News Roundup

Nonprofit Spotlight: Crescent City Farmers Market

05/27/2002 - Vol. 95 - Issue 100 - Page 13
BY Ian McNulty, Staff Writer
New Orleans CityBusiness

The Crescent City Farmers Market is a bustle of activity, abounding with sample tastings, cooking demonstrations and sometimes music or even pet parades. Money changes hands at each booth as produce, bread, crabs, jams and strawberry wine go from producers’ trucks to consumers’ baskets.

But there’s more going on here than groceries. The farmers, bakers and other producers are making new business plans and the Economics Institute, which runs the market, is helping them resurrect discarded growing techniques and local varieties.

“It’s a model that works because it’s so simple. It’s thousands of years old. Take consumer and producer and put them together and amazing things happen,” says Richard McCarthy, executive director of the market and the institute, which was formed in partnership with Loyola University.

“It’s the opportunity to meet your customer base, where (farmers) can retool these businesses to be consumer-driven. Our customers are not a shy bunch. They’ll say, ‘Look, your collard greens are great but what we really want is arugula.’ And the vendor will say, ‘What’s arugula?’ Then we sit down with them with seed catalogues and identify what crops they could be growing,” says McCarthy.

The actual market days are the public face of the institute. But McCarthy says much of its work goes on between those well-attended markets. For example, the institute helps farmers analyze customer feedback, advises them on pricing, packaging and labeling and helps them network with chefs from upscale restaurants hunting for fresh produce for their menus.

From the start, the market was about more than selling farmers’ harvests. The first market opened downtown on Magazine Street in 1995 with the dual purpose of enticing people back downtown and encouraging the growth of ecologically sound agricultural businesses.

The market was founded by McCarthy, downtown resident John Abajian and Sharon Litwin, now executive director of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra.

“Historically, these types of markets were incredible incubators for small enterprise and new ideas,” says McCarthy. “They can be centers of innovation because your competitor is two feet away from you.”

One aim now is to get strawberry farmers to grow more of a local variety of the berry, which fell off when other regional varieties that ship better began to dominate the national market.

“We couldn’t go in on year one and say, ‘Enough of that, you have to grow the old varieties, bag the chemicals, go back to using straw (for mulch) like the old days,’” says McCarthy. “But because (farmers) meet shoppers who are saying that, because they are making money, they start being ushered down the path of taking some risks.”

In 2000, the institute opened a second market outside Uptown Square on Tuesday mornings and in November it opened a third market at the American Can Co. apartment building in Mid-City on Thursday evenings.

Along the way, the institute evolved into a regional source for information and expertise in forming and managing farmers markets. The group used its experience drafting new guidelines for food handling regulations and zoning for open air markets to advise a dozen other new markets forming independently from Covington to Mobile, Ala.

Thanks to help from Loyola and free space donated by property owners for the markets, the institute can keep its overhead costs low. The 60 vendors who now work with the institute pay $15 per day to sell from the markets, though they must meet a set of criteria intended to ensure diversity, competition and locally grown produce at the markets.