if you're coming into the city via truck, there's a good chance you're gonna be stuck in traffic for a long time. I understand trucks have refrigeration, et cetera.
But like when it comes to that cold chain, whether it's the delivery of food to the terminal and then the pickup by the person at the van, or whether it's the vertically integrated mega supermarkets that contract directly with the farmers and have their distribution points outside the city, et cetera. Is it just difficult from it? Like, you know, if you wanted to compare New York to say, like
I used to live in Austin, Texas. It's traffic's getting worse there, but it's not nearly as big or as dense as crazy Like, yeah, is it just harder, it's harder. Can you talk about like those challenges?
Yeah, I can tell, Yeah, it is. It is harder. It is harder. And the Hunts Point Produced Terminal Market was built in nineteen sixty seven, and that was an effort to take all those vendors that were selling wholesale on Washington Street and put them indoors. Yeah, and put them in a market in U.
Is it cold there in the market Yeah, no, okay.
And it's not cold because the market is not completely cold shame compliant, which is one of the top five reasons why it needs to be redeveloped and why it will.
There are so there are issues.
There are issues, of course, So you're going to find issues anywhere. That's anywhere that you're transporting and handling food. You know, they do the best they can with the infrastructure that they have. But the infrastructure, people like to say, and I was only seven years old in nineteen sixty seven, so I can't say this from firsthand experience. But people say that as soon as the market opened it was obsolete. Huh so and that's how many years ago, right, so
fifty six years ago? So the market?
Sorry, why why?
What?
Why was it? Absolutely? Well, what did people identify right away that they say, you know what this is going to be.
Just to your point, because the city, the city is so dense, the population grew, and here you were trying to put all of these trucks into the very few funnels that exist, meaning the George Washington Bridge or than now it's called the RFK Bridge or the Degan Expressway. You're trying to get all these trucks. And that protus was being brought in more by truck than by train. So the usually when a market is called a terminal market, it literally means it's the end of the line, and
it's the end of rail lines. So but rail got less and less and trucks got more and more when the price of gasoline went down and when buying became more specialized.
You know, you mentioned this earlier, the rules around food safety and regulation. Can you talk a little bit more about how those feed into the actual network and the logistics of moving produce, especially in New York, because I imagine maybe New York has some different laws to other places.
New York doesn't have different laws to other places. Now, there is a national law which actually just went into effect a few years ago. It's called the Food Safety Modernization Act or catchy FISMA, FISMA FISMA. That is catchy actually, and so that became a national requirement for any kind of perishable food to be meeting certain government FDA and USDA standards for culting compliance. But I think to answer your question, if I could tell a little story, please, Okay.
So I was at the Hunts Point Produce market one day, probably in two thousand and nine. Let's say we were actually managing a program called the New York City Green Cart Initiative at the time, which was a whole class of vendor licenses exclusively for selling fresh fruits and vegetables
in low income neighborhoods that didn't have supermarkets. So my office ran that program for the first five years that it existed, And I was at the market one day with some of the vendors kind of teaching them how to buy produce. And we were there when the big truck was coming in I don't know where it was coming in from. And the very first thing that happens you put the you roll up the gate of the back of a tractor trailer and there is a little black box, just like there's a little black box in
an airplane. Right, that little black box is taking the temperature of the produce every I don't know minute, every three minutes. I'm not sure. It's a constant read of temperature of the produce in that truck. Okay, And somebody who's receiving the goods will get that black box or the report from the black box, and they will see has this produce maintained its temperature from all away from where it came from, let's say California, And if it does,
then they're going to pay the price they promised. Right. If it hasn't, they've got to start testing the food to see if there's breakdown, if there's material breakdown of let's say it's a tomato right happening on the inside of the tomato, and then they'll make a decision about whether to buy the product or how to buy the product. And so even though there are these rules that things must be cold chain compliant, it's a relatively recent rule.
And so now all the infrastructure needs to be upgraded to be able to, at least on the receiving side, do what they can to maintain the food.
I have a kind of random question, but so I guess a lot of people might know this, but maybe some don't. If you mix certain vegetables together, I think the classic is, what is it onions with potatoes or something. If you store them together, one of them emits a chemical that causes the other one to rot. Yes, are those the types of considerations that you have to think about at a food market, Like, oh, you can't put the onions next to the potatoes.
