It seems every company I’ve ever heard of is laying of workers left and right recently; and, unfortunately, Open Produce has to do the same.

Though business has been slowly but steadily increasing, after poring over our balance sheets, Andrew and I decided there was no way we could become profitable in the short term while paying out 3.5 full-time positions. Since our cash reserves are running fairly dry (i.e. this payroll cycle will probably put our bank account balance in the triple digits), today we gave notice to two full-time employees and our part-time employee, and, after they leave, the store will be run by just me and Andrew, plus one employee (Beth, who has been with us the longest). This really wasn’t an easy decision — our employees have been more helpful and understanding than we could have asked for — but I think it is the right one, since it means we will be just about breaking even instead of losing money fast. It won’t be pleasant for us, since we will have to stretch the existing work over half as many people, and it certainly won’t be pleasant for the three who no longer have a job (especially in the current economic climate), but the alternative is some serious financial problems in very short order. Avoiding that is worth the unpleasantness.

We wish our departing employees the very best of luck, and they will have first shot at any job openings we may have in the future.

On the shelf: horned melon, cilantro, basil, brussels sprouts, sparkling cider, asian soy milk, acorn squash, concord grapes, shitake mushrooms, bosc and d’anjou pears, miso, fried tofu, tempeh, muscat gummies, ready-to-eat Indian food.

Starting today, we will have not one but TWO items featured in store every day. Check in every day for our Daily Special, a familiar food at a dirt-cheap price. Today we have collard greens for 75 cents a bunch.

If you’re out of ideas for dinner, try out the suggested recipes for our weekly feature item. This week, it’s rutabagas! Again, here’s a copy of the recipe sheet available in-store:
Rutabagas are a root vegetable thought to have originated in the wild as a cross between a turnip and cabbage. They got a bad rap during the Great Depression, when they were one of the few foods cheap and readily available, and haven’t been commonly eaten in the US since. However, rutabagas are delicious, slightly sweet, and bursting with calcium, vitamin C, and potassium.

Serving Suggestions:
**Peel, dice, and boil the rutabaga until tender. Mash with butter and, if you want, a little cayenne pepper, ginger, brown sugar, garlic, lemon juice, rosemary or a combination of spices.
**Peel and grate the rutabaga, toss with orange and lemon juice and some raisins for an easy salad!.
**Roast with olive oil to bring out the vegetables’ sweetness.
**Add to winter soups or stews instead of potatoes for a more nutritious, sweeter twist.

Recipe Suggestions:
EASY CURRIED RUTABAGA
Peel and cube a RUTABAGA, then stick in a skillet with just enough water to cover the vegetable pieces (about a cup and a half…not too much or all the sweetness will go away!). Bring water to a boil, then add a little OLIVE OIL, SALT, PEPPER, a little BROWN SUGAR, and a dash or few of CURRY POWDER to taste. Bring back to a boil, reduce heat, and let simmer until the cubes can be easily pierced with a fork.

APPLE RUTABAGA CASSEROLE
Cook 3 C. PEELED RUTABAGA SLICES in boiling salted water until just tender; drain. Slice TWO MEDIUM APPLES Place half of each kind of slice in greased 1 quart casserole. Sprinkle with 1/4 C. PACKED BROWN SUGAR and dot with 1 1/2 TBSP BUTTER. Sprinkle with salt. Repeat layers using up to an additional 1/4 C. BROWN SUGAR AND 1 1/2 TBSP. Drizzle top layer with LEMON JUICE. Bake, covered at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. (adapted from southernfood.about.com)

Also on the shelf: Texas sweet grapefruit, sparkling apple cider, tangelos, galia melons, organic celery hearts, GIANT golden delicious apples, 6-pack cinnamon rolls (for only $4!) handmade in Milwaukee, red pears, fresh pita, and half-gallons of Grasspoint Farms milk–it’s locally produced, ‘Certified Pasture’ (the highest humane certification out there), and freshly delicious!

Well, not quite, but two pages on the front page did catch my eye for being Open Produce-related.

One is that New York may start charging 6 cents for each plastic bag. As most of our customers know, we charge 5 cents per bag, both to encourage people to bring their own bag and to cover our own costs of providing bags. A few customers are a bit indignant at this practice, and I think a few feel like we are trying to cheat them out of some money, but most understand the idea and are happy to pony up a nickel, in most cases only a small percentage of their purchase price. A surprising number even remember to bring their own bag the next time, which is the ultimate goal of the fee. Fees like this are common in most European countries (except there the charge is more like 50 cents). The proposed New York plan would give 5 cents to the city and 1 cent to the store owner, so it’s a little bit different than our fee, but it’s nice to see other urban American markets considering similar plans to ones we’ve implemented.

