Open Produce has joined the Web 3.0 revolution, by broadcasting a Twitter feed! Expect mention of new products, eye-popping sales, and random store anecdotes. If you use Twitter yourself, you can just follow @openproduce. If you don’t use Twitter, you can visit the feed directly or just check the right-hand side of our blog page, where you can see recent posts. Feel free to message us (@openproduce) with requests, suggestions, and questions.
I read this article in the New York times a few weeks ago, entitled “How Green Is My Orange?”:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/business/22pepsi.htm
It outlines some of the difficulties associated with trying to determine the carbon footprint (or, in fact, any other environmental footprint) of consumer products. One problem is that a lot of that data is hidden or not easily accessible (how many pounds did the truck haul, how many gallons of gas did it use, how many miles out of its way did it go to deliver to your store, etc.). Another problem is to know where to stop: Do we count fuel used by farmers to power their tractors? How about the fuel used to operate tanker trucks to deliver the fuel to the farmers? What about the fuel used to fly an oil company executive to the Middle East to secure a contract for more oil, which was then used to make the gasoline? In what could be described as the reverse corollary to the Butterfly Effect, an unimaginable tree of events transpired to bring any product to any particular storefront. Even the environmental cost of preparing such a report should theoretically be considered in the report itself.
The market is supposed to collapse all of this complexity and history into a single number: the price. But the problem is that, with conflicting moral views and priorities, some consumers inevitably won’t agree with the way in which the complexities were collapsed (e.g. Should pollution be taxed? Should the government subsidize oil drilling?), and will demand more information about the history of their product. But exactly how much information the bulk of consumers want — and are willing to pay for — has not exactly been settled. I fear that catch-all, broad labels such as “organic” and “local” will suffer the same fate as price — just as suppliers often sacrifice the environment or human welfare to drive down price, they could just as easily (and often do) sacrifice the environment or human welfare to satisfy requirements for labeling their products “local” or “organic”. At the same time, metrics complex enough to provide the information necessary to make informed decisions remain elusive. It’s a difficult problem, and one I don’t think is going to be solved quickly or easily.
Every crisis is an opportunity, and we took the crisis of our truck breaking down (with an estimated $1,400 repair bill) as an opportunity to try to get as much delivered as possible. The hardest part, we thought, would be finding affordable and good-quality produce. However, that problem solved itself when we worked out a wholesale agreement with Hyde Park Produce up on 53rd street. We would run into Larry or his father, Yo-Yo, at the produce market in the morning anyway, and now for a small mark-up they are delivering boxes of produce (and smaller amounts of loose greens, which were not able to carry before) to us four times a week.
After two weeks, this seems to be working out well. We’ve been able to maintain our breadth of inventory (even expanded it), and we are committed to using the money saved from truck expenses to cover the small mark-up (about $1/box) rather than raising prices. Plus now we have an eye with 20-years experience in the retail produce business picking our produce, which will probably result in higher quality.
We plan on going to the market at least once a month in a rented vehicle, to maintain our relationships with the wholesalers and keep our ear to the ground regarding the produce world.
On the shelf: fractal broccoli (Romanesco) — check out the Wikipedia page. Also pomegranates, pears (ya, green d’anjou, red d’anjou) for $1/lb., blood oranges $2/lb., organic braeburn apples and jonagold apples (plus conventional honeycrisp, cripps pink, and granny smith apples), Looza juices, tubs of nuts and dried fruit.
Lots of snow outside; here’s what’s inside Open Produce this weekend:
On the shelf: Okra (much-requested), leeks, brussels sprouts, meyer lemons (a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange), cantaloupe ($2.25 each), Napa cabbage ($2 each), and some Chilean cherries. I am usually disappointed by South American fruit (because it is picked unripe and shipped), but these cherries are truly delightful, and at $6.50 for a two-pound box, how can you say no? Also, for the weekend, blueberries (South America) and strawberries (Florida) are $2 a box!
I had an excellent salad the other day. You should try it out:
- chopped fuyu persimmon
- chopped fragrant pear
- arugula
We have plenty of all three ingredients here at Open Produce. You can add the following if they suit your taste:
- chopped walnuts
- crumbled goat cheese
If you end up trying this out, let me know how you like it. Also, feel free to post a comment with salad suggestions you would like to share with the other readers.
On the shelf (besides the above): Cripps Pink apples, cherries, pineapple, 10 types of tomato sauce, reed’s ginger beer, san pellegrino sodas (orange, lemon, chinotto), organic butter, organic yogurt, basil.
It seems as if everyone is back in town and business is picking up again. The bad news is that our truck is broken with a 4-digit repair quote, so we are going to try to move to having things delivered as much as possible to see if we can dispense with the need for a truck. This will require reconfiguring how we do things a bit, and sinking more money into a larger stash of inventory in back, and possibly investing in such luxuries as a storage fridge in back. Hopefully this change will be mostly invisible to everyone but us. Except, perhaps, that you may see some odd scenes such as one that occurred last night: Andrew, along with 7 boxes of goods from Chinatown on a two-wheeled cart, taking the red line and #55 bus to get to the store.
I would like to take a moment to ask you, dear customer, to stop by Yelp.com or any other review sites you use and write us a quick review. We think this would help us out.
On the shelf: Ya (”Yali”) pears, papaya, collard greens, strawberries, blueberries, navel oranges, asian gummy candy, wide variety of asian noodles (oat flower, black wheat, etc.), mixed nuts, chesnuts, kiwi.
