Race Or Food?

It's nice to know that this country of immigrants (from 1492 til today) will always welcome new groups into our culture in the same way: by hating them until they have enough money to buy our love. Or maybe not.

Pessimistic, perhaps, but I see no justification for the negative reactions of various US communities to the arrival of new grocery stores aimed at the economically, culturally and politically powerful Hispanic market.

It's funny, because I started reading the article and thought - WOW! This is great! A chain of grocery stores that is expanding the "Spanish" food section to the whole store! An unbelievable opportunity for people in the mid- and south-west to have access to foods that are readily available, and evidence of the cultural and economic blending that was signed into possibility with NAFTA (remember that?).

I appreciate the "fair reporting" from the NYT, and I'm glad to know that this opportunity was not met with enthusiasm and acceptance by the communities lucky enough to host these stores.

You know what tripped up the white folks on the city councils? Chicken slaughtering in-house. And I'm not saying that a dude with a machete is hacking off heads in the front of the store - we're talking standard butcher setup in the back, but in the store. They couldn't get approval.

The more things change, the more we try to stay the same...as some imagination of racial, cultural, social or political cohesion and homogeneity that has NEVER EXISTED! EVER! ANYWHERE!

Get over it. Gimme some fucking Goya.

As always, the NYT text below:

March 21, 2007
Tortillas Like Mamá’s, but This Is No Bodega
By KIM SEVERSON
AURORA, Colo.

YOU’RE not going to find Swanson frozen dinners at Rancho Liborio, a shiny new 49,000-square-foot supermarket in this Denver suburb. But you will find the fried plantains called maduros and giant Peruvian kernels of corn.

In the produce section, a dollar will buy you three avocados. The tilapia are sold live. Stacks of fresh tortillas, made from 600 pounds of corn ground in the store daily, are always warm. And maybe, if the local political winds shift, shoppers might one day be able to buy a chicken that was slaughtered and plucked on site a few hours earlier.

The store’s slogan pretty much says it all: “Si es de allá lo tenemos aquí.” Translated, “If it’s from there, we have it here.”

This upscale store is a new concept for the Cuban family that started the small Liborio chain in Los Angeles in 1966. The idea is to sell food to an increasingly affluent pool of Hispanic grocery shoppers as well as the growing segment of people who want their supermarkets filled with fresher, local and more authentic food.

With its bright, wide aisles, agua fresca bar and an expansive selection of hot food like carnitas and even pizza, Rancho Liborio wants to be the go-to store for second- and third-generation shoppers who are attracted to markets like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, but want to cook and shop in a store that feels like home.

“We’ve gone to all the other markets in the area, but this is the place where the tortillas are the closest to his mother’s,” said Deeanna Zavala, who was shopping on a recent Saturday with her husband, Guellermo. “And we can still get everything else we need.”

Rancho Liborio is not the only grocery chain hungry for more affluent shoppers whose families have roots in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central and South America. The 65-store Minyard chain in the Dallas-Fort Worth area is pumping money into its Latino-theme Carnival stores. In Northern California the Super Mercado México chain, based in San Jose, has started buying old Albertsons stores. Publix, one of the biggest grocery chains in the country, is experimenting with Publix Sabor stores in Florida.

Winn-Dixie, which runs 521 stores in the South, started a Hispanic neighborhood merchandising program at 103 stores in Miami and Orlando, Fla. The hope is that store-sponsored dominoes tournaments, Spanish-speaking employees and a product mix fine-tuned to each neighborhood will help distance the chain from a recent bankruptcy. One offering is La Completa, a line of hot meals featuring combinations like pork, rice and yuca to go.

“It appears that the Hispanic community is just as pressed for time as anyone else,” said Jim Carrado, senior director of neighborhood merchandising for Winn-Dixie.

In 2007 Hispanics are expected to become the minority group with the most spending power in the United States, displacing African-Americans, according to a report by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia.

For decades small markets and bodega-style stores in cities like Los Angeles, Dallas and New York catered to new immigrants looking for lower prices. But larger, more traditional chains are now trying to capture shoppers in those cities, as well as in places like Denver, Atlanta and Minneapolis.

They are finding that it takes more than a few Mexican products mixed in among the ranch dressing and Fruity Pebbles to attract them.

“If you add jalapeños to the produce department, it doesn’t become a Hispanic store,” said Jack Rosenthal, the food service supervisor for the two Rancho Liborio stores in the Denver area. Mr. Rosenthal, who was born in Peru, speaks English, Spanish and German fluently.