The other New York Times article that caught my eye was that GM and Ford are running out of money. The analogy is more straight-forward than I’d like to admit, but it’s nice to know that big companies have the same problems as small companies sometimes.

On the shelf: crazy melons, pink lady apples, miniature lady apples, artichokes, collard greens, guava, multi-colored cherry tomatoes, pomelos, shitake mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, celery root, red pears, gold pears, Italian vinegars, sauces, and sweets, juices of all kinds (in big bottles), and much more. Stop by soon!

Every few days, we’ll feature a new fruit or vegetable in the store. Maybe it’ll be a little weird (i.e., not native to American cuisine), maybe it’ll be something familiar with some creative recipe suggestions, maybe it’ll be something you’ve seen before but not known exactly what it is you’re supposed to do with it.

This week, it’s plantains! Here’s a copy of the recipe sheet available in the store:

Plantains are starchier versions of the banana that are plentiful in Latin American and African cuisine. Plantains can be eaten when green-yellow (for a firmer fruit that holds up well in cooking) or when fully ripe and yellow-black (they won’t ripen on their own, though, if this is the way you want to eat them, stick them by some tomatoes for a few days…the chemicals released by tomatoes trigger the ripening process). Plantains are usually cooked and served as a side dish or dessert.

Serving Suggestions:
**Fry some green plantains for a quick snack! Peel them first– we recommend cutting off the ends, halving it, and prying the skin from the fruit inside—and then cut into small chunks or slices. Deep fry in vegetable oil and salt. A little brown sugar makes it a nice dessert!
**Try sautéing or boiling the plantain and mashing with brown sugar or honey and a little oil.
**Cut into chunks and boil to add bulk to a hearty fall soup.

Recipe Suggestions:
GREEN PLANTAIN PANCAKES
Peel and grate 2 GREEN PLANTAINS, add SALT AND PEPPER to taste. Add a small amount of water, just enough to make the paste stick together. Deep fry, garnish with CILANTRO, HORSERADISH SAUCE, or SYRUP.

CREAM OF PLANTAIN SOUP
Saute TWO SMALL ONIONS, CHOPPED and FOUR GARLIC CLOVES, CHOPPED in OLIVE OIL. Add FOUR GREEN PLANTAINS, PEELED, CHOPPED, and cook until golden brown. Add 4 CUPS VEGETABLE STOCK, 3 BAY LEAVES, and SALT AND PEPPER to taste.

Above recipes adapted heavily from www.sunshine-tropical.com

Also on the shelves: dirt cheap GIANT plums (size of an apple, 50 cents a piece), guavas, fresh asparagus, lemongrass, starfruit, more Hawaiian baby papayas, lady apples, delicata squash.

We are partnering with Backstory Cafe to host a pumpkin carving contest! Bring $7 and your clever Jack-O-Lantern ideas to Backstory on Wednesday night, and leave with one of our desirable prizes (or, at least, your Jack-O-Lantern). Carving materials and pumpkins will be provided.

Backstory Cafe is located at 6100 S. Blackstone, just one block east of 61st and Dorchester. Carving contest begins 7pm on Wednesday, 29 October 2008.

Get directions to Backstory »

Yesterday marks the end of our first month of operation. It’s been a busy and difficult month for us, but also exciting, educational, and even — most of the time — fun.

There have been a number of surprises, and I’ll share a few of them here. One real surprise is how shopping habits change without any detectable rhyme or reason. There have been afternoons where we have sold more than 25 bags of grapes in a few hours, and other multi-day periods where we have sold one or two. People will snap up an entire box of blood oranges within an hour of us putting them on the shelf, and then the final four oranges (in good shape, not damaged or overripe) will sit there for three days untouched.

I’ve also been impressed with the price-sensitivity of customers on a few key items: raising our orange juice price from $4.75 to $5 made our sales drop considerably (we’ve now lowered it to $4.50 to be in line with other stores in the neighborhood — we buy it for about $3.80 wholesale), and our El Milagro tortillas sell very well at 3 for a dollar and didn’t sell at all for 2 for a dollar.

The most surprising things sell, too: Kim Chee and 5lb bags of black rice fly off of our shelves at alarming rates, while I think only one person has bought mustard, and we’ve only sold one package of butter. Who would have guessed?

We’ve made our fair share of mistakes in the last month, too: buying a box of chard that wilted before we could sell a single bunch, organic milk that cost $9 per gallon (our Organic Valley milk is now $7, and we’re looking for ways to lower it more), accidentally selling Ibarra mexican chocolate for lower than the wholesale priced (sorry, we’ve had to raise the price from $2 to $3), and countless other things.

Thank you, dear customers, for sticking with us while we figure out how to effectively run our store. I’m looking forward to the next month.

