The SF Market, a wholesale produce market occupying a 25-acre campus in San Francisco’s Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood, recently marked a major milestone. It has recovered and donated 10 million pounds of fresh produce through its food recovery program.
The program, which continues to recover and donate an incredible 4,000 pounds of produce a day from its 20 merchants is a success in large part because of Carolyn Lasar, food recovery project manager.
“[We] started in 2016 and built up from just a few of the merchants here, and over a fairly short amount of time, we managed to get everybody on board, and so we’ve been capturing about a million pounds a year since then and still going strong,” Lasar says.
Lasar works with the merchants in the campus’ six warehouses Monday through Friday, looking for surplus produce that’s of good quality that can be donated to nonprofit organizations in San Francisco and the Bay Area.
“To my knowledge we’re the only wholesale produce market in the country that has its own food recovery program with its own staff,” says Michael Janis, general manager of The SF Market. “We’ve really leaned into a lot of our community work, and the piece that we’re most proud of is our food recovery program.”
Coordinating food for rescue at The SF Market is in many ways a one-woman show and a fast-paced one at that.
“I am the one person who works for food recovery here,” Lasar says. “So, I start at 6 in the morning, which is the end of the workday for our merchants, and I contact each one of them, first by text and also in person to find out what they have available.
“By 7 o’clock, I put together a list of everything that I have available from the whole market, and it’s a very low-tech operation,” Lasar continues. “I work with a notebook, a mechanical pencil, so I can erase if I need to. And I work with a phone, so I put everything into a text, and I send that text out of what’s available to each one of the nonprofits that we work with that day.”
Lazar works with nearly 20 nonprofits from food pantries to cooking kitchens to home delivery to get a variety of fresh produce to people in need.
“All of this has to take place and finish up, pick up by 8:30 in the morning, because the market closes, the merchants close their doors,” she says. “We can’t leave anything on the docks. So, between 6 and 8 or 8:30 — that’s the whole operation of everything in the morning. It happens pretty rapid fire.”
The SF Market, which serves as a kind of connector between rural and urban California, supplies San Franciso’s diverse population with some 180 types of produce a year.
“We do have all the typical commodities, but we also have a huge variety of what you might call specialty items,” Lasar says. “We have every kind of Asian green that you can imagine. And then we also have daikon and ginger and green garlic, onions and garlic chives and regular garlic and every kind of herb you could think of. And this time of year, we’re starting to get local citrus — different kinds of mandarins and other kinds of oranges, lemons, limes, pomelos and blood oranges.”
The donation of specialty, seasonal produce has tremendous value to The SF Market’s food redistribution partners who serve ethnically and culturally diverse populations, Janis says.
“We have found that our community partners really value this variety because they’re able to have product that they typically couldn’t have for their meals or for their boxes or for their pantries,” he says. “It’s become a really important part of their programs, which is very humbling for us and our merchants.”
The SF Market’s food recovery program is so popular, Lasar says there’s a waiting list of community organizations hoping to receive fresh produce.
“The demand is definitely up,” Lasar says. “It’s certainly up from COVID days, people think things must have gotten better since then, absolutely not. The demand is increasing — ever increasing.”