I know numbers are boring, so just a quick run down: our gross sales for October and November were about $18,000 per month. Assuming an average mark-up of 30% on our food (in reality it varies between -20% and +100%, depending on the item), and neglecting “shrinkage” (spoilage and theft), that means net monthly sales are about $4,500. Our fixed costs are rent ($1700), a full time employee ($1300), and utilities and insurance (about $600). There are some other costs, like sales tax and medicare payroll tax, but this is just a rough outline. This leaves us with a “surplus” of $900, which needs to cover any mistakes, spoiled fruit, fridge repairs, capital expenses, truck-related expenses (gas, repairs, insurance), and, ideally, a salary for me and Andrew. Not quite enough.
Our goal for the next three months is to increase our average daily sales from $600 to at least $800 and see what we can do about cutting some of our costs, perhaps our employee or our truck or something else. If, for instance, our daily sales were $800 and we had no employee, our “surplus” would be $3700 — enough to live on and re-invest in the store, in the form of capital improvements and an operating cushion of cash.
On the shelf: lots of ready-to-eat and frozen Indian food, fuyu persimmons, blueberries ($2), kettle chips, little peaches, fragrant pears from China (ask to try one for free), lots of other types of pear.
Oh yeah, we may open a little late on January 1st, and Medici Bread and Metropolis Coffee will be back on our shelves on January 2nd.
Our sales dropped so low over late December (we hit $50 gross sales one day, down from $600 average for November) that we decided to close for a few days. Between the University’s break and lots of other people taking their vacation, it just wasn’t sustainable for us to stay open, and the time has instead been spent on some much needed rest and time to attend to other tasks by me and Andrew. Also, our employee, Beth, has returned to her pre-Open-Produce life as a college student, so for now it’s just me and Andrew running the store until we decide we need to hire someone else.
We’ll open back up on the morning of December 30th, in time for all of you to do your shopping for your New Year’s Eve Party. We’ll also probably have a late start the morning of January 1st, since everyone should hopefully be celebrating the holiday instead of shopping.
On the shelf: not much!
A lot of people (including our landlord) have asked us why we are keeping our door open now that the weather is cold. The answer is that we want to keep our store around 60 degrees, to keep the produce fresh. This is about the same temperature you’ll find in the produce departments of big grocery stores, like Treasure Island (I recently measured it at 62 F). Anything below 55 hurts things like tomatoes and bananas (and employees!), so whenever the temperature in the store drops into the mid-50s, we close the door until it warms up above 60 again. Even if we didn’t have produce to worry about, we’d want to keep it in the 65 F range anyway just to keep our customers in coats from overheating.
Don’t worry: our heaters are completely turned off and have been the whole season. The only thing that heats the store back up are its adjacent walls (made of brick), the lights, the people (about 100 watts per person), and the compressors on our fridge and freezer. Any marginal additional fuel consumed to heat the surrounding retail or residential spaces that might be slightly cooled by having a 60-degree neighbor are certainly offset by the reduction in the amount of produce that rots before we can sell it (that produce has still accrued environmental costs in the form of transportation and cooling before it reached our shelves). We’d really like to get off-board compressors for our fridge/freezer that sit in the basement or outside — they are more efficient and would make the store quieter — but the initial capital costs are very high. At any rate, our glass-doored fridges are much more energy efficient than those open coolers you’ll find in most supermarkets.
On the shelf: organic carrots (with greens still attached), beautiful organic spinach in bunches, organic beefsteak tomatoes, key limes, eggplant, pomegranates, clementines, tuna (cactus fruit), pineapples, egg nog, silk nog (vegan egg nog), hummus, sparkling cider, Tofurkey sausages.
A handful of people have cornered me, Andrew, or one of the employees over the last few weeks and expressed concern about whether the operation of our store is crime-conscious enough for Hyde Park. Given that two businesses on our block (Quick Snacks and Cornell Dollar) have been broken into in the last two weeks, I thought now might be a good time to write a little about our thoughts.
One concern seems to be that we sometimes have female employees working the checkout counter, sometimes (gasp!) even after dark. Several people have suggested that we only schedule men to work after a certain time, or have a man around whenever we have a woman on duty. This is really backwards thinking. It is huge regression in gender equality to assume that women are less suited to deal with something than men, and we are not going to play that game. All of my employees know that they can talk to me or Andrew if they are uncomfortable working at a certain time of day, and we will work something out. This has, in fact, happened — no need to stereotype based on gender.
Another concern seems to be that we are open till 11pm, which is later than most places on the block. This is on purpose. Hyde Park is full of night owls who keep weird hours and are afraid to go out at night because there are no people around. There are no people around because there are no businesses open late. Likewise, because there are no people out late, businesses see no reason to stay open late. It’s a chicken-and-egg problem, and we are eager to push the envelope a little bit. Andrew and I have lived here for over half a decade and are well familiar with the crime patterns in east Hyde Park, and in addition I grew up here and remember Hyde Park of the ’80s — and I have no desire to steer our neighborhood back in that direction by keeping conservative hours and putting metal bars over my windows.
To address a third common concern (one that I shared), we have replaced our cash box with a hefty cash drawer that can lock (the kind that normally sits under a cash register). This also clears up room on the check-out counter for people to set their baskets or items, the lack of which was something which had been bothering me (and some of you) for a while.
On the shelf: Grass Point Farms milk ($3.50 for a half-gallon), fresh cranberries, raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, radiccio, mixed nuts in shells, canned pumpkin, Jerusalem artichoke, clementines in boxes, pre-fried tofu, sparkling cider, and sweet potatoes on sale for 40 cents a pound. We also have 6-packs of cinnamon rolls for $4. Their frosting has a slight citrus twang that makes me eat them for breakfast regularly. You should, too.