Farmers’ markets get creative
While many Bay Area farmers’ markets are open yearround, May typically brings seasonal editions — not to mention more vendors touting juicy berries and stone fruit and more shoppers who want them.
Considered an essential service by the state, most local farmers’ markets have continued to operate during the coronavirus, adapting to the times with a host of new protocols that have made going to the market less social but more safetyoriented. They’ve gotten rid of tables and live music to
discourage lingering. They’ve forced farmers to wear masks, spaced out the vendor tents and chalked out lines to help people stay 6 feet apart. Most don’t let shoppers touch the vegetables — instead, farmers take orders like restaurant waiters and retrieve the goods with gloved hands.
Some farms have also adapted by selling boxes of their goods directly to customers via restaurants. But when it comes to openair markets, the warming weather and increasingly attractive produce will present more challenges for crowd control.
“We’re concerned that social distancing is going to be hard to maintain,” said Christine Farren, executive director at the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, which operates San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. “It’s a delicate balance between letting people know they’re as responsible as we are and ensuring the way we space people makes it possible.”
The market is applying for temporary permission to stretch farther down the Embarcadero, as Farren expects roughly 20 additional vendors to return to the market by June. Like some other regional markets, it’s also offering curbside pickup. CUESA both creates farm boxes featuring ingredients from several vendors and distributes prepurchased boxes from individual vendors.
The boxes have been a huge success, helping farms that had lost sales due to restaurant closures and also reducing the number of visitors to the market. The CUESA boxes have consistently sold out.
“We’re working to keep up with the demand, and we’re working to figure out financially how to make it make sense,” Farren said.
The five farmers’ markets in Sonoma and Marin counties run by Agriculture Community Events offer online ordering and curbside pickup with a user experience that resembles shopping at the market — you can pick individual items from different vendors in advance, instead of getting a preset box. Given the past wildfires and smoky days in Sonoma County, executive director Kelly Smith said she hopes to continue the service indefinitely and is hiring someone to help with the effort.
“It may be something we’ve always overlooked and now, here it is: something we should have been doing for quite some time,” she said.
Perhaps the biggest adaptation was made by the Portola Valley Farmers’ Market, which is now a preorder, drivethroughonly operation. Nile Estep of Good Roots Events and Farmers Markets said the community response has been “overwhelming.” His group helped convert the Facebook Community Mobile Market, a program from the tech company that sells subsidized bags of produce to hundreds of families each week from locations in Menlo Park and East Palo Alto, into the same format.
Even though operators argue that the outdoor environment makes them safer than grocery stores, some shoppers are still fearful that farmers’ markets are dangerous. Those fears caused city officials to take until May to reopen the Danville farmers’ market after closing it at the start of shelterinplace.
“The biggest challenge we are having is meeting the public’s expectations, because it’s often talked about that we need to be enforcing social distancing protocols, but our staff are not enforcers — they don’t have the legal authority,” said Allen Moy, executive director of Pacific Coast Farmers’ Market Association, which operates roughly 50 Bay Area markets, including Danville’s.
The Ecology Center, which runs three markets in Berkeley, has begun asking shoppers to line up once a market reaches its maximum crowd count. Staff then let a set number of shoppers into the market every 15 minutes.
Meanwhile, seasonal farmers’ markets are starting to ramp up. CUESA was scheduled to bring back its Thursday Mission District market in March but it didn’t open until last week. A lack of bathrooms forced the delay — market staff and vendors were no longer able to use restrooms at the nearby campus of City College of San Francisco, which is now closed. The owners of the Make Out Room dive bar are letting CUESA use the space while it’s closed, as long as the nonprofit pays for a bouncer.
“I love that a bar is helping a farmers’ market reopen,” Farren said.
The North Beach Farmers Market was supposed to open May 2, but the usual location was too small to maintain social distancing, said director Danny Sauter. Several Bay Area markets, including ones in Concord and Santa Rosa, have already moved locations in order to spread out vendors.
Some seasonal markets likely won’t return at all, including ones that operate on health care campuses and certain ones in downtown areas that rely on workers who no longer commute to an office. The latter includes the downtown San Jose market and Uptown Oakland market.
At the same time, other ways to buy from local farms have emerged. Some, such as Santa Cruz’s Dirty Girl Produce and Bolinas’ Star Route Farms, drop off boxes of produce at restaurants all over the Bay Area. The restaurants then sell the boxes alongside their usual takeout.
Ali Hooke, former chef at San Francisco’s Andytown Coffee Roasters, started a new service called Chef ’s Cart, where San Francisco residents can subscribe for deliveries or buy oneoff boxes of local produce put together by Hooke and other chefs. Each week features about 10 farms, and it allows small farms that don’t have the capacity to start their own directtoconsumer services to get into the field.
“We buy in bulk and repackage to take the labor off of their hands,” said Hooke, who quit her post at Andytown to focus on Chef ’s Cart full time. “People still need to eat the food; we just need to rethink how they get it.”