Produce Buying Locally in a Global Economy

Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of working in the Wedge produce department is our customers. Having customers who appreciate our great produce and the time we spend creating beautiful displays is almost expected, but having customers who also appreciate knowing where the produce comes from - that is truly special. Occasionally a customer will take us to task about a product's origin, and that's great. A clientele concerned about buying locally, sustainably, and economically fair is a dynamic clientele.

Here is a sample of the comments we receive: Where are the local organic apples? They must be out there! Why do you have California lettuce in July? How could offering bell peppers from Israel be a sustainable choice? Growing concern and feedback like this has led us to take a closer look at the produce we sell and the farms that produce it. We seek to balance the various concerns of our customers. After years of working the produce aisles at the Wedge, I have identified three types of shopper.

The first kind of shopper is the political shopper. She is concerned about where the food came from, whether it is organic, and the conditions for the farm workers. While this customer prefers organic, she might rather have a conventionally grown apple from a local farmer than an organic apple from 2,000 miles away. The second shopper is concerned above all about organics. Minimizing pesticide residue in the produce he eats is his top concern. He buys apples from Washington if that is the only way to get organic. The third shopper is looking primarily for quality. This shopper comes to the Wedge because we have the best produce in the metro area, year in, year out. She usually prefers organic, but won't hesitate to buy conventional produce if the quality is good. She shops our aisles looking for good fruits and vegetables. Other than price, this customer doesn't pay much attention to our signs.

Now let's look at how we balance the priorities of these different customers. We'll start with the summer season. This is a pretty easy time of the year. Our shelves are teeming with local lettuces; greens like kale, collards, arugula, mustard, and chard; beets and other roots; broccoli and cabbage; tomatoes; melons; and potatoes. Farmers from Gardens of Eagan, River Bend Farm, Avalanche Farm, and Featherstone Farm frequently make their deliveries to our store in person. Customers often grab produce from the shelf that was in the field just 12 hours before.

Yet even in summer there are circumstances that can frustrate customers. In July, for instance, our shelves will usually feature lettuce from California. The political shopper might be baffled that we have lettuce being trucked across country in the middle of summer. But there is a good reason. Lettuce grows best in a cool climate.

It likes temperate days and cool nights. The heads grow slowly in these conditions, sizing up nice and full. Lettuce grown in the Midwest's muggy, 90-degree days is fragile; the heads long and thin. While we buy local lettuce in June, by mid-summer we turn back to California to get a quality product that satisfies the other two customer groups.

Another struggle in the summer is the small amount of local produce out there for wholesale purchase. If the farmer with whom we arranged to buy cucumbers, for instance, has a pest problem or a flooded field, we have to scramble to find a back-up supplier. This can be tough to do on short notice. Any farmers we might approach made their crop decisions months ago. They already have customers waiting for their produce. We may get some cucumbers if it is a good year for them, or we may be out of luck. There simply isn't much of a surplus of local certified-organic summertime produce on hand for last-minute buying. In this scenario you may find California cucumbers on our shelf in August. This doesn't happen often, but it can occur, and it is to the dismay of all of us, customer and worker. At these times, the farmers' market is a good alternative.

As the summer ends, we see its last hurrah in tomatoes and melons. Tomatoes are always a difficult wait.

A July heat wave certainly suggests local tomatoes, yet they rarely arrive this far north before August. It would be nice to find some nice tomatoes, real tomatoes, earlier, maybe from Iowa or Missouri. But, assuming we could find an organic farm with tomatoes for sale beyond its local area, we would need to arrange transportation. And getting a truck to carry a trailer full of produce from California's giant agribusiness infrastructure is much simpler and more economical than arranging shipment from a 5-acre vegetable farm in southeast Missouri. It is an attractive thought, though. Tomatoes grown on a small scale and picked ripe 400 miles away would certainly taste superior to those grown on thousand-acre plots 2,000 miles away, picked green.

The arrival of autumn is always exciting in the produce department. Cooler weather has us eager to use our ovens again, and those cool nights sweeten up the squash, cabbage, and broccoli in the fields. Harmony Valley Farm's turnips, beets, rutabagas, and parsnips fly off our shelves. Sometimes we even get a second local lettuce season. But probably our most heralded fall items are local apples. But this season has gotten trickier in recent years.

Fall apple season was simple for us years back. Turkey Ridge Orchard in Gays Mills, Wisconsin supplied us with several varieties from September through Christmas. In addition, we made sure to have local conventional versions of traditional Minnesota favorites like Haralson, Fireside, and Sweet 16. Add to this a few conventionally produced heirloom apples from a small orchard in West Virginia (remember the Mountaineer and Nittany?), as well as some organic staples from Washington, and that was our apple season. As fall became winter, the local inventory would thin out or lose its crunch, and we would replace it with storage apples from Washington.

