As Joe Amaro rounds the corner, the breadth of the Ontario Food Terminal (OFT) spreads out before him, the 1.74 million-square-foot facility roiling like a large, concrete ant farm at 8am on a Wednesday, as it is every morning. The largest produce distribution centre in Canada and the third largest in North America, it’s a U-shaped strip mall comprised of 21 produce wholesalers with 80,000 square feet of cold storage space — and a farmer’s market with more than 500 stalls — surrounded by a parking lot the size of three NFL football fields. Some vendors inside the building specialize in citrus fruits or root vegetables, but most carry a bit of everything. Hundreds of local wholesalers like Joe (who represents Augusta Fruit Market, a restaurant supplier) show up every day to haggle over the price of grapes or tomatoes or limes.
You’ve probably never been here, and maybe you’ve never even heard of it. But chances are the salad you had for lunch passed through the OFT. Joe may have even brought it to the people who sold it to you. Without getting existential, the OFT is the answer to the question, “Where does our food come from?” The majority of the fruits and vegetables that enter Toronto from points near and far make a stop here. Conglomerate-owned grocery stores like Loblaws and franchise restaurants such as McDonald’s deal directly with growers, who produce exclusively for them. But everyone else — the restaurant down the street, the vegetable market on the corner — gets their food here. Even the big guys sometimes supplement their supply with produce from the OFT.
This fortress of produce, provincially owned and operated by an arms-length crown agency, has its own garbage collection system and police force and provides employment for an estimated 42,000 people. Situated between the Gardiner and the Queensway, the 40-acre mini-state is surrounded by chain link and barbed wire, quite defensible from land or sea assault. In 1952, Toronto’s original distribution centre, the St. Lawrence Market, burnt to the ground. Already hemorrhaging to meet the demands of our growing city, its departure paved the way for the OFT, completed in 1954.
For a newcomer, the haggling may be a surprise. Some vendors are coy, beginning their negotiation like the sale of a Persian rug, replete with perfunctory observations regarding the weather or traffic or imploring the buyer for sympathy: “Joe, I’m trying to put steak on my table. You gotta buy something today!” Others bark their numbers before even saying hello, quoting the price of cauliflower while extending a hand in greeting or just shouting across the room over the roar of diesel engines. Everyone carries a little notepad and pen, quoting prices in rapid-speak like on a stock exchange floor. Except, rather than proxy slips, they trade tangible, perishable goods, which are immediately loaded onto trucks.
Stocky, scowling men breathe through cigarettes while zipping along the loading dock on forklifts carrying up to 2,000 pounds of produce. Joe roots through pints of cherry tomatoes, picking out the best. He climbs up to get a peek inside a container of watermelon so huge it would crush him if it toppled. Going through flats pint by pint, he cites off-quality merchandise to justify his lowball offer. Or combines the best from different batches to validate a high asking price. In this fashion, Joe makes his way around the OFT, ducking in and out of vendor’s stalls, sometimes for just a moment (“Chanterelles are coming tomorrow Joe!”), other times spending a few minutes with purveyors not just to haggle over today’s crop but to put future purchasing wheels in motion (“I’m gonna be looking for 15 cases of radicchio this weekend Carlos. Are you gonna have those Friday morning?”).
Today Joe is on a quest to pay less than $19 a case for romaine hearts. It starts at Streef Produce where he tests the waters with Santino. “How much you want for romaine hearts?”
“Nineteen dollars.”
“I’ll give you $16.”
Santino shakes his head. Joe cracks open a case of lettuce. He spreads one head out to see the core. He’s not happy about its crispness. “Pass.”
“If we had a complaining building here it would be open 24 hours a day,” says Santino.
At Ippolito, Joe wants to know if the frisée is blond or green. It’s green (and a little bitter), having been picked prematurely to meet sales demands. He passes. The air is thick with sugar at Italian Produce Company. Though chilled to 4ºC, there are so many berries in the room, it smells like someone’s baking a pie. Barry at Morris Brown & Sons doesn’t cut any deals with Joe; not with lemons at $42 a case (compared to a standard $19). At Provincial Fruit, dedicated almost entirely to mainstream fruit, Joe buys bananas and blood oranges. His romaine quest ends at Mel-O-Ripe where he agrees to pay $17.50 a case.
After an hour of shopping, he heads back to the van, where the forklift people are beginning to deposit orders. Another half hour is spent waiting as each vendor shows up with a delivery and invoice. He clamps down the rear of the van and heads toward the city, where the goods will be unloaded into Augusta’s subterranean warehouse, to be broken down for the afternoon’s orders for restaurateurs.
Joe is one of many middlemen through whose hands our produce passes. Nothing much beyond leeks grows out of Ontario’s ground this time of year — there are some local potatoes, beets and rutabagas available, but they’re all fall harvests, stored in soil by the farmer over the winter. Berries come from South America during our winter. As the spring arrives, Mexico’s produce begins trucking up here, then California’s, New Jersey’s and finally, about halfway through our summer, Ontarios. We only start planting tomatoes on May 21.
The plague on these businesses is the rising cost of fuel. Produce arrives from all over North America by truck. The cost of shipping is folded into the price of the produce. Soaring fuel prices have, in recent years, seen the shipping cost of one truckload from California jump from $5,000 to $8,000. That massive increase is not directly reflected in retail prices. But it cuts directly into the wholesaler’s pockets.
Most farms do not package the goods themselves. Conglomerates like Sunkist will pre-buy the crops from hundreds of lemon or orange fields and subcontract out the packaging work to outfits like Saticoy, Oxnard and Golden Valley. As the middlemen with all the supply connections, they’re more able to control prices. It’s the distribution infrastructure where the profit is being made.
So where does most of our food really come from? Well, Mexico. Those watermelons Joe climbed up to peek at? The boxes and US-patriot flag stickers say Texas, but they’re grown in Mexico and shipped north, where a company named Little Bear packages them and schleps them up to Canada.
When the harvest from southern Californian growers is expended, there’s often a gap before the availability of the next market, the northern Californian produce. Toronto supermarket shelves and restaurant menus don’t bend to seasonality. So the growers’ gap is filled with product from South America. And we pay through the nose for it. This week, for instance, there’s no radicchio from California. So it starts flying in from Guatemala, going from $12 a case to $17. If Joe were charging $15 a case last week, he now looks like a gouger for asking $19. “I wish I could bring every restaurant owner down here so they can see what it’s like, so they can understand why the prices change.”