On the shelf: coral broccoli (a/k/a Romanesco broccoli a/k/a “fractal food”), more blood oranges, rambutan, vegan sausage, Hawaiian Papaya, organic Broccolini, Bonne Maman preserves, concord grapes, asian pears, red and green bell peppers, eggplant.

A few people have asked me why we stopped putting the wholesale price (i.e. what we payed) on the same price signs that have the retail price (i.e. what you pay). Some have suspicions that we mark up items more than we’d like to admin.

Our real reasons are less sinister: in practice, it’s very complicated and labor-intensive to calculate, keep track of, and display wholesale prices. And then they change — in the case of produce, multiple times per day. As an illustrative example, jalapeño peppers are (sometimes) sold in boxes that are 1 and 1/9 bushel in size (that’s a measure of volume, not weight or count). Our latest box cost $21, which is within a few dollars of previous boxes we’ve bought. Some of the peppers arrive in unsaleable condition (they are crushed or broken or rotten), and others become unsaleable either before or after we put them on the shelf. So, what is the wholesale cost of a jalapeño? Is it the number of dollars we payed divided by the number of peppers in the box (and who is going to count them?)? Do we count the number of peppers that arrived in saleable condition, or the number we estimate we will sell? To give a more accurate picture to our customers, do we include delivery, transportation, labor, or other marginal costs? NYC Bagel Deli, for instance, requires a separate trip up to a very congested part of north side, while most of our other suppliers are on the south side. Because of this, we are going to mark them up more than our other inventory, but are our customers going to understand this high mark-up unless we disclose the reasoning behind it? And next time we buy, the same box of jalapeños might cost $25, and there might be 250 peppers instead of 275 in the box. Do we spend labor time re-calculating everthing, or do we just leave the “jalapeños $0.15″ sign up?

So, the conclusion is that, now that we have some idea of what running a store is like, we need a little while to organize and implement what Andrew calls a “general IT solution” to manage and publish the data. We have as a goal January 1 to have a good working system of transparency: bank account statements, wholesale receipts, sales data, and everything else. Don’t worry, we haven’t lost sight of our vision, it just takes a little bit of time.

Until then, don’t be afraid to ask. We will gladly tell you that limes cost us $14 for 175 count, while strawberries fluctuate wildly (last purchase was 16 boxes for $24).

On the shelf: baby spinach, more heirloom tomatoes, rutabaga, blood oranges, pie pumpkins, conventional and organic mushrooms, Metropolis coffee and tea, Chinese red bean bun.

Just a quick look at some of the things we have in this week:

• papaya
• organic dates
• organic arugula
• green plantains (by popular demand)
• sweet asian pears from California that taste like honey in your mouth.

Plus we have a special: Pineapple from Costa Rica plus a jar of Tajin chili fruit seasoning. Delicious, and only $4 for the two together.

We also have 5 different types of apples — Granny Smith, Golden Delicious, organic Jonagold, organic and conventional Honeycrisp — and all of them cost $1 a piece or $5 for a 3lb bag. Don’t like chewing? We have organic fresh cloudy apple cider ($5 for half gallon).

Not having learned our lesson from the “let’s buy an entire pallet of strawberries” adventure (I’ll leave it up to someone else to write a post about that), yesterday I had a friendly forklift driver put a 700-pound bin of carving pumpkins in the back of our truck. Only on the way back to Hyde Park did I realize that, not having a loading dock or forklift of our own, we had no way of removing the bin of pumpkins…except, of course, pumpkin-by-pumpkin. We had a miniature parade of employees carrying pumpkins into the store and finding spaces to put them all. We’re selling them for $5 a piece (the whole bin cost us about $115 — about twice as much as the same bin would have cost last year).

Long story short: sometime in the next two weeks, come pick up your Halloween Jack-O-Lantern-to-be at Open Produce.

So, you might remember that Steven Lucy, the second partner of Open Produce, took off shortly after our opening to go on a homemade raft trip down the Mississippi. Well, he’s back! As of 3am last night, but even so. Come say hi and hear about his adventures!
Also, in response to a recent request that we list some of our new stock, here’s a list of items that we’re particularly excited about. We hope you will be as well.
- Huge, beautiful pomegranates
- Teese Vegan Cheese (I haven’t tried this yet, but I hear it’s fantastic for making pizza and the like. Made by the same guys who make Temptation Ice Cream.)
- Sugar Cane
- Honey Crisp Apples (Beth says: “Seriously the best apple I’ve ever eaten”)
- Cayenne Peppers (Grown right here in Hyde Park!)
- Peaches (And more peaches!)
- Mexican sweets from Pilsen (The candied sweet potato is to die for.)
- Whipped! moisturizer (Made by one of the former managers of Bonne Sante. We don’t generally stock personal care products, but this stuff is really cool.)