A&J Wholesalers is one of 30 vendors at the Brooklyn Terminal Market in Canarsie. Despite the name, A&J operates both wholesale and retail businesses. Once an Italian specialty market, A&J has adapted with the immigration changes in the neighborhood. Now they offer a combination of West Indian, African and Italian products. Though the Italian products are diminished to one little corner of the shop.
Jay Nespoli has been working at the market for a quarter century and for A&J the past 10 years. He says that many of his Haitian customers buy palettes of products such as flour, rice, dried beans, even bottled water and paper towels to send home to Haiti. The food prices are so outrageous in Haiti that it is actually cheaper to ship food from New York. Check out this article from last year on NPR about the problem of food prices in Haiti: Spiraling Food Prices Buffet Poverty-Stricken Haiti
Mangoes and cod fish are among A&J’s best selling products. Check out this photo collage of some of A&J’s offerings…
Once you’ve trekked down to Sheepshead Bay and stumbled through the fresh fruit and veggie market at 1414 Sheepshead Bay Road, you’ll discover at the back of the room what looks like your typical, automated doorway into a supermarket. But this is no ordinary grocery store.
“A baza is so much more than a market,” said Karina Ioffee, a journalism student of Russian decent. According to her mom, “It’s where you went for the stuff that just didn’t exist in other stores, like a depot.”
Her mom couldn’t be more on the money.
As I wandered through the aisles, admiring neatly stocked shelves of Eastern European products, I found myself suddenly starving…and wishing I could read a Slavic language. I deciphered most of the jam flavors with the help of the fruit illustrations on the labels, but the meat was another story.