Circumstances have changed with our apple program, however. That little orchard in West Virginia stopped selling its apples outside its region. And, after a change in ownership, Turkey Ridge no longer grows apples for wholesale. They only press their apples for cider. This has left us looking around the area for other options. This fall we formed a relationship with a newly certified organic orchard called Breezy Hill. We bought everything they could sell us, including the Connell Red and the Greening apples. But other options are scarce, and this has led to a Washington-dominated apple section in the store.

It is difficult to produce a nice, big, unblemished organic apple in the Midwest. Our high humidity means fungus. One local apple grower told me he breaks his crop down into thirds - one third is pretty enough for store shelves, one third is good enough for pressing into cider, and one third is simply deer food. These are tough odds. Then add the time and money required to have your farm inspected and certified organic, and you can see why our choices are limited. There are other organic orchards around, but they are very small operations that sell most of their apples at their farm stand. If they do have a surplus available for wholesale, the Wedge, as a certified organic retailer, cannot sell these apples as organic without certification. I'm afraid the days of shaking growers' hands and trusting their word about their farm practices are gone for us. The organic food business has grown tremendously, and with this, for the good and for the bad, comes more regulation.

Next fall, if we can't find enough local certified organic apples to fill the demand, we will have some decisions to make. Shoppers with quality and health concerns will be satisfied with organic Honey Crisp and Pink Lady apples from Washington, along with the option for a nice tart local organic apple. But our political shoppers will be looking for more local options. At that point, we may need to consider dedicating more of our shelf space to conventional fruit if that's what it will take to feature more local apples. Stay tuned.

Winter and spring are obviously seasons with very little produce available from the Midwest. Local roots remain available from storage coolers for much of the winter. Squash and potatoes are around for some of the winter, depending on the summer's bounty. But with everything else, local becomes a relative term.

Much of our produce comes from Mexico and California all winter long. We also have options from overseas for part of the season. In these situations, sustainability versus quality becomes an issue. Nasty winter weather can destroy Cal/Mex crops and knock items like tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, or cucumbers off the market at times. At this point we can buy conventional if we wish to stay in our hemisphere. The sheer quantity of conventional produce out there makes dramatic shortages much less common. Or we can look overseas for organic produce from Holland, Belgium, Spain, or Israel.

Sometimes produce from both sides of the Atlantic is on the market. Then we have to choose between perfect but pricey food from these countries, versus cheaper Cal/Mex produce that looks, and possibly tastes, inferior. When we can, we like to offer both. But this can pose a challenge if it requires cashiers to make difficult distinctions between two types of pepper that have two very different prices. Sometimes we sticker items in these situations.

Other factors can also come into play. If we need to buy European peppers due to shortages in North America, it may make financial sense to add some European tomatoes so as to fill the minimum order. If food is going to come from half a world away, let's at least make sure it is coming in full containers. Of course, we could just not buy produce that comes from too far away. Let's imagine how that might play out.

If we commit to local only, our winter shelves would feature roots and squash, nothing more, I'm afraid. If we put a limit around 2,000 miles, we could have a department full of apples, pears, citrus, and vegetables from California, Florida, and Mexico. We could even probably squeeze in pineapples from Costa Rica. But Mexican organic banana production has dwindled in recent years, requiring us to buy from Peru and Ecuador. This would require raising the limit to 3 or 4,000 miles. The next stumble would occur around our supply of berries, grapes, and plums from Chile. Maybe people would consider making this sacrifice, but what about when the storage season for Washington apples and pears ends in late winter? Argentina provides us with pears and some apples during this time. Without a 6,000-mile range, we give up all those items from Chile and Argentina. Finally, all those Braeburn and Pink Lady apples we crunch in the spring and summer come from New Zealand. If we don't allow a 9,000-mile range, we're going to have very few apples on our shelves for several months of the year.

How many of us are willing to make these sacrifices?

The Wedge has always stayed pretty neutral about the products we sell. If customers don't like an item, they don't buy it. If nobody buys it, we stop carrying it. Some items may raise concern from enough customers for us to consider discontinuing them despite a reasonable following. Other co-ops take a stronger stand politically about the products they carry, and more power to them. That hasn't been the course the Wedge has chosen to take. In the produce department, we have focused primarily on organics. If we couldn't find it organically and locally grown, we were happy to bring in organics from afar. But we are in the process of strengthening our local commitment, and with it, fair trade practices, too. We have seen the fair trade label appearing on coffee for some time now, but what would fair trade produce mean?

Stay tuned. And in the meantime, keep giving us the feedback. Keep asking why we do or don't have something. Keep telling us what you would like to see offered. An informed, questioning clientele makes our job more interesting. And, after all, it is your co-op.