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Los Angeles: Produce
Sourced From All Over the World
‘City of angels’ boasts fruits and vegetables as diverse as its people.
LBy Bob Johnson
os Angeles native Alan Pollack, general manager at Coosemans Los Angeles, has seen a new produce world grow up around him in the more than 35 years he has been in the business.
Cooseman’s Los Angeles, which has been importing produce since the early 1980s — when Los Angeles native Pollack and Belgian-born entrepreneur Herman Van den Broeck would pick up loads of Belgian endive at the Los Angeles airport and load it into Van den Broeck’s Cadillac for delivery — went independent from Cooseman’s Inter- national around the turn of the century.
“I’ve been doing produce in Los Angeles for about 35 years, since 1981, when I worked for a purveyor who sold to restaurants,” says Pollack, who has been with the company from the beginning. “On the market today we sell mostly to purveyors who sell to restaurants.”
Although Coosemans Los Angeles and its sister company Coosemans L.A. Shipping, Inc., went independent, the operation is more international than it was in the 1980s.
“We’ve got produce coming in from all over the world,” says Pollack. “Before, it was Mexico, Belgium and Italy, but with the changes in the packaging and transportation, we are able to keep global supplies fresh for weeks while it ships. We ship all over the United States and into Canada and parts of Central and South America. We are a hub for the whole country.”
California produces more than two-thirds of the fruits in the country and more than a third of the vegetables, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, and Mexico grows more than 40 percent of all the produce imported into the country.
A sizable portion of this bounty comes through Los Angeles before heading back out to the rest of the nation and beyond.
State Highway 101 runs from downtown Los Angeles north to the elds of the Salinas and Pajaro Valleys that yield most of the lettuce, spinach, broccoli, cauli ower, straw- berries, blackberries and raspberries grown in the entire country.
Highway 5 travels north from the heart of town to nearby San Joaquin Valley orchards that yield most of the country’s fresh-market citrus, almonds and pistachios, and a healthy harvest of tomatoes, peppers and squash. To the south, the highway connects to the winter vegetable elds of Mexico.
And then there is the Port of Los Angeles, which the locals call America’s Port. Chicago may be the city of broad shoulders, but the
dock workers in ‘Tinseltown’ manage to unload more produce than their counterparts anywhere in the world.
“ e Port of Los Angeles processed 833,568 Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units (TEUs) this past July, which was the busiest July in the Port’s 111-year history,” according to the facility’s website. “ e cargo volumes exceeded July 2017, the previous record, by 4.6 percent.”
is unique combination of unrivaled nearby agricultural productivity and modern facilities to move it by truck, boat or airplane make this city uniquely positioned to receive and ship produce.
“Los Angeles is becoming the consol-
MARKET PROFILE
PRODUCE BUSINESS / OCTOBER 2018 / 155
LOS ANGELES