Although there is no one typical Hispanic shopper, some generalizations are driving the design of the new Latino-theme stores. Many have wider aisles because, research shows, grocery shopping is often a family outing. Hispanic families tend to be larger, and more people cook from scratch, so produce and meat departments tend to be bigger and better stocked. And loyalty to brands from the home country is strong. At Rancho Liborio, Tide is almost an afterthought. Mexican brands like Ariel dominate the shelves.

But the generalizations end there. The term Hispanic applies to people from many countries, each with particular preferences for things like fruit, meat, spices, bread and beans. Tastes can change from city to city, even neighborhood to neighborhood.

A walk through the dried-bean aisle at Rancho Liborio in a case in point. There are pintos, both the larger speckled brown ones preferred by Mexicans and the smaller, lighter-colored ones used in Peru. Pink beans appeal to Puerto Ricans, and black beans to Cubans, Guatemalans and Brazilians.

Even individual households are multicultural, which adds to the challenge of finding the right mix of products in an ever-fusing Hispanic food culture.

“In many households you have an individual whose grandparents are Hispanic but from four different countries,” said Joseph Pérez, a senior vice president at Goya Foods. The company, which has headquarters in Secaucus, N.J., is the largest Hispanic-owned food company in the country.

Attracting Hispanic shoppers is a delicate business, said Juan Guillermo Tornoe, who runs Hispanic Trending, a market research company in Austin, Tex. Buyers for big chains will often go to Hispanic food trade shows, order everything in sight and then wonder why their efforts to market to Latinos fail.

“Well, what are you buying?” he said. “Are you buying hot sauce and expecting to sell it to Cubans?”

The Rancho Liborio bakery is a study in cross-cultural merchandising. The Cuban bread has to have the right delicate crust and texture for dipping in café con leche. The compact Mexican loaves called bolillos (four for $1) are sold near Salvadoran pastries called peperechas, layered with pineapple. The tres leches cake is a hit with almost everyone, including African-American shoppers from the area.

Customers know the difference, Mr. Rosenthal said.

“If it doesn’t taste right, they’ll tell you,” he said. That’s why Rancho Liborio hired Eulalia Ventura from El Salvador to make as many as 200 pupusas a day, by hand. The pupusas are stuffed with a mixture of cheese and the herb loroco, and sometimes with pork cracklings and beans, then grilled until the interior bubbles.

Monica Mejia, a student at Metropolitan State College of Denver, drove 45 minutes on a recent Saturday with her mother, Sara Mejia, in part for the pupusas. The family emigrated from San Salvador six years ago, and find themselves going to Rancho Liborio as often as they can.

“It’s really nice here because my mother can get the brands she grew up with,” Ms. Mejia said.

Generational differences that arise among Hispanic shoppers further complicate things for grocers. Ms. Mejia doesn’t mind spending $2.29 for a pupusa, but to her mother that seems expensive.

Newer immigrants are more likely to be bargain hunters, especially in the competitive Los Angeles market, said Bob Rosenthal, Jack’s brother and the director of food service and bakery for all eight Liborio stores in Southern California, Las Vegas and Colorado. “But as a culture begins to progress in society,” he said, “the younger people want the food that reminds them of Abuelita” — Grandma — “and they don’t care if it costs more.”

In the meat section at Rancho Liborio, nary a T-bone is to be found. Most people from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America cook with thinner cuts, so the 10 varieties of beef are stacked like crepes, separated by pink paper. The chicken section is stocked with both the smaller inexpensive yellow-skinned chickens that Jack Rosenthal said are popular with recent immigrants and the plumper white-skinned birds more popular with people who were born here.

When the chain started its expansion into Colorado, the owners had hoped a polleria would be the star attraction. Live chickens would be shipped in every morning, then slaughtered and processed by noon. But the polleria, which has met the federal Agriculture Department’s guidelines, sits unused at the Commerce City store, the first in the chain to open in Colorado, because the idea of chicken slaughtering didn’t go over with some city officials and residents.

“You’d think we were planning to kill people,” Jack Rosenthal said.

The company ran into a similar problem when it began plans to open a store with a polleria in Greeley, Colo. Both chicken slaughtering and the chain’s bilingual signs tapped a vein of anti-Latino sentiment. The public outcry grew so intense that the company scratched the polleria. The local newspaper, The Tribune, ran an editorial in July welcoming the market and condemning what the editorial board viewed as a vilification of Mexican immigrants.

“If this were any other market, people would welcome it with open arms, and maybe wander through the aisles to find some new foods to try at the dinner table,” the editorialist wrote.

And in fact the Liborio markets are attracting white, black and Hispanic customers. When it comes down to it, a grocery shopper is a grocery shopper.

“It’s not so much the cultural stuff,” said Marie Lopez, a dental hygienist in the Denver area. “Everything here is fresh, and the prices are good. That’s really what I’m looking for.”