The merchant count at Hunts Point has fallen by roughly three quarters, and the most interesting explanation of it comes from one of the suppliers listed above. Speaking to a trade publication in August 2024, Fierman Produce Exchange put it this way: when the market opened in 1967, 130 merchants worked at 100 percent capacity, and sixty years later 27 merchants operate at 120 percent capacity. There has been no loss of volume or generational business. What happened, he said, was that all the houses used to be specialists, later generations expanded into new spaces and diversified their product lines, and many houses now carry similar items. That is what makes price and quality important, and the market operates on true supply and demand.
The counts themselves need dating rather than averaging, and this is a case where the honest thing is to show the spread. 130 merchants in 1967 on Fierman's account. 47 in 2018 per the NYC Food Policy Center. 27 in August 2024 per Produce Business. More than 30 on the market's own current site, whose directory lists 31 unique names. 26 in August 2026 per NY1, citing the city. Five sources, five numbers, five dates, and they are not measuring quite the same thing.
The same caution applies to the market's share of the city's produce, which is quoted at 60 percent in 2018, 60 percent in 2024 and 25 percent in 2026 by three different bodies who define it three different ways. This page prints them separately with their sources or not at all, and it does not compute a decline from them, because the arithmetic would be invented rather than measured.
What did become a real concentration is the diversification Fierman describes. When every house was a specialist you needed several accounts; now many carry similar items, which is why price is the thing that moves. The exceptions are still on the page and they are worth knowing: Top Banana says it is the only firm ripening bananas inside the market, Coosemans carries over 400 specialty items, Pan Hellenic claims the deepest frozen lineup there, and Fierman remains an onion and potato house that grew a full vegetable line around them.
