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Spanish aisles

Specialty grocery stores attract wider audience with ambiance and adventure

Wendy Engelhardt inspects a vivid green something at Ranch Market, an enigma as oval and big as a football, with spines sticking out.

"Oh, my gosh! I have no idea what that is. I don’t know if I want to pick it up. It looks like it hurts," says the ad executive with Clear Channel Radio.

She gingerly lifts the thing that could be an alien seed from space, as unfamiliar as she is with it. When the pincushion veggie doesn’t draw blood, she grins. Her smile is infectious, and sparks other grins from nearby families of Mexicans watching her adventure with the chayote in the produce section.

Wendy says it’s certainly not like shopping at Safeway, her childhood supermarket in upscale Boulder, Colorado. Salsa and merengue music blares from speakers, overhead TV screens air Mexican variety shows, signs are bilingual, the deli is dominated by dozens of Mexican-style cheeses and crémas, and stalls outside and inside sell clothes, perfumes, toys and household goods, just like in Mexico.

"Oh, my gosh," she repeats in the carnicería, amazed at the display of a skinned cow head, eye sockets staring and tongue hanging out, and a mound of chicken feet.

"That’s a little scary," she says, pointing at the cow skull. "At Safeway you might not sell as many."

"Oh, my gosh" is Wendy’s favorite phrase as she cruises the crowded aisles – amazed as a turista in a Mexico City mercado – and absorbs the sounds, sights, smells and Latino energy at the Ranch Market at 16th Street and Roosevelt.

On this Saturday she is one of a handful of gringos shopping among the hundreds of Mexican men, women and children. Wendy dresses casual to shop. Many of the Mexican shoppers wear their Sunday best reserved for weekend outings to what is essentially the neighborhood community center.

The dress-to-kill wives and daughters may have led a culturally ignorant New Times writer to give this Ranch Market a Best of Phoenix award for "Best Place to Pick up Groceries and a Mamacita." But a glare from a tall papa sporting a Stetson and a silver belt buckle the size of a coffee-cup saucer, zealously shepherding his women flock, soon bursts that gringo fantasy.

Yet the numbers of Wendys (and her male counterparts; we’ll call them Wendells) are growing.

Although the Ranch Markets, El Supers and Food Citys proliferating in Arizona are marketed squarely at recently arrived Mexicans, non-Latinos shop there for a cultural adventure akin to traveling in Latin America. These specialty supermarkets have become Latino cultural centers by default, grabbing that title from Arizona swap meets.

"It’s so cool how mariachis just play in the aisles," says Wendy. "It really does feel like you crossed the border." She leisurely sips a cilantro margarita at Tradiciones, the expansive indoor/outdoor restaurant conjoined to the supermarket. There is also a plaza mini-mercado in the massive complex.

The success story of specialty stores like Ranch Market is the upside of immigration, one appreciated by gringo cultural tourists and ethnic foodies.

Many of these culture consumers have traveled to Latin American countries, or watched chef Rick Bayless and his Mexican foodie show on PBS, Mexico, One Plate at a Time. They are glad to buy formerly unobtainable exotic ingredients like chayote, yucca, plantain leaves, and achiote seeds in Arizona. It’s the corporation-generated Latino authenticity that drives area ethnic foodies to explore them.

The popularity of Latino-oriented foods today makes a moot point of the outrage of residents near 7th Street and McDowell Road in the recent past. In 2001 these good neighbors publicly protested the conversion of a mainstream supermarket there into a Southwest Supermarket, a Latino-themed chain. A higher justice was served when other areas got the fun markets, and the neighborhood got what their white bread sensibilities deserved – a Safeway.

Dennis Raffaelli, Ranch Market regional manager in Phoenix, estimates non-Latinos make up only 10 percent to 15 percent of his chain’s shoppers. And he knows these adventurers aren’t traveling to the high Latino population areas for the bargains.

"They come here for the experience more than anything else," he says. "They come for the excitement and ambiance."

SPECIALIZING IN ‘COMFORT ZONES’
Ethnic supermarkets are what is called a "vertical play" in the grocery business. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, they pick their niches and dig in.

The chains that own these markets deliberately make shopping an adventure instead of a chore. Ranch Markets and their ilk are engineered to feel like "home," providing a cultural "comfort zone" for Mexicans living in the U.S.

The Valley’s Latino grocery-store consumer market was one of the hottest in the country last year, along with other Sun Belt cities such as Orlando, Las Vegas, and Austin, according to industry experts.

Phoenix Ranch Market opened its first Valley store five years ago at Southern and Central avenues in south Phoenix. Since then, the Ontario, Calif.-based chain has opened five more.

El Super, based in Los Angeles and partly Mexican-owned, opened at 51st Avenue and Indian School Road. The chain is said to be scouting other sites in cities like Mesa, which some still think of as highly White and conservative. That city has half its residents Hispanic on its west side, and 25 percent overall, according to Mesa’s economic development office. Latino-themed stores are now building at University and Main, and Horne and Main, says city spokesman Al Bravo.

And nobody can talk about Latino-oriented food chains without mentioning Food City, owned by Basha’s. Food City is el primero of the of the specialty stores serving Arizona’s Hispanic community. Bashas’ bought the original Food City on Mojave in 1993 and grew the number of stores in the last decade. A new Food City opening at Southern and Seventh avenues will be the flagship in its chain, with all the amenities Mexicans love.

"The original Food City first served Hispanics here," says Robert Ortiz, vice president of sales for Food City. He adds that the chain is also looking to capture the acculturating children of immigrants as future customers. "We are making our Basha’s more Hispanic friendly. As they become more educated and earn more, we’ll probably get them in our A.J.’s, too."

Elias Moreno is a Mexican-American three generations acculturated. The south side resident says that gringos aren’t the only ones who can look confused and out of place while shopping Ranch Market.

"I feel kind of intimidated when I shop at Ranch’s," he admits. "Mexico is a culture my family left, and not one I’m real comfortable with."

Still, he feels a certain smugness when he passes a new supermercado going up.

"I think of it as payback for the Sam’s Clubs, Costco’s, Wal-Marts and other American stores practicing their NAFTA imperialism in Mexican cities," he says.

Back at a Ranch Market aisle, cultural shopper Wendy bravely – for the first time in her life – gulps down a sample of freshly fried chicharrón, or pig skin. She grimaces, and laughs when the risk proves flavorful.

"I think it’s cool that everybody can experience shopping like this," she exclaims. She inspects the young, beautiful promotion Latina with her Mexican blue skirt and fluffy peasant’s blouse draped low on tan shoulders.

"The lady who gave out samples at Safeway didn’t look like that," she says.