By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Fola Akinnibi, who wrote “New York’s Biggest Produce Market Is at a Breaking Point” for Bloomberg. Here's what I wrote about it:
The Hunts Point Produce Market is an invisible but crucial link in the supply chain for New York City’s food business, handling 60 percent of the city’s fresh groceries and $2 billion of fruits and vegetables per year. As a co-op, it’s unique in America where most of that kind of business has been vertically integrated under supermarkets, and it’s the 113-acre main market for buyers and sellers to converge and get the Big Apple its big apples, among other things. The 27 wholesalers are the key middlemen between farms around the world and all the grocers, bodegas and restaurants in the city. It’s also become increasingly awkward in size, with sellers keeping 600 to 800 diesel trucks idling nonstop, polluting the area, and an essential upgrade poised to …