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If anyone embodies the multicultural melting pot that is Los Angeles, it’s Dantee Cardenas and his downtown Los Angeles produce company.

Cardenas grew up on a family-run farm in Baja California and speaks only Spanish. At the behest of his family, Cardenas established E.D. Produce Co. near downtown’s Produce Mart some five years ago to bring the family’s fare to California.

Today, E.D. Produce has made its name selling Persian cucumbers grown on the family farm to the region’s large Middle Eastern immigrant population. The company has staked a claim as Southern California’s dominant purveyor of Persian cucumbers, which are smaller and crispier than standard the standard sort; Cardenas, 34, has even claimed the title “King of the Persian cucumber.”

They have long been a staple in households with Middle Eastern roots. Now, Persian cucumbers are going mainstream.

“It’s amazing how the Persian cucumber has taken off in popularity,” Cardenas said in Spanish, with translation provided by his assistant, Aurora Guzman. “Now, everyone is trying to buy them.”

While most small growers get their products onto shelves through distributors, Cardenas is trying something new. He uses distributors, but has supplemented that method with his own sales people, who deal directly with stores and restaurants. That innovation cuts distribution costs and helped him win the Small-Businessperson of the Year award from the Los Angeles region of the U.S. Small Business Administration this summer.

But the increased interest in Persian cucumbers is a mixed blessing. While sales have steadily increased as customers come to buy his cucumbers from all over the state, he’s concerned because major agricultural producers in Arizona and other parts of Mexico are entering the market with the competitive price advantage of mass production.

Sensing that his local market dominance is not likely to last, Cardenas has begun a push to diversify the produce base with more traditional Mexican crops of tomatoes, squash, watermelons and strawberries. He’s also trying to get a foothold in some of the region’s major grocery chains such as Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods Market.


Flower runs

All this is a long way from Cardenas’ rather modest beginning on the local business scene, hauling gladiolas and other flowers in an old truck several times a week from the family farm outside Ensenada to Los Angeles’ Flower Mart.

Cardenas did that for eight years, watching his trips into the U.S. become ever longer and more tedious as the border checkpoint became more difficult to cross, especially after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“The trip into Los Angeles could sometimes take 10 hours, while it only took four to five hours to get back to Ensenada,” he said.

Meanwhile, Cardenas’ father was expanding the family’s Baja farm and looking to diversify the crops. Around this time, word was spreading among Mexican farmers about a new vegetable that was particularly suited to the dry Baja California climate: Persian cucumbers.

The cucumbers are grown in Mexico’s Sinaloa province during winter and Baja California in the summer, said Roberta Cook, marketing economist at the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Davis.

The Cardenas family initially chose to set up shop in Oakdale, in between Stockton and Modesto, because it was easier to find distributors who send produce to small specialty stores. The new business was named with his first initial and his uncle Enrique’s first initial. The office opened in 2003, but only lasted a year.

Cardenas explained that while they were making more per box of cucumbers selling from the Central Valley, they could sell far more boxes if they set up shop in Los Angeles. So, in 2004, E.D. Produce moved to its current location.

The company quickly won over buyers from specialty stores catering to Middle Eastern immigrants.

“The E.D. Produce Persian cucumbers are among the best,” said Mohammad Pourarabe, co-owner of Mission Ranch Market in Mission Viejo. “I have customers from San Diego and even from San Francisco who come regularly to pick up cases of the cucumbers.”

Pourarabe said the only problem has been dealing with occasional shortages during the off-season.


Tomato scare

In part to deal with these occasional downtimes and the increased competition among sellers of Persian cucumbers, Cardenas last year set out to diversify the company’s produce selection, bringing in chili, jalapenos, tomatoes, watermelons and other crops.

But those plans hit a major bump during the salmonella scare in spring and summer. First, Cardenas had to dump thousands of tomatoes. Then, when jalapenos were named as the probable cause, he had to dump those, too.

“Once those warnings came out, there was no way we could sell them,” he said. “So we had to throw boxes and boxes away. We lost quite a bit of money.”

Even when the all clear was given for tomatoes, sales were still much lower than before the salmonella warnings.

It was a significant setback and he’s still angry at what he sees as the overreaction of the U.S. Department of Food and Agriculture. But Cardenas is still sticking to his goal to add more crops to E.D. Produce’s line.

“Right now, about 60 percent of our sales come from Persian cucumbers and the other 40 percent from everything else. I’d like to reverse those figures and really become a full-produce company,” he said.

Cook at UC Davis said that strategy carries some risk.

“Persian cucumbers are a higher-margin specialty crop,” she said. “It may be going mainstream, but it still commands premium prices. The other crops they are growing tend to be lower margin.”


E.D. Produce Inc.

Headquarters: Downtown Los Angeles

Year Founded: 2003

Core Business: Selling Persian cucumbers and other produce to markets and distributors in Southern California

Employees: 17

Goals: To sell produce to major grocery chains such asTrader Joe’s and Whole Foods, and to expand its line to include more vegetables

Driving Force: Increasing popularity of Persian cucumbers beyond Middle Eastern immigrant communities

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Howard Fine
Howard Fine is a 23-year veteran of the Los Angeles Business Journal. He covers stories pertaining to healthcare, biomedicine, energy, engineering, construction, and infrastructure. He has won several awards, including Best Body of Work for a single reporter from the Alliance of Area Business Publishers and Distinguished Journalist of the Year from the Society of Professional Journalists.

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