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Hello and welcome to another episode of the AdLots podcast. I'm Joe 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 in our
episodes going forward? How long can we stretch this out? I don't know. Something hit me when
like in my mid 30s. You know, it's like when you're a kid, the whole excitement of summer is like
not being in school. Then you get a little older and the whole fun of summer is I don't know,
traveling or parting or something. And then something hit me in my mid 30s or late 30s,
where it's like the best part of summer is like a really fresh tomato. 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. Yes. So for listeners who don't know, Tracy has a garden and
she posted some tomato pictures and I was like, I need some. So Tracy brought some. Anyway,
they're the best produce I've had in a while. And I'm just going to 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 just 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. Why should people
say it on Twitter? There are some New York City produces 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
cheap 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 20 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 it's like a miracle. The modern economic supply chains capitalism would have you
that we can be in this dense area. And by and large, we get produce. But I don't know anything about
where it comes from really. I don't know. I don't know anything about the supply chain of produce.
And so whether it's good or bad, and New York is obviously so diverse in the types of places.
One could go grocery shopping. So you have the local change, you have Whole Foods, you have the
China town. This is 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 24, 7365 who sells produce on these things. I don't know how it does it.
I should probably just go up and 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, etc. I want to know how New York City gets its
produce and where it's coming from and whether the reputation in some corners is 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 them on my desk and I brought them home that night.
Oh, no. No, no, they're fine. They're 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 like other supply chains? 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 Carp 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 undeserved reputation. I could start by asking you like, you know, what is your
background? What is Karen Carp and partners? I'm just going to start though. What is the cold chain?
The cold chain is really a 20th 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 that 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 rail car that was literally packed with ice and thus it got,
that's that lettuce 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 mean, I'm here to teach you. The cold 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 of produce cart. And the whole notion 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 that, as I said earlier, that there are no food-borne
illnesses that you could get from consuming something as fragile as lettuce that has grown
3,000 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 over-overstatement of the... We're all dying from the day we're born.
Well, kind of... Sorry, I didn't mean to get 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 87th birthday, so we were talking about that. But yeah, so basically the minute
something is picked, 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 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 Caron Carpenter's? And what do you do? And what is your role within this sort of
produce food delivery ecosystem? Sure. So I founded Caron Carpenter's in 1990, so a little over
33 years ago, initially as just a small boutique restaurant consulting firm, because I had been
working for about 16 years or so before that in the restaurant business. Managing restaurants,
putting together a group of restaurants, building that group from one to seven restaurants in
the late 1980s. And then 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 in actually the only
restaurant he had at the time. Or I was offered a job by a consultant who helps restaurants,
hotels, et cetera, start up their business or their food service, dining services, whatever.
And I actually wanted to go work for Danny Meyer. 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 1907, I believe. He drove a breakstone cottage
cheese cart. If you remember those old commercials for breakstones cottage cheese, he was one of those
guys driving a buggy around the upper east side selling butter eggs and cheese and cottage cheese
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 19 my grandfather
was born around 1909. And then my father was born in Brooklyn in 1932. 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 1940s 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 to you. Tracy, have you done that? I haven't mixed up any
explosives. It's only a matter of time though. I did find a load of gunpowder that the previous owner
left in there. Plenty of blowing up opportunities. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, fast forward. My
grandfather grew that company. He sold it to a company that eventually sold it to Dow. So,
you know, fertilizers, those kind of fertilizers or chemicals. My father then became a sales,
it 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 brokered 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, a, I don't even, it's not even nascent because it's already been going on for 50 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 KKNP,
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 produce that tastes good 100% of the time. So a personal history steeped
in agriculture and food. We're going to have to ask you for some Anthony Bourdain style tips
about like when to order fish and salads in New York restaurants. I'll try to channel him the best
actually. 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
in a moment in time, right? Okay. Up until, let's just say the 1950s, let's just put it in the middle
of the 20th century. There was some produce that was coming in from across the country as I mentioned
earlier, coming in on 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 25% 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
one 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, they were good. Tracey grew them, they were delicious. Tracey
grew them in Connecticut. They were brandy wine. 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 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 going to 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 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 KKNP, 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
that 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.
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podcast. You mentioned one stat already about Hunt's point and you said roughly a quarter of
New York City's produce goes through there. I don't know much about it. I mean, my impression is
and I think it's the grocery store for grocery stores and this gigantic facility of produce,
but I don't give us a little bit more description of the role that Hunt's 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. I will answer that question, but I want to say first,
if you don't mind, fresh produce gets to New York City now today in 2023, one of three principal
ways. The going from sort of small scale to big scale. The small scale is, well, the small scale
is Tracy bringing you a few for brandy wine 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 100 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. The next level up
is the level that a wholesale marketplace such as the Hunt's 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 Hunt's point, produce terminal market. This is a project I've been working
on since 2002. So we're really ready to see a question. A wholesale market like could trace it,
even if it's wholesale, could we walk in there? Would we have to be like a licensed buyer for
Hunt's point or for the wholesale farmers market for either? Either both. Yeah. I mean, you,
let me mention how many tomatoes are you buying, Joe? Yeah. Let me just mention the third way
because 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. Okay. So your whole foods, your
dagiceno, seetown, whomever, 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. Okay. And then in fact, many in Cheshire, Connecticut
just so happens up through 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 it. 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 a step. How could you
hunt point how unusual, you know, just tell us a little bit more about how the terminal system
works? Sure. And can we buy from it? Right. So let me go back to answer that question. So
typically not, you're not going to go to Hunts 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 for me. Yeah, neither both of us can do that.
