Bi-Rite Market: Building Relationships Through Food

By Greg Gonzales

It’s a quiet morning on 18th Street, in San Francisco’s Mission District, just 7:59 a.m., but as the next minute rolls around there’s a familiar shout from Bi-Rite Market: “All right folks, we’re open!” One of the employees, Nicole, is putting the finishing touches on the flower and citrus displays, carefully placing each item on Strunk’s Apple Creek Ranch crates, just under a painted tagline on the window that reads, “The California Citrus Experience,” all under the blue art-deco Bi-Rite sign that hasn’t changed at all since the 1940s.

Inside and out, the team is hard at work; some unload produce from a truck parked out front — there’s no parking lot or loading dock — some stock shelves with greens and cheese and chocolates, and others slice up meats and cheeses in the back while the kitchen gets ready to churn out hundreds of sandwiches.

This happens here every day, like clockwork.

Except on sunny days, when it gets busier as nearby Dolores Park turns into what looks like a music festival. The customer count at Bi-Rite quadruples as families, couples and daily visitors all drop by to pick up their picnic to enjoy while they watch the city from the top of the park.

The Mission wasn’t always such a pleasant place. After booming with an art, punk and jazz scene in the 70s and 80s, the area went a little downhill. ““People used to avoid the area,” said Kourtni Johnson, Assistant Manager at Bi-Rite. “The park wasn’t a place where you took your children.” But the park was renovated, and businesses slowly trickled into The Mission during the 90s and early 2000s, along with a more affluent crowd. As General Manager Stefan Morin explained, The Mission was the new Haight-Ashbury, with neo-hippie types moving in when the neighborhood was just closed storefronts and cheaper rent. The new tenants made the place their own, opening new businesses and giving the place an artful new life.

Bi-Rite stayed in The Mission through it all, ever since it first opened it doors nearly 80 years ago. Brothers Joe and Bill Cordano built the market in 1940, then sold to Jack and Ned Mogannam in 1964. Ned’s son, Sam, grew up working at the market, but went into the restaurant business, opening several successful restaurants — until 1997, when Ned asked him to come back.

Sam came back from foodservice with fresh ideas for Bi-Rite, taking the helm in 1998. He wanted to maintain the store’s original familiar feel as a neighborhood market, but he added a kitchen to serve up prepared foods, and made it his mission to work directly with farmers.

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Bi-Rite Creamery was the creation of pastry chefs Anne Walker and Kris Hoogerhyde, who sold their creations through Bi-Rite. Their talents outgrew their kitchen, and they found a new home in the creamery just down 18th Street. The creamery makes ice cream from scratch, using organic dairy from Straus Family Creamery just north of the Bay Area. Because of the lines that form there daily, the staff has to set up velvet ropes every morning just to keep things orderly.

By 2008, the leadership team decided to move the conversation around food from the store to its own space, where customers could meet the farmers who grow the food, right next to the creamery. They called it 18 Reasons, which became Bi-Rite’s nonprofit operation. The space is used for tastings, nightly dinners and classes, and also the Cooking Matters program, which teaches basic cooking skills to low-income community members.

Bi-Rite’s original location, with all the fresh attention, started getting too busy. “There would be days when we had a line going all the way out the door,” said Stefan Morin, General Manager of Bi-Rite Market. “We got crowded out.” So that year, they opened a second location in the Western Addition Neighborhood, less than two miles away. This location was larger than the original.

That same year, Bi-Rite took some of the pressure off its in-store kitchens and expanded into catering by opening its commissary in the Bayview District. The commissary — just like the two markets — is noted for its wide selection of world-renowned cheeses, making it perfect for high-class entertaining.

The most recent addition to the Bi-Rite family of business opened in the Civic Center in October 2018, in the form of Bi-Rite Cafe, when the Helen Diller Family Foundation extended an invitation. The foundation was adding new life to the area, which was known for being a bit of a food desert.

And even though the business has grown from a small family operation, it still has the same family feel it used to, for staff and customers alike. As customers walk in the door, they’re often greeted by name, and they’ll often stay to chat for as long as two hours — to learn about where their food comes from, to learn about pairing food and just to catch up with the crew.

Everything fresh in the store is farm-direct. That shortens the supply chain, connects customers to their food, makes sure food is fresh and allows the maximum amount of dollars to get to the person who’s responsible for making the product. “That’s the definition of a community business, is that’s it’s a regular part of the community, not one that operates outside the community, not exempt from the community,” said Morin. “Without this community, we wouldn’t have a business.”