Grabbing a Slice of Latino Sales

It’s a daily ritual bordering on the obsessive, she says, but Los Angeles homemaker Marina Lopez can’t stay away from her local carniceria.

Every day, she carefully studies the long glass cases filled with fresh meat at the small Westlake neighborhood store. On this particular Wednesday afternoon, her eyes stop at the beef tongue, but she quickly rules it too expensive. After consulting her butcher--her carnicero--Lopez settles on ground chuck that will become her family’s dinner of albondigas, a meatball soup.

“Meat should be fresh so that it tastes good,” Lopez says, reflecting an attitude she acquired from going to the market every day in her native El Salvador. Carnicerias help her keep the tradition locally, she says.

The Latin-style butcher shops are an essential market stop for millions of local Latinos who know they can find the right carnes for any dish. The shops also are pushing the U.S. food industry to reconsider how fresh meat, particularly beef, is sold in Southern California.

Imitating these niche markets, large and medium-sized supermarket operators across the region are luring carniceria shoppers by stocking such specialized cuts as tripe, goat head and tongue and adding professional butchers to create full-service meat counters that buck the trend toward prepackaged, self-serve, warehouse-style food shopping.

“The Latino consumer is making a huge difference in the meat industry,” said Bruce Berven, executive director of the California Beef Council.

Californians spend $5 billion to $6 billion annually on beef, and about a third of that is spent by Latinos, Berven said. Industry market studies also indicate that Latino families eat beef more often (four to five times a week) than the general population (two times a week), and that a higher percentage of Latinos’ household incomes is spent on beef than in non-Latino households.

“We like our meat. I can cut back on other things, but I always have money to spend on food. And always with your food you have meat,” said Raul Morales, a taco stand owner near downtown L.A. who makes regular trips to carnicerias for his family and for his business.

Believed to have first appeared in the 1930s, carnicerias sprang from the need for fresh cuts of meat like those popular in Mexico. With few such butcher shops in Southern California, immigrant Latino families would travel to family-run stores each week for their grocery shopping but also found them to be cultural havens.

“They would cash their checks there, get to know the butcher, make friends,” said Steve Soto of the Mexican American Grocers Assn. Soon immigrant families started opening more carnicerias, and the stores became neighborhood staples with their helpful carniceros.

Also known as mini-markets or convenience stores that specialize in cortes latinos, or Latin cuts, the meat shops have flourished in heavily Latino neighborhoods. The Los Angeles-based Mexican American Grocers Assn. estimates there are about 4,800 independent carnicerias in the state, and the majority of them are in Los Angeles.

But the number of these local carnicerias is shrinking as supermarkets open stores in the same areas.

For the last 15 years, independent chains such as Superior Warehouses, Jon’s, Northgate’s, Tresierra’s and El Tapatio have picked up on the demand for fresh meat and have hired skilled butchers, which has helped push up sales in their meat and produce departments.

The full-service meat counters have become a mainstay at the 14-store Superior chain, where 65% of its customers are Latino. Meat sales make up 16% to 19% of same-store sales, said Phil Lawrence, the company’s vice president of meat and seafood operations. Some of the top sellers are milanesa (thin beef sirloin steaks), ranchera (beef flap steak) and diesmillo (boneless beef chuck).

Now, some of the major supermarket chains are working to catch up. Kroger Co., Vons Cos. and Albertson’s Inc. have begun adding special meat cuts and hiring butchers in certain stores. Some supermarkets have even added tortillerias, rolling out fresh tortillas, and panaderias, making fresh sweet bread.

“They’re growing this trend because the independent retailers have been successful,” Soto said.

During the last two years, full-fledged carnicerias have been added to Kroger’s Food 4 Less stores in Pomona, Bell Gardens, Pacoima, Highland Park, Westlake and Boyle Heights, said Terry O’Neil, spokesman for Food 4 Less. Carnicerias also have been added to the company’s Foods Co stores in Central and Northern California.

Food 4 Less’ warehouse-style stores offer low prices in return for less service, he said, so full-service meat counters go against their usual operations. In stores where customers are accustomed to reaching for their own boxes of cereal on top shelves and bagging their own groceries, friendly butchers now customize their meats.

“We discovered a lot of our customers bought their groceries with us but would go down the street to purchase their meat,” O’Neil said. “We wanted to provide full-service carnicerias modeled like the stores in Mexico and Central America. It’s been very successful.”

