Buyer for the county

Buying produce is a Wichita Linesman kind of role – up early, out on the road, a lot of the time alone, people who you will never know relying on you to come through for them. 

Joshua Arzt is Fair Food’s produce buyer (that’s him above), tomorrow morning he’ll be up around 2am on the phone sorting last minute details with growers and agents before he drives his truck into the produce market in Epping.

By 6am he’ll be back at the Fair Food warehouse with 20-30 pallets of produce and will finish his day by the time most people are starting theirs. He’ll do this again on Thursday along with a couple of smaller runs through the week.

Produce buyers live in the future, this week’s fruit and veg was ordered last week. On Wednesday Joshua will begin ordering for next week.

Joshua works off “the Big Order” a twenty-five year old byzantine excel spreadsheet of interconnected produce lists, set boxes, orders and packing sheets that you can almost hear groaning as it loads up for another week.

I ask how February’s looking and Joshua gives me the run down…

Joshua’s small growers – Craig Heppell in Cockatoo, Eve and Charlotte at Farmraiser, Remy’s Patch in Keilor, Plenty Valley in Flowerdale and our own Joe’s Market Garden in Coburg are keeping him in zucs, cucs, spring onions, basil, lettuce and lots of leafy greens. 

It’s been, he notes, a great season for organic tomatoes, while organic cherry toms are also really starting to come on.

He thinks for a bit – broccoli’s had a good summer, Victorian organic cabbage is coming on now, spuds have been good.

Fruitwise Peter and Helen Kamavissis’s organic Menindee and Black Magic grapes have finished and it’s time for their organic Sultanas.

Joshua gives a heads-up to look out for a new locally developed IPM grape coming soon called Sun Muscat. (Edit: it’s here!)

Dimits IPM nectarines and peaches have been great, they’ll go for few more weeks at least. Clingstones will come soon.

Joshua says there are so few organic stone fruit growers at the moment that wholesale prices have been super high.  Right now though there are some organic yellow peaches he reckons are the nicest he’s seen this season.

Then he remembers – “Black genoa figs – they’re really, really, really good and a great price – $14.95 for a half kilo…. Did I say they’re really good? They’re so good”.

It wasn’t a great season for apples last year but the new Galas are in and we should see some early season Abbas soon. There’s also a new organic pear variety called Red Sienna that cuts red. 

Berry-wise Joshua advises there’ll be lots more organic blueberries soon though strawberries have been scarce and expensive all season, the same with raspberries. Rockys and honey dew melons haven’t had the best of seasons either.

Joshua does the shopping for over a 1000 households and I ask him how he keeps track of everything – “It’s in my head – I can feel what’s going on rather than thinking about the numbers. I can look in the coolroom (it’s the size of a house) for a few seconds and just know what we have.” 

I ask Joshua what the most challenging thing about his job is and he says it’s when produce you’ve organised last week simply doesn’t arrive this week and you’ve disappointed hundreds of people. “You just don’t want to let people down.”

Have a great week

Chris