Okay. And then you would have to buy cases of product. All right. That might be the problem.
Maybe we should set up some sort of grocery cooperative and just buy cases of tomatoes every week,
June. I think we should start and share. You know what I think we should do? We should start,
what's a CSA like those like, it's like farm things, but, but our trick is we're just actually
going to the Hunts Point Market really early. That would be really bad. Yeah, no. 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 cantaloupe,
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,
they're Manhattan. They're called like Mr. Coco and Mr. Melon. You know those,
but they're produce stores, right? Yeah. But would those be the level in which they're
acquiring? Yes. Absolutely. And so those guys will typically send their own vans up to the Hunts
Point produce terminal market. They'll get an order. Maybe the order is preset 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 Hunts 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. Heat half is 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 going to be good. It's 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 on, 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, talked us about what are
the sort of controversies in the food network right now? Because you mentioned 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? If you go to the farmer's market, what is the hot topic of debate? Yeah, I mean
the hot topic of debate no matter where you 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 fruit desert at KKMP. In fact, policymakers in
New York have not used that term for many, many years. They're out of date. I'm sorry. That's okay.
We'll bring you up today. 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 insecurity. And people are food insecure
because 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 no, 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? Do you want to know why that is? Yeah, why that is is
more to do with the kind of technological and policy innovations throughout the 20th century.
So we're going back to the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s when 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 1920s 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, et cetera, things like that. So as the agriculture sector got more
industrialized, the number of ingredients got fewer. The food manufacturer is picked up on that
and started producing manufacturing what we now call highly processed food, right? High processed
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 we people ended
up consuming a very highly processed diet by the 1960s and into the 1970s, 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-invitiable 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.
Yeah. 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,
created an influx of housing for non-white people and supermarkets at the time or the stores that
were available. Basically, we're 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 a rural area away from
a grocery store and they don't have a problem with food insecurity. I mean, you know, somehow they
get their food, maybe they might not have a grocery store then 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 produce to them. 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.
In my mind, the way I was thinking about it was 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.
But to your point of a wealthy person living in the suburbs or 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.
Kind of like after the formal interview about how the kids were doing in this Head Start program
and the food that they were getting there and whether the parents thought that 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, you know, 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 the 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, we, and this was a while ago. So like before Uber, will
four of us will go in a taxi across the George Washington bridge to a supermarket in New Jersey
and stock up? We will take the subway down to Chinatown one day a week and 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. This was going to be kind of my next question, which is,
OK, 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, so I think what happened over maybe those years
from like the 60s or 70s 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. There's darn
TV dinners in the 80s. I mean, I'm guilty of this myself. I'm busy. I work. I have two kids.
It's like sometimes was cheap and what I can put into air fryer. Totally.
Yeah, totally. We can't be faulted for making our lives as easy as 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.
Further constraint. What's 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. Right. You have to plan your whole day and how many bags
you're going to be carrying by the end of the day. Right. That kind of thing. Let me just kind of
back up and say, you know, in probably starting in the 1920s, 1930s, 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
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 50s. 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
going to 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 they're struggling. 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.
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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 going to be stuck in traffic for a long time.
I understand trucks have refrigeration, etc. 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, etc.
Is it just difficult from 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 dinosaur-crazy. Is it just harder?
It's harder. Can you just talk about like those challenges?
Yeah, I can tell you. It is harder. It is harder. The Hunts Point Produce Terminal Market
was built in 1967 and that was an effort to take all those vendors that were selling wholesale
on Washington Street and put them indoors and put them in a market in a...
Is it cold in there?
In the market?
Yeah.
No.
Okay.
And it's not cold because the market is not completely cold chain compliant, which is one of the
top five reasons why it needs to be redeveloped and why it will be results.
So there are like, so there are issues.
There are issues, of course.
So you're going to find issues anywhere, 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 1967, so I can't say this from first-hand
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 56 years ago.
So the market...
Sorry, why?
Why what?
Why was it obsolete?
What did people identify right away that they say, you know, this is going to be a misunderstanding?
Just to your point, because 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 the now it's called the RFK bridge,
or the Deegan Expressway.
You're trying to get all these trucks, and that produce was being brought in more by truck
than by train.
So 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.
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.
No, there is a national law, which actually just went into effect a few years ago.
It's called the Food Safety Modernization Act, or 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 culture and compliance.
But I think to answer your question, if I could tell a little story.
Please.
So I was at the Hunts Point Produce Market one day, probably in 2009, let's say.
We were actually managing a program called the New York City Green Card 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 I, 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.
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 the way 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 culture and 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?
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, tomatoes
don't need to be refrigerated at the same degree of coldness as leafy greens, for example,
which really need to be at 39 degrees, I think it's 37 or 39 degrees, to stay crisp for as long as
possible. Tomatoes actually can be in a 50 degree room, a tomato ripening room, and there are,
and when you go to some of the vendors at Hunts Point have these, but more sophisticated
produce distributors like those that exist outside the market, Baldor 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 produce into the city. What about setting aside
the Hunts Point and the terminal? What about for the large grocery stores? That is, you say,
completely vertically integrated. They're vertically integrated in 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 super
market chains that feed New York are located in Cheshire, Connecticut. 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 our,
to the 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, you know, 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 macro level. On another kind of macro
level, in some ways climate change further gives a rationale. This 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
20th 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 50 miles and 100, then 150 miles around New York
City, which is generally the distance considered for local food, is either 150 miles or a day's drive.
There are two definitions, there's no technical definition, 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 broccoli, the spinach,
the whatever, the cornucopia of produce products, those farmers were in effect in competition
with farmers on the west coast who were being invested in by companies. And places like 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 understand a little bit
the seasonality of things and appreciating that great tomato when it's in season. And if it gets
too hot next summer, 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 tomato. So every year is a little bit like a crapshoot,
whereas in more controlled environments and controlled by pesticides, controlled by irrigation,
et cetera, you don't have as much 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 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. Tracey, you know where they don't have to worry about flooding
risk for agriculture? Where? Arizona. It's like, isn't it? We got to keep growing produce
with the Arizona desert. No surprise floods. You and Arizona, Joe, just go. But Joe, you know the
problem. Yeah, we've done, we've done many, we've done several episodes on the Arizona
program. Yeah, water. Yeah, this has been a great thing. Can I go back to the agricultural policy
issue that you described earlier, 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 there a political appetite or will to actually reconsider some of that?
You know, there, there is. I mean, I worked on a project exactly around this question and we
finished that project in 2018, I think, looking at a region called the Mid-South Delta, which is
about 90 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,
76% 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 is still happening, but the investments are
starting to like maybe make a turn there. What what's been happening in that region is because it's
a wet region and because 90% of the product is put on a barge 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 U.S. is a
huge white 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 76% of their,
of their, you know, 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
times. I have one small question and then one regular question. I know we just have a couple of
minutes left. Farmers markets, you mentioned them. I mean, I think you said they're about 100 in
New York City. I wish I had this. Something that we talked about. We talked about the big grocery
stores. We talked about maybe the more mid-sized 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 farmer's 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 farmer's markets here in New York City. I think they operate
60 or 70, maybe a few more farmer's 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 a super
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 80s and into the 90s. And then,
you know, by the end of the 90s, people at the New York State Department of Agriculture were
realizing, this is unsustainable, and not really the best way to transfer 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 2004, what we quantified was that there was a $200 million dollar demand for local food
among restaurants and retailers and distributors. And there was just 10% 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. Okay, so final question. And I don't, maybe this
isn't even, I'm going to frame this as a hypothetical question, but I know you've worked with
the white 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
it 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 I can not, this is not hypothetical.
No, it's not hypothetical. I would say the three things that the city is focusing on right now.
Yeah, is the rebuild of the Hunts Point produce terminal market because
20 years ago, it distributed 60% of the city's produce. And now it's a little bit, it's more like
20 or 25% that piece of infrastructure is critical for maintaining competition in the marketplace
and for enabling access 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. Right.
The other thing 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 to 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. I just on the Hunts Point upgrade. The one thing you mentioned is that
it's not that cold. What else sort of needs to be done? I mean, there's a lot. The biggest issue,
the biggest issue at Hunts 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 culture compliance issue and ease of merchandising
and selling and all of that, but it's 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 Produced Market, Produced Terminal Market 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. Sharon Carp, thank you so much. I learned so much
about how we get our produce. Really appreciate you coming on out on my pleasure. Yeah, that was
fascinating. Yeah, thank you.
Tracy, I'm still just mostly going to 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
all these 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 tomatoes 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 shrunk, then that really would create like this 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 free desert, but also
the discussion of some of the agricultural policy choices. Yeah. 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.
Yeah, we do. Especially when the when the when the farmers market is particularly in the wholesale
farmers market open. Yeah, the regional food. All right, all thoughts outing at 2 a.m. 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 AdLots 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 Armin and
Dashel Bennett at Dashbot and check out all of the Bloomberg podcasts under the handle at podcasts.
And for more AdLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash AdLots where we have transcripts, tracing
i blog and publish a newsletter every Friday. And for more, go to our discord discord.gg slash
AdLots. Lots of supply chain talk. In fact, this episode came out of requests. Someone wanted to
learn more about the cold chain, et cetera. And so I was like, I got on then. That's how we found
Karen. So check it out, not chat 24 7 with fellow AdLots listeners. And if you enjoy AdLots,
if you appreciate our discussions of cold chain storage, then please leave us a positive review
on your favorite podcast platform. Thanks for listening.
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