Food giants to buy local
Waldbaum's, Pathmark agree to source produce from our farms
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As part of a new partnership with the Long Island Farm Bureau, announced Monday, A&P's family of stores on Long Island will start offering a variety of fruits and vegetables, including corn, tomatoes, green peppers, squash, romaine lettuce, cucumbers and potatoes -- all grown on Long Island farms.
A&P, which is headquartered in Montvale, N.J., also agreed to set up separate sections in the produce aisles of select A&P, Waldbaum's and Pathmark stores in Suffolk and Nassau counties with signs displaying the Long Island Farm Bureau's logo: "Grown on Long Island."
Walbaum's assistant manager Chris Cavaliere (left) and assistant produce manager Roger Sahl in the produce section, which is now carrying fresh local spinach, radishes and herbs.
"It's a win-win," said LIFB executive director Joe Gergela. Local farmers get a reliable buyer and A&P gets to save on rising fuel costs, he said. He recalled talking with an A&P executive recently who told him it took 650 gallons of diesel fuel to drive a trailer truck from California. "Locally," Mr. Gergela said, "it would cost about $20 to deliver the goods."
Mr. Gergela said that he sees a huge marketing potential for eastern Long Island farmers, although not as great as it once could have been.
Nevertheless, he said, he sees the announcement as possibly reversing local farming's decline in recent years.
"If they live up to their word and not jerk farmers around with price and stuff, then I think you will see some of the idle farms come back," Mr. Gergela said.
"We tried to get this going with them a number of years ago, but the timing wasn't right," he explained. He said rising transportation costs was one impetus, but so, too, was a greater concern over food safety along with the growing desire on the part of consumers to buy locally. "We can have fresh produce from farm to shelf in less than 24 hours," he said.
He also credits Mr. Schumer for successfully interceding.
According to Gary Petrella, Mr. Schumer's Long Island regional director, "The Farm Bureau approached us. They said they'd been negotiating with A&P but hadn't pushed the ball over the goal line yet. They thought that any more delay, this being July, would put this year's harvest in question. So the senator made some calls, I made some calls, and the next thing we knew, we had a deal."
Mr. Petrella said that King Kullen "created the model, set the standard, if you will." The first step, he said, was getting stores to agree to use the "locally grown" logos and to actually configure their stores in a way that sections are dedicated both visibly and physically to Long Island produce.
"If you walked into a Waldbaum's last week, you didn't really know where the squash you we're buying came from. Now you're going to know that," he said. "Once you have that in the store, and this is what King Kullen found, the demand in their case actually went up. People wanted to buy local."
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