Absolutely, And I don't know if it's exactly those two products, but yeah, I can't remember. But to go back to our tomato example, tomato tomatoes don't need to be refrigerated at the same the same degree of coldness as leafy greens, for example, which really need to be at thirty nine degrees. I think it's thirty seven or thirty nine degrees to
stay crisp. For as long as possible. Tomatoes actually can be in a fifty degree room with a tomato ripening room, And there are and when you go to some of the vendors at Hunt's Point have these but more sophisticated produce distributors like those that exist outside the market. Baldore is a great example here in New York. They'll have ripening rooms for tomatoes, They'll have ripening rooms for bananas,
They'll have different ripening rooms for other things. Potatoes. You can pretty much do anything to potato and it will still be okay. So, yes, there's a range of temperatures. You're absolutely right, Just.
Going back to the logistics of getting produced into the city. What about setting aside the Hunts Point and the terminal, what about for the large grocery stores that, as you say, completely vertically integrated. They're obviously vertically integrated New York. I assume they're all sort of roughly the same model all across the country.
For sure.
Do they face any additional challenges here in New York that you wouldn't see in a smaller city or in a less dense area.
Well, yeah, I mean, as I mentioned earlier, the distribution centers for four or five supermarket chains that feed New York are located in Cheshire, Connecticut. Okay, so if you're growing, if you're shipping that lettuce or those tomatoes from California, it's going to go to Cheshire, Connecticut, which is, you know, an hour away, maybe an hour and a half away,
but it's going beyond New York. Then it's going to sit there, and then it's going to come to New York to a supermarket, to a Whole Foods or some of the other supermarkets. So it's already like a couple more days.
I just want to go back to one thing you said when I asked about what are the sort of hot topics of debate in food network land at the moment, and the first pick was climate change. At some point, are the complicated logistics of bringing fresh produce into New York going to be complicated or perhaps even untenable in an age of weather related, climate related disruptions?
Right, So, there's a couple interesting things that are happening in the food system right now relative to that. On a very macro scale, there are large organizations, usually agricultural Those organizations, along with some nonprofit organizations that do scientific research and understand sustainability. Are working on developing drought resistant, rain resistant, heat resistant crops so that produce still can be grown in a variety of places and sent to
a city like New York. That's kind of one very mac level on another kind of macro level. In some ways, climate change further gives a rational might be a little bit hard to kind of put together, but maybe we can, the three of us can work it out right for more regional produce production and distribution. So going back to that moment in time in the middle of the twentieth century that I painted earlier, as soon as we could get produce from really far away. I'll get back to
the climate in a second. As soon as we could get produce from really far away, we started doing that because those farmers could produce more quantity, have more consistency. They were invested in by the big by big food companies and the regional farmers. Let's say around here in
New York City. The first let's take the fifty miles and one hundred and one hundred and fifty miles around New York City, which is generally the distance considered for local food is either one hundred and fifty miles or a day's drive. They're two definitions. There's no technical deface, but those are the two that are kind of floated
and used the most. Those farmers that were producing the specialty crops, right the potatoes, the carrots, the onions, but more importantly the greens, the broccolis, the spinach, the whatever, the bound the cornucopia of produce products. Those farmers were in effect in competition with farmers on the West Coast who were being invested in MY companies and places like hunt.
The Hunts Point market wanted to only deal with the big guys because they could contract ahead, they could plan, they knew what they were going to get, and there was a year round supply in lieu of contracting with the regional guys for which there was only maybe a
few months supply of any one product. What climate change is doing is first of all, making people and making people understand a little bit more the seasonality of things and appreciating that great tomato when it's in season, and if it gets too hot next time, your tomatoes might not grow. Right.
I mean, last summer in Connecticut we had drought, and that was a terrible, terrible year. For my tomatoes.
