Watermelons Slowly Reappear in Area Markets

One week after reports of pesticide contamination prompted state health officials to order all watermelons harvested in California destroyed, the popular summer fruit is beginning to reappear in grocery bins across the state.

Watermelons bearing the required sticker of approval arrived early Wednesday morning at Hughes Markets in the Los Angeles area, and a spokeswoman for Vons Grocery Co. said the chain received its first deliveries Wednesday night. Lucky Discount Supermarkets will receive their first watermelons Friday morning, Judy Decker, a spokeswoman for the company, said.

State health officials ordered all watermelons pulled from grocery bins last Thursday after at least 280 people in California and four other Western states became ill from melons tainted with the pesticide aldicarb.

The state Department of Food and Agriculture ordered all harvested watermelons destroyed Monday and permitted only melons bearing special stickers to be sold. The sticker indicates that the fields from which the melons originated are free of aldicarb.

“I hope they’re safe now,” said Martha Hudson of Corona del Mar as she picked over a pile of watermelons in a local Albertson’s Food Center.

Hefting a large melon that bore the required sticker, she said, “I guess we’re going to find out pretty soon, aren’t we?”

Managers at the 350 Lucky stores in California were preparing Thursday for an initial slump in watermelon sales.

“At this point, they (the managers) are being rather cautious with it in terms of quantity until we understand how customers will react,” Decker said. “I would feel that initially customers would have some resistance to the product. But once they are assured it’s safe and they see the stickers, the confidence level will return to what it was before this occurred.”

A spokeswoman for Safeway Stores Inc., Linda Souza, said the chain is expecting low sales when the first watermelons are distributed Monday. “I would assume (sales) will be less because I’m sure there’s slight resistance at the consumer level,” she said.

Vons spokeswoman Suzanne Dyer said initial sales at the company’s 180 California retail outlets were less than half the normal level for this time of year. “There’s a little bit of apprehension in these early days after the recall,” she said.

At Brentwood Gourmet Foods in Brentwood, manager Sid Epstein said he is unsure when he will replenish his watermelon stock because he expects customer resistance. “My customers won’t even talk about the watermelon issue,” he said.

Ricky Pigee, an employee at Texas Watermelons on the corner of Avalon Boulevard and Manchester Avenue in Los Angeles, said normally generous patrons are apprehensive about buying watermelons.

Checking for Stickers

“They (watermelons) are just coming out, and (the customers) don’t know if they’re ready for them,” he said. “People are checking for the stickers, and they have more confidence when they see those,” he said.

Pigee said that before the pesticide scare, his company brought in about $290 a day in melon sales. Sales as of Thursday afternoon totaled only $34, he said.

One of the only supermarkets reporting increased sales of watermelons was the Hughes Market in Monterey Park, where manager Tom Schoch reported 144 melons snatched up before 5 p.m. Wednesday. The market was selling watermelons at 7 cents a pound, 12 cents lower than prices at Vons and 5 cents below Lucky’s price.

Los Angeles County agriculture officials, meanwhile, were supervising the examination and stamping of melons that had been kept in warehouses and truck trailers since the ban on sale and transport went into effect.

Jits Teruya, deputy agricultural commissioner for the county, estimated that nearly 800 tons of melons had been cleared for sale and marked with stickers in a fast-moving operation. Some of the melons, he said, became overripe and were rejected.

Arizona Melons Checked

He said paper work was used to determine which stored melons originated in California fields subsequently found free of aldicarb.

Melons from Arizona were being tested and stamped with a different sticker. It reads, “This commodity has been inspected by the state of Arizona and approved for human consumption.”

Mexican watermelons arriving in the county were tested by federal workers and stamped with the same sticker used on California fruit.

Texas and Oklahoma melons were still not being allowed on the market in California on Thursday. Officials said they were not satisfied that those states had established a method to test the fruit for aldicarb.

Meanwhile, state officials announced that 43 more fields had been found to be free of aldicarb, meaning that melons from them can be harvested, stickered and sold. The testing of melon patches is expected to take a week.

Times staff writers Carla Rivera and Sebastian Dortch in Los Angeles and Gary Jarlson in Orange County contributed to this story.