For 23 years, our produce buyer Bob Tevlin has been personally responsible
for the quality of the produce at Vallerga’s Market. Three nights a week,
(sometimes four or five near holidays) Bob drives to the Jerrold Street
Produce Market in San Francisco, as well as to the Golden Gate Terminal
Produce Mart near the San Francisco Airport. He walks nine miles each night,
prowling the marts to find the best produce to bring back to our
customers. Follow him along below to see how he does it.
- 3:02 New City
- The pallet stops outside New City Produce. Bob cuts the plastic and pulls down a box. They are perfect. He grabs three more boxes. During checkout he looks down in front of the office window and sees a box, opens it. He looks inside. “How much are these little jicamas out here?” he asks. Told the price, he takes a box.
- 3:23 What a Tomato! and Washington Vegetable
- Bob also buys all the produce Vallerga’s uses in its deli for green salads and on their deli sandwiches. At What A Tomato!, he finds red, ripe large tomatoes. “There’s nothing worse that a green tomato in your sandwich.” At Washington Vegetable, he looks at broccoli, which is packed in ice, which helps it to stay fresh much longer. “This will last two weeks, easy, in someone’s fridge.”
- 3:35 North Bay Produce
- Here Bob is looking for peaches and tries one box in the cooler. “Not good enough.” He heads back out to the front and finds a box from Fidel’s. “I like this producer because he picks them riper.” He cuts into a peach, and it is much sweeter. He takes three boxes.
- 3:44 Loading the Truck
- Behind the truck, a lot of boxes wait for Bob, everything he has picked. A whole pallet from Earl’s Organics has been delivered by forklift from down the street. For the next hour he reconciles orders and wraps boxes on pallets with plastic wrap so the loads hold together, and uses the hydraulic lift to load the truck himself.
- 4:52 Truck pulls out of Jerrold Street
5:10 Truck arrives at Golden Gate Produce Terminal - A stack of pre-ordered produce from trusted vendors awaits, but Bob still needs more. He has been passing on limes all night, and also needs strawberries and iceberg lettuce, which thanks to a recent holiday weekend has been sitting around for four days at the vendors he has tried. He starts with Coast Tropical, where he finds the limes at last, as well as green beans with a snap to them.
- 5:31 Shasta Produce and Freshpoint
- It’s cooler here, so Bob throws on a warmer jacket, and starts with a run through Shasta Produce, and then finds the fresh and ripe strawberries in plastic clamshell containers at Freshpoint San Francisco.
- 5:39 – Carcione’s Fresh Produce
- Bob finds “perfect” zucchinis and grabs a cup of coffee in the back. It is getting light out, work is winding down and the room is full of workers finished for the night. Bob tries one last vendor for fresh iceberg lettuce, but no luck. He calls on his cell phone back to Berti at Jerrold Street, and finds out they received a fresh shipment right after he left. He tells them to hold them for him and he will be there in an hour.
- 5:45 Load truck
- Bob loads up his picks and the pre-ordered items, which he inspects carefully, and pulls out at 7. He gets back onto 101 and heads back to Jerrold Street. The boxes of fresh iceberg lettuce are waiting on the loading dock. He loads them up and we are off around 7:20, heading for Napa.
- Back in Napa at 9:15, produce heads for the shelves
- The truck arrives at the store and is unloaded. Any produce items needed for the displays are loaded into produce carts by the store crew and taken directly to the displays. The rest is taken into the produce cooler until needed. Some products stay fresher longer, but others--like bananas and tomatoes--need to be purchased every few days. That's why Vallerga's buys only what it can sell before the next buying trip. For holidays, the buyers will make a fourth or even fifth trip during the week to keep the shelves stocked with fresh produce.
