—By Joel Denker

In a vigorous commercial culture, many of America’s immigrants naturally chose business, and especially the food business, as their avenue of opportunity. Ethnic food enterprise was at once a means of holding on to vital cultural traditions in a strange society and a way of getting ahead. Throughout American history, newcomers worked as vendors, grocers, and restaurant proprietors.

Each successive wave of immigrants brought new arrivals who changed the food landscape. The Irish, Germans, French Canadians, and Scandinavians journeyed to the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century. In the most polyglot migration up to that time, Jews, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians poured in from Poland, Hungary, Russia, Greece, Italy, and from other states in Southern and Eastern Europe between the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. Beginning in the 1970’s, previously underrepresented groups from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East started settling in.

Entrepreneurs in each wave staked out niches in the food business. Germans, for example, opened delicatessens selling knockwurst, bratwurst, mustards, and pumpernickel. Southern Italians started businesses purveying fresh ricotta and mozzarella and established salumerias to sell salami, prosciutto, and mortadella. Today, Salvadorans establish pupuserias, eateries that sell the pupusa—their country’s version of the tortilla—tamales, and exotic drinks like horchata and tamarindo.

Ethnics relied on family and old country ties in their ventures. Greeks, the archetypical food entrepreneurs, jumped ship, grabbed jobs as dishwashers or countermen, and began working long, laborious days. They scrimped and saved in hopes of accumulating enough money for their next move. After several years, working for a kinsman, many opened their own lunch counter, coffee shop, or diner.

They, in turn, brought in relatives from the “other side” to help out in their shops. Having learned the trade, brothers or cousins, in turn, embarked on a similar path. Chain migration, as the social scientists call it, created an ever-expanding food business.

The Food Business: Courting Ethnics and Natives

The ethnic food venue served as a gathering place for “green horns,” newcomers who felt lonely and adrift in anonymous cities. They congregated in eateries and cafes to recapture memories of pilaf and grape leaves or of samosas and biryanis. Nostalgic customers sought out these businesses to meet old friends and find new companions, to pick up gossip, and to debate homeland politics.

The pioneering food business in each community depended on a loyal ethnic customer base. In time and with greater financial success, merchants reached out to strangers, to worldly urbanities and to cosmopolitan eaters. As ethnic