A well-stocked carniceria will offer everything from “flap” steak, an inexpensive cut from the belly used for stews and carne asada; freshly ground longaniza sausage for hearty breakfasts; bloody beef heads for moist barbacoa; leathery tripe for spicy menudo soup; and hefty beef tongues for tasty tacos. But the most important ingredient are the carniceros, the men behind the counter handling the meat who can be counted on to deliver any cut.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say a carnicero is just as trusted as a doctor. You depend on his knowledge for good cuts, for fresh meat. You trust they’re not selling you bad beef,” said Justo Frias, president of Gigante USA Inc., based in Santa Ana.

The Mexican-owned supermarket chain has stores in Arleta, Pico Rivera and Covina and is building a store in South-Central Los Angeles, keeping a Mexican feel throughout, especially at the store’s meat counters. Gigante has hired about 50 carniceros for its Southland stores, placing such a high value on their expertise that some butchers have been brought in from Mexico.

“A true carnicero is different from a meat cutter. A really, really good carnicero has to know how to cut and sell at the same time. It’s an art,” Frias said. “In most stores nowadays, you don’t have cuts with bones. A carnicero knows how to cut the bones in different ways. They know we like, we need, bones for certain dishes.”

For that reason and others, carnicerias are labor-intensive and would not work in every store. “The need is dictated by local markets, but yes, you will see more carnicerias,” said O’Neil of Food 4 Less.

Albertson’s has expanded its meat selection to attract Latino shoppers in about 100 of its Southern California stores by stocking such cuts as flap steak and pork butt, as well as marinated meats, spokeswoman Karen Ramos said.

All this has the entire meat industry taking note of the Latino market, said Jeremy Russell, director of communications for the National Meat Assn., based in Oakland.

The organization’s conference this spring saw more than 400 professionals from the $80-billion meatpacking and processing industry discuss how to reach Latino meat consumers, he said, asking about chorizo and special cuts. In Southern California, Los Angeles-based meatpacking company Farmer John introduced chorizo as its newest product in September after customers asked for it, said a company spokesperson.

“It’s still a niche market, but we’re looking for products. It’s a small market, but it’s big in California,” Russell said.

This summer, the California Beef Council is working with 150 carnicerias in the Los Angeles area in a $400,000 campaign to boost beef sales in the Latino market.

A similar promotion during the summer of 2000 helped increase meat sales by 5% in the participating Latino markets and carnicerias, said Berven of the beef council.

“It may not sound like a lot, but it’s more than one-third of our marketing budget,” targeting just the Los Angeles market, where about 60% of the state’s 11.5 million Latinos live, he said. “It’s a very specific market.”

The huge investment in this group of consumers is easy to explain because “it’s easier to produce incremental sales from your best customer than to try to get new customers,” Berven said. “The Latino is already a good customer. They purchase a lot of beef. They’re heavy beef users, and they are loyal. It’s easier to keep them.”

And if more Latinos are doing all of their shopping at the supermarket, including their meat buying, that means fewer are patronizing the small, mom-and-pop carnicerias.

“If you’re a shopper and you go to Albertson’s and shop and all of a sudden they have live butchers and 40 feet of fresh-cut meat at the same price, then more than likely you’ll stay there because you’re already doing 90% of your shopping there,” Soto said. “The little guy dies. It’s an end of an era of carnicerias.”

In the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, Arturo Kenneth Chavez, 53, wouldn’t disagree. He sits staring at the television set near his register where he mans the counter at Chavez Meat Market. The store, owned by his wife, Maria Chavez, is open, but few people seem to know it.

He misses the customers, he says, pointing to an empty space in front of the meat counter that is just about 5 feet long and houses few cuts. Another part of the meat counter now holds some cheeses. Gone is the butcher who used to work full time. Now he visits once or twice a week to stock the counter.

“There used to be a lot of familias around here, but now they’re gone,” says Chavez of his neighborhood east of downtown. They have been replaced by bohemian hipsters who don’t have a taste for tongue or tripe.

New stores that cropped around the neighborhood, including Vons, El Rancho Market, 7-Eleven and the 99 Cents Only Store, also have affected sales, Chavez says. The store used to make as much as $1,500 a day about three years ago, but now it nets about $300 a day. He supplements his income by helping manage an apartment building, and occasionally film companies will use the classic-looking convenience store to shoot commercials and movies.

“It’s dead here, but we’ve put in too much to quit now,” Chavez says. “I work from sunrise to sunset. I was ready to throw in the towel, but my wife has her heart set in this store.”