Produce markets and the choreography of a stall

Reference library · 1099 words

Stand in one of the open sheds at Queen Victoria Market at seven in the morning and watch a stall being built. Crates come off a truck in a particular order. The trestle is dressed with a false floor of empty boxes so the display sits high and tilts toward the customer. Fruit is laid out face forward, best side up, in blocks of single colour. Prices go up on chalkboards in round numbers. By eight the stall looks like it has always been there, and by two in the afternoon it will have vanished entirely. Everything in that sequence is deliberate, and almost all of it is about time.

Melbourne has three surviving nineteenth century public produce markets and they still do serious daily trade. Queen Victoria Market occupies two city blocks at the northern edge of the Hoddle Grid, grew from sheds erected in 1878, and trades five days a week, closing on Mondays and Wednesdays. Prahran Market on Commercial Road, which began on Greville Street in 1864 and moved to its present site in 1881, is the most food focused of the three. South Melbourne Market, opened in 1867 when the suburb was called Emerald Hill, is the oldest continuously operating and trades a shorter week. Beyond them sit the great multicultural markets of the west and south east, Footscray and Dandenong, where the produce ranges are set by the communities around them rather than by European convention.

The supply chain behind the trestle

Almost none of this fruit was grown by the person selling it. That is the crucial difference between a produce market and a farmers market, and it is not a criticism, merely a different business. A produce market stallholder is a retailer, and their day starts before dawn at the wholesale market, which since 2015 has been located at Epping in Melbourne's north after decades on Footscray Road in West Melbourne. There, in the small hours, they buy from wholesale agents who have taken consignments from growers across Victoria and interstate, and their skill lies in reading quality, judging how long a line will hold, and buying at a price that leaves a margin after waste.

Waste is the governing constraint of the whole trade. A box of stone fruit bought on Tuesday must be sold before it becomes unsellable, and there is no writing it back to the supplier. Everything about the choreography of a stall is a response to this. Produce is rotated so that older stock sits at the front and moves first. Displays are rebuilt through the day to look full while actually shrinking. The pyramid of tomatoes is not vanity: a tilted, faced display sells faster than a flat one because the customer can see the whole line at once and reaches from the top, where the trader wants them to reach.

Then there is the endgame. In the last hour of trading, prices collapse in a highly ritualised way. The spruiker steps out in front of the stall and starts calling, and the unit changes from the kilogram to the bowl or the box, at a flat price, take it or leave it. This is not theatre for tourists, though it functions as theatre. It is a rational liquidation of inventory that has no value tomorrow, and the difference between a stall that clears its stock at cost and one that carts it home is the difference between a profitable week and an unprofitable one. If you shop at Queen Victoria Market at half past one on a Sunday you are participating in someone's inventory management, and both parties know it.

Who works the sheds

The trading families are the least documented and most interesting part of the picture. Melbourne's market stalls have passed through successive waves of migration, and the accents in the sheds record them: Italian and Greek traders who established themselves in the decades after the Second World War, Lebanese and Turkish families, and more recently Vietnamese, Chinese, Afghan and East African stallholders, particularly at Footscray and Dandenong. Sites are typically held long term and handed down, which is why you will see the same surname on the same pitch across generations, and why the market operator's decisions about tenure and rent are fought over so bitterly.

That history is also why the buildings themselves are contested ground. Queen Victoria Market sits partly on land that was Melbourne's first general cemetery, and human remains were never entirely removed. Every redevelopment proposal since the 1970s has had to reckon both with that fact and with a trader community that has repeatedly organised to resist change. A campaign in the 1970s stopped a plan to redevelop the site, and the market was placed under a trust rather than direct council trading control. The arguments have continued in almost every decade since, and anyone who reads a proposal to modernise the sheds should understand that they are reading the latest instalment of a very long dispute.

How to buy well, and what not to believe

The most persistent belief about Melbourne's produce markets is that they are automatically cheaper and fresher than a supermarket. This deserves scepticism. Since most market produce and most supermarket produce pass through the same wholesale system, freshness depends on what the stallholder bought and when, not on the venue. Market stalls sometimes buy second grade lines precisely because they can sell them cheaply and quickly, which is excellent value if you intend to cook tonight and poor value if you expected the fruit to last a week. Conversely, supermarket cold chains are extremely good, and a supermarket apple in July may well be in better condition than a market one.

What the markets genuinely offer is range and specificity. You will find varieties, cuts and whole categories that no supermarket carries: unusual apple and pear cultivars, whole fish with the head on, offal, live shellfish, bunched greens by their Vietnamese or Greek or Lebanese names, spices by weight, cheese cut to order. You can also ask questions and get answers, which is the real advantage of buying from someone who chose the stock personally at four in the morning.

Practically: go early for choice and late for price, and do not expect both. Buy the thing that is stacked highest and priced lowest, because volume means the trader bought it well and it is moving. Ask what is good today rather than what is cheap, because the honest answer to the first question is more useful. Do not handle the display, which is arranged the way it is for a reason.

Back to the library