Yeah, this year on Long Island, it's been raining like crazy and it's the middle of August and we're only seeing our first good tomatoes. So every year is a little bit like a crapshoot. Whereas in more controlled environments and controlled by pesticides, controlled by irrigation, etc. You don't have as much for variables, except now you do. Right when they had those terrible floods out in Monterey on the West coast between Santa Cruz and Monterey last spring,
it wiped out the entire strawberry crop. So I don't really eat strawberries that frequently, especially ones that are brought in from far away, but they were just not on the shelves. So I also think COVID made people understand the fragility of our food system, and that's why I think there's an opening for a general public growing awareness of appreciating the food that they can get, and that
will help with seasonality. Right if you accept I can't get that great that tomato that I love all year long, but I can get it in July and August when it's great. I think COVID kind of broke down some of our expectations about consistent supply, which is good for regional food tracy.
You know, where they don't have to worry about flooding risk for agriculture. Where Arizona it's like, we got to keep growing produce in the Arizona Desert, no surprise of floods.
You and Arizona, Joe just go no.
But Joe, you know the problem with Yeah, we've done, we've done, We've done.
We've done several episodes on a water Yeah water.
Wait, but can I can I go back to the agricultural policy issue that you described earlier at this idea that we subsidized you know, exportable crops like soybeans and corn over maybe fresh produce producers. Could that change in an era of climate change? Is their political appetite or will to actually reconc some of that?
You know there there is I mean I worked on a project exactly around this question. We finished that project in twenty eighteen. I think looking at a region called the Mid South Delta, which is about ninety counties that span that goes across five states, so it's along the Mississippi River, so it's not the Delta like in Louisiana. But it's the Mid South Delta. So it was Tennessee, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky,
and a little bit of Mississippi. And in that region, seventy six percent of the crops are just four products corn, soy, cotton, and wheat. No rice, sorry, corn, soy, cotton, and rice. And what was happening or what's still happening, but the investments are starting to like maybe make a turn there.
What's been happening in that region is because it's a wet region and because ninety percent of the product is put on a bar large and shipped out of the country, there was no way to gain value for that product for the farmers. And when you look at, for example, deforestation in Brazil to produce crops like soy, when you look at rice, when the US is a huge rice producer,
but you see climate impacting those things. In a generation and a half, three of those four crops won't be able to be produced in that region, which is seventy six percent of their of the receipts. So yes, so there are efforts to say, well, what else can we grow there? And in a region like the Mid South Delta, for example, that used to grow lots of watermelon and cucumbers, things that actually require water, which they have, but which lost their markets to the West when that whole thing
was happening. That we've already talked about a couple of times.
I have one small question and then one regular question. I know, we just have a couple minutes left. Farmers' markets. You mentioned them. I think you said they're about one hundred in New York City.
I wish I had this precise about this.
Yeah, we talked about the big grocery stores. We talked about maybe the more midsize where they get their produce at the terminal. You described how the produce got into the farmer's market, But how big of a role are they playing in the sort of the diet of New Yorkers.
Well, an increasing percentage, right. I think when we first spoke, I told you about this wholesale farmers market, the project I've been working on for a long time, and it's going to be called the New York Regional Food Hub, and it's going to be operated by Grow NYC, which is an operator of farmers markets here in New York City.
I think they operate sixty or seventy maybe a few more farmers markets, what farmers' markets, what farmers were experiencing, would be chefs coming to the markets and saying, you know, I want to buy all the tomatoes you have right or or a super a local supermarket would come and say I want to buy all of those blackberries that
you have. And this was happening for years. It started kind of in the in the eighties and into the nineties, and then you know, by the end of the nineties, people at the New York State Department of Agriculture were realizing this is unsustainable and not really the best way to transper produce anyway. We need a wholesale facility to focus on this local stuff. So it's very difficult to quantify exactly how much local produce is in the system
at any one time. But what I can tell you is that it's grown from being something really minuscule to something that is more quantifiable. So just for an example, in two thousand and four, what we quantified was that there was a two hundred million dollar demand for local food among restaurants and retailers and distributors, and there was
just ten percent of that available in the marketplace. But local farmers and local farms have there's been a revival and they are starting to meet that much greater demand because people and including businesses are willing to pay a little bit more and to understand the seasonality.
So final question, and I don't know, maybe this isn't even I'm going to frame this is a hypothetical question. But I know you've worked with a watch of people, so maybe it's not hypothetical. But our mayor in New York City is a fan of produce generally supposedly he's
a vegan, or he's claimed to be multiple times. If he calls you up tomorrow, maybe and again maybe he has or maybe someone you've worked so, but like he calls and says, what are the three big things that we should focus on to approve the produce supply chain in New York City? What do you say?
