Midnight in a Garden of Green

It is midnight at the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market and the chilly air clangs with the cacophony of truck pistons. Men are everywhere on the white-lit loading docks, bending over to sniff crates of bok choy, injecting probes into mangos and melons, careening out of semitrailers and massive freezers in carts and forklifts, haggling amid moist boxes in Spanish, Armenian, Korean and Mandarin Chinese.

As one city dreams, another city, churning out all our future double-coupon sales, breakfasts on the run and grand banquets, awakens at 8th and Alameda streets.

Each day, 600 truckloads arrive here, carrying produce from Salinas, Texas, Florida, Utah, Chile, New Zealand and beyond. Annually, more than $1.5 billion in fruits and vegetables flows through these clamorous warehouses. The players and the products constantly change, as demographic shifts introduce new tastes.

Outside the Ramirez Bros. warehouse, a Corona vegetable market owner named Issam Kirrish is trying to talk down one of Ramirez’s produce brokers, Jose Viramontes, on a batch of chiles. “What are you doing with the jalapenos?”

Viramontes says he wants 55 cents a pound.

Kirrish is incredulous: “55? Come on!”

“OK, 50.”

“Put it at 45 cents. Come on, man!”

Kirrish has been coming to the market every morning for five years to buy produce for his store. His main customers, he says, are Cambodians, Vietnamese, Middle Easterners and Latinos. “This is where we all come,” he says, giving Viramontes a rough embrace. “I couldn’t do business without this place.”

Los Angeles’ oldest wholesale markets have been around since the city’s founding and have always catered to small businesses. But by the 1970s, the region had grown so populous and ethnically diverse that the wholesalers outgrew the old markets and threatened to relocate to cheaper facilities in Bell or Orange County.

In response, then-Mayor Tom Bradley envisioned the $90-million downtown produce market, which would be financed by federal and city agencies and private entities. The market, completed in 1986, is jointly owned by 25 of the 36 wholesalers. In all, 5,000 drivers, loaders and others work here. The world’s largest private food bazaar is a window into Los Angeles’ polyglot origins and a presage of the coming century. Its owners are mostly third- and fourth-generation American Jewish, Korean, Mexican, Japanese and Italian families who are holding their own even as large chains edge out smaller wholesalers in other cities.

The downtown produce market and its independent clients have survived by responding to demographic trends and changing tastes more quickly than large chain stores, said Roberta Cook, a UC Davis produce market economist.

Ramirez Bros., one of the newer wholesalers at the market, is a leading U.S. importer of Mexican wholesale produce, with sales topping $40 million a year. Co-owner Alvarro Ramirez, 37, says nearly all of his customers are Latino-owned businesses.

Ramirez’s family has been in the produce business for three generations and now hauls 10 truckloads a day of fresh fruits and vegetables from family-owned farms in Baja California. Ramirez says he sees no reason to seek a broader customer base as long as the Mexican American market continues to grow at its current pace.

Pat Morita, the only female landlord at the market, inherited an apple cart from her Japanese forebears. Now Morita Produce Co. reports sales of more than $20 million a year. Many of her customers are immigrant business owners who prospered as she prospered. “Half of my customers are the same customers we had 50 years ago.”

Some of the wholesalers have used their long-cultivated ethnic niches to find new markets, like introducing traditionally exotic produce into mainstream and gourmet retail shops. Others are translating their familiarity with immigrant communities into business relationships abroad.

Fifty years ago, John K. Dunn’s grandfather, a Korean American immigrant, established a small produce store that targeted Asian communities in the Sawtelle district of West Los Angeles. When Dunn’s father, Kenny Dunn, inherited the business, he turned that store into Coast Produce Co., a wholesale company, and moved into the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market in the 1980s. Now John Dunn has transformed Coast into a leading produce exporter to South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Coast also identifies and markets specialty items to larger American chain stores. “We try to find good candidates for mainstream retailers,” said Coast spokeswoman Jinju Wilder. “Then we’ll do nutrition cards, we’ll educate the stores’ employees on how to use a new vegetable, how to cook it, how to display it in a store, how to have a dialogue with consumers.”

Wholesale produce remains an old-fashioned industry. There is no such thing as www.lawholesaleproducemarket.com. Most of the market owners still wake up in the middle of the night to drive to the produce market and conduct business face-to-face. The wholesale business is overwhelmingly male. Seniority, if not outright primogeniture, determines who runs most businesses. Most transactions are done in cash. Receipts are written by hand. Prices are memorized and can change with the weather.

By 3 a.m., the Banana Co. looks like something between a Wall Street trading floor and a Babylonian marketplace. Bill Wood, a buyer for the Food Ranch Apple Market of Industry, likes the price of the red apples--$4 per crate--but thinks the gold apples are a little steep at $5. “If you can give me $4 for the reds, you can give me $4 for the golds.”

Senior salesman Albert “The Cuban” Alonso won’t deal. “Naw. Can’t.”

“Come on. . . . Can I get any kind of break on the gold?” The Cuban doesn’t budge, not for $4, not for $4.99. Even when deals are done by the ton, this is a nickel-and-penny business--everything counts. “You guys are dealing tough this morning,” Wood says, but he finally relents.

By 6 a.m., things are starting to slow down on the loading docks. Most of the trucks have loaded up and are well on their way. Maintenance workers sweep away mango pulp and peanut shells, banana peels and lemon juice from the grotty concrete. Most of the warehouses start to roll down their doors.

In the second-story offices of the market, however, there is a second flurry of commerce. The sellers have now become the buyers, barking into phones, ordering tons of produce to sell the next morning or the next week. Buying produce is tricky work, says Mark Tanimura, whose family established I&T; Produce after the Japanese internment. If a company orders too much of one thing or another, it could rot in the warehouse.

Weather reports say a cold snap may be on the horizon in California as well as Florida and Texas, two major produce suppliers. If crops freeze, prices will rise (even the threat of a freeze may cause prices to climb), so many wholesalers around the market are planning to order more food than usual.

I&T;’s Tanimura is being cautious, though. He’ll wait until the reports are more definitive. “I think we’ll just do what we always do.”

Back at the Banana Co., however, Armen Karapetian, head of the company’s citrus department, has used the reports to justify price increases--from $10 for a box of oranges to $11. He is also working the phones, placing orders at a furious pace to make sure he will be able to ride out a short freeze, if it comes to pass.

“You can make good money in this business,” says Karapetian, a fast-talking deal-maker whose family fled the Soviet Union 50 years ago to give capitalism a try. “This whole industry is just like the stock market, but with perishables. Plus, what other business would give me so much time with my family? I love it.”

Yet many here say the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market, with its long nocturnal shifts, is often a marriage-breaker.

“You give up your life to come here,” says Morita, a divorced mother of two teenage boys. “I don’t have any other life other than the market.”

David Settani, 52, has been buying produce for independent stores at the wholesale markets for more than 20 years and says he wants to retire soon.

“I’ve been married twice. I have a girlfriend now, but I never see her because I go to bed at 2 [p.m.] and she comes home at 5 [p.m.],” Settani says. “You don’t have a life in this business. You basically give up everything to make money.”

But Settani said the money can be good for produce brokers on commission. Some take home as much as $200,000 a year with benefits.

“What other business can you make that kind of money without a college degree?”