At L.A.’s New Wholesale Produce Mart, Tenants Already Saying: ‘Give Me Space’
In Thomas Suriya’s two sunset-colored murals, unveiled last week at the official dedication ceremony of the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market, giant shiny apples, avocados and cucumbers emerge from the desert and cascade into an orange crate.
The sense of abundance is fitting. Because there’s some real volume inside.
Twenty-seven fruit and vegetable wholesalers in the fully leased, $90-million facility are already clamoring for more space. And officials at the Laguna Niguel-based Birtcher, which built and operates the market, wish they’d had the foresight to recognize the demands of Los Angeles’ $1-billion produce industry.
“I guess we fell short. We could have done a lot more,” said Douglas Anderson, vice president of commercial and industrial development for Birtcher and head of the market project. “We could have easily bulldozed more buildings and built a facility 30% larger, and we would have it filled.”
Touted as the biggest and most modernized wholesale produce center in the nation, the 30-acre market on Olympic Boulevard, between Central and Alameda streets, was 100% leased when it opened for business June 30. It replaces the time-worn 7th and 9th street produce markets that had served the industry since 1908.
“We’d been looking to move into a larger facility for more than 30 years, and everybody was anxious,” said Art Lalonde, co-owner of Valley Fruit & Vegetable, one of the highest volume wholesalers and a former tenant of the 9th Street market. “We now have about four times the space. We’ve boosted our volume and have been able to carry more produce lines than ever before.”
Rents in the new market are double what wholesalers paid in their previous facilities, but modern equipment has enabled them to store more produce per square foot and save on labor costs.
Hundreds of semitrailers now line up to receive produce that is moved mechanically on pallets. Conveyor belts and refrigeration facilities are computerized to speed the handling of more tonnage. The 7th and 9th street markets were designed for horse-drawn wagons, and produce must be hand-carried into the non-refrigerated warehouses.
Jack Berlin, president of the Produce Market Advisory Committee until the project’s completion, estimates that volume has increased an average of 20% for each tenant. “But that is very conservative. We could be doubling the volume very shortly.”
Berlin notes that despite the pent-up demand, there is now no more room for the industry to grow east of downtown. The spaces vacated in the older markets have already been occupied by smaller wholesalers, and property in the area was bought up when word spread that the new market would be constructed.
While storage facilities continue to overflow, plans are being made to add more vegetables to the walls. Mickey Weiss, a produce industry veteran and financial sponsor of the murals, is negotiating with Suriya to paint artichokes, yellow-neck squash and other items on every trash bin.
“Nature gives and takes away,” Weiss said. “But on the rubbish disposal units, the food will always be overflowing. Just like in the market.”