Right?
Well, I haven't spoken to the mayor directly, but I do work for the Mayor's Office of Food Policy.
Okay, there you go, So this is not hypothetic.
No, it's not hypothetical. I would say the three things that the city is focusing on right now is the rebuild of the Hunts Point produce terminal market because twenty years ago it distributed sixty percent of the city's produce and now it's a little bit, it's more like twenty or twenty five percent. That piece of infrastructure is critical for maintaining competition in the marketplace and for enabling accessed for fruits and vegetables across the diversity of outlets that we have in.
New York City. Right, So without it, we would really just be at the whim of the big st Right.
That the other thing that the city is focusing on there is this policy effort called the Good Food Purchasing Initiative, and the Good Food Purchasing Program has this list of criteria of what sustainable healthy food is and the New York City has signed on for all of the public institutions to participate in this Good Food Purchasing Program, which is creating criteria for not only where product is created more local product, for example, but also how it's produced
in terms of an equity perspective, the sustainability of that product, the healthfulness of it, etc. So I would say that's the second thing, and the third thing. I think the third thing is really related to the So I guess it's infrastructure access and overall sustainability.
Just on the Hunts point of the one thing you mentioned is that it's not that cold. What else sort of needs to be done?
Yeah, there, I mean there's a lot. The biggest issue, the biggest issue at Hunt's point right now are that there are hundreds of tractor trailers that park and run their diesel trucks all day to keep produce cold in them because there's not enough space in the market itself.
So that's not only a cold chain compliance issue and ease of merchandising and selling and all of that, but it's a major environmental issue that's responsible for a lot of the asthma and other bronchial related illnesses in the bronx. So that's one thing. The other thing is we need to have a facility that is operated with green energy that maybe produces food on the roof itself, maybe and
that also has a greater mechanism. And the Hunts point produce terminal market work does a lot on this, but it needs to be more that creates a better system for what's called the rescuing of food and the redistribution of food that is not being sold to charitable organizations.
Karen Carr. Thank you so much. I learned so much about how we get our produce. Really appreciate you coming on odline my pleasure.
Yeah, that was fascinating.
Yeah, thank you, Tracy. I'm still just mostly gonna get my tomatoes from your garden.
That's your supply chain solution.
Here.
I might have bad news for you, Joe. I don't have that many tomatoes.
Okay, there's always so many.
Some of them are splitting too, because you know, we mentioned there's been a lot of rain this summer, so last year was drought. This summer is just torrential rain in the Northeast and not that much sun. Actually, so a lot of my tomato are also splitting.
But I did find that conversation really fascinating. I was particularly interested in that point at the end that like, if you didn't have the terminal and that it's shrunk, then that really would create like the sort of market structure competition issues for the New York City market since obviously not every vendor can have their own vertically integrated supply chain for produce.
Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. The other thing that I found fascinating was, I guess my outdated use of the term food desert, but also the discussion of some of the agricultural policy choices, and I guess also the corporate decisions that kind of went into creating that outcome.
And I guess the question is, you know, as we become more cognizant of these issues, and as climate change becomes a bigger factor affecting the food supply chain, whether or not some of those policies start to be reconsidered.
Yeah. Now, totally fascinating conversation.
And we got to do I guess we got to take a trip out to the terminal.
We do when the farmers market is particularly when the wholesale farmers market opens. Yeah, the regional food hub.
All right, Adlots outing at two am in the morning. It'll be fun.
Let's do it.
Shall we leave it there?
Let's leave it there.
This has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
You can follow me at the Stalwart. Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Arman and dash Ol Bennett at dashbot, and check out all of the Bloomberg podcasts under the handle at podcasts and for more odd loots content, go to Bloomberg dot com slash odd Lots, where we have transcripts. Tracy and I blog and publish a newsletter every Friday. And for more go to our discord Discord dot gg
slash odd lots Lots of supply chain talk. In fact, this episode came out of request someone wanted to learn more about the cold chain et cetera, and so I was like, I got on. Then that's how he found Karen. So check it out Chat twenty four to seven with fellow od loots listeners.
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