Castro Profile: Ava's Downtown Market & Deli
Have you ever thought about where your food comes from? Where it was grown? How many hands it passed through before it appeared on your plate?
You might not notice it, but, in many ways, our world is growing increasingly disconnected. Do you even go grocery shopping anymore? (Amazon and Instacart don’t count.) Often, the only thing we know about our food is that it arrived on our doorstep. For small grocery store owners like Juan Origel, this is an especially large problem.
Origel founded Ava's Downtown Market & Deli, his daughter's namesake, 13 years ago. He’d been in the food industry for a long time and saw the need for a grocery store that was filled with customer suggestions and was predominantly organic.
However, the past few years have been a struggle for Origel and Ava’s. With the pandemic, as demand for online grocery shopping grew, VC-backed startups quickly cropped up in Silicon Valley. Small businesses like Ava’s couldn’t keep up. Maintaining an online presence is tough, and there are a lot of overhead costs and requirements (like pricing and inventory) involved with it. The effects of the pandemic on Ava’s were indirect as well. The area has always been a hub for tech companies, and many of their employees regularly went to Ava’s for lunch and after work. Now, however, many of them opt to work from home; it’s no longer uncommon to see an empty Ava’s in the middle of the day. To make matters worse, inflation is creating what Origel likens to a “trickle-down effect”: prices of CPG (merchandise that is bought and replenished regularly), salaries, rent, and insurance policies, which are dependent on each other, all start to go up. Origel sees this happening in real time, both inside his store (through rising operations costs) and outside his store: take a walk around Castro St. and you’ll find a lot more vacancies than before.
These challenges can be demoralizing, but working with the public keeps Origel energetic. He loves sharing recipes and talking to customers about Ava’s mission to sell better-quality products. When people have to cut down their expenses, Origel points out, the first thing that goes is groceries. There’s always a cheaper (but not as healthy) option, right? Origel stresses the importance of consuming good food, following the idea that “your body is a temple.” We often forget that organic food is not only better for our bodies but also better for those growing the food. Origel’s seen firsthand the damaging effects of pesticides and chemicals on the people working with them.
Origel grew up connected to the land. One side of the family cultivated several farms while the other was in the pharmacy business—the “old-fashioned pharmacies where medicines were made-to-order in the shop itself,” he clarifies. He loves hunting and fishing, evident in the sweatshirt he’s wearing. A deep navy blue, it reads “Sorry I missed your call…I was on my other line” while accompanied by graphics of a fisher and buttons mimicking those of an iPhone’s caller ID display.
Origel brings this philosophy to Ava’s, where he wants to strengthen the links between the consumers and the production. He stocks brands from other small businesses, always healthy, quality food—organic when possible. Their success is dependent on grocery stores like Ava’s, as they don’t have the advertising power of the multinational corporations that are far more well-known. Community is the secret ingredient to the prosperity of places like Ava’s, and maybe only through them can we begin to reconnect our global system of sustainable, healthy food.