Why Fruits and Veggies Are So Crazy Cheap in Chinatown
Metro Money’s Anne Kadet finds out how green grocers can sell their produce at rock-bottom prices
People shop at one of Chinatown’s many green grocers along Mott Street PHOTO: PETER FOLEY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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Last week, while shopping at a tiny produce market on Mott Street, Giselle Isaac found a crazy bargain: fresh ginger for 50 cents a pound. She promptly stuffed a plastic bag to bursting with the pungent root.
“I’m West Indian and we make a lot of ginger beer,” she explained. “This is the cheapest I’ve seen ginger in years.”
Ms. Isaac, a teacher’s assistant, lives way up in the Wakefield section of the Bronx, but she is one of the many New Yorkers who frequent Chinatown for fruits and vegetables. “The food is fresher,” she said, “and Chinatown is way cheaper.”
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I never gave Chinatown’s crowded produce markets a chance; I figured the prices were cheap because the selection is all C-grade bok choy and yesterday’s bananas.
Wrong again! I toured the markets with Valerie Imbruce, an economic botanist who spent more than a decade researching the community’s produce supply chain. She even wrote a book on the topic, “From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown’s Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace.”
Her discovery: Chinatown’s 80-plus produce markets are cheap because they are connected to a web of small farms and wholesalers that operate independently of the network supplying most mainstream supermarkets.
Most of the city’s fruits and vegetables come from wholesalers at the Hunts Point Produce Market, the South Bronx distribution hub boasting all the color and accessibility of La Guardia Airport. Chinatown’s green grocers, in contrast, buy their stock from a handful of small wholesalers operating from tiny warehouses right in the neighborhood.
Chinatown’s Jack Fruit, Fuzzy Squash and Baby Shanghai Choy
A trip through Chinatown’s markets with Valerie Imbruce, author of ‘From Farm to Canal Street’
Because the wholesalers are in Chinatown, they can deliver fresh produce several times a day, eliminating the need for retailers to maintain storage space or refrigeration, said Ms. Imbruce.
Indeed, Chinatown’s green grocers make Costco look like Dean & DeLuca. Some are mere sidewalk stands renting space in front of a nail salon or a drugstore.
Shelves are typically made of plywood and lined with newsprint; prices are hastily marked on strips of cardboard. Shoeboxes serve as cash registers. The scales are still analogue, and good luck using a credit card.
All this translates into low overhead for the retailers—and low prices for shoppers. The typical Chinatown produce markup is just 10% to 12% over wholesale, said Wellington Chen, executive director of the Chinatown Partnership Local Development Corp.
The markets, Mr. Chen said, further reduce prices by negotiating bulk discounts from wholesalers. “They chip in together and split a truckload,” he said.
Ms. Imbruce introduced me to two of her favorite destinations: the 40-foot sidewalk fruit stand on Mulberry Street just south of Canal Street, and the vegetable stores on Mott between Grand and Hester streets.
I made a little chart to compare prices with my neighborhood Key Food. In almost every case, Chinatown’s prices were less than half what I would pay at the supermarket. Among the bargains: broccoli for 85 cents a pound, $1 each for pomegranates, oranges for a quarter.
After 5 p.m., impromptu vendors haul cartons of cauliflower and cherries from graffiti-covered vans out to the sidewalk, hoping to sell excess inventory before day’s end. I saw just-ripe bananas selling for 50 cents a pound.
Some of the best bargains can be found on day-old produce, at the sidewalk stands on Forsyth Street in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge. Here, $8 buys a 20-pound box of mangos.
Bargains also vary from day-to-day. On Monday, the market was flooded with cartons of fresh raspberries for a buck each.
For Ms. Imbruce, the fascination isn’t the low prices but the incredible variety—more than 200 fruits and vegetables including jack fruit, fuzzy squash and her favorite, baby Shanghai Choy. Where does it come from?
Rather than contracting with large, industrial farms, it turns out, Chinatown’s wholesalers often buy from small, family farms specializing in Asian vegetables, including backyard “home gardens” in south Florida, and oxen-plowed plots in central Honduras.
Ms. Imbruce knows shoppers often equate low prices with exploitation, but that isn’t what she saw on the more than 75 farms she visited. The farmers, she said, were pleased to be growing for the Chinatown wholesalers because they could cultivate an array of crops, leading to economic and agronomic stability.
“Some said it was the best situation they’d had in a long time,” she said.
That is reassuring, but my favorite part of shopping in Chinatown is the adventure. I bought a single cherry from a sidewalk vendor selling Bings for a quarter. I got a kick out of the Asian clerk who told me the leafy green choy I asked about was “Chinese lettuce.” I bought spiky dragon fruit and woolly rambutan that served as scary additions to my fruit bowl.
“It’s just a fun, happy place to go,” said Ms. Imbruce. “And it’s always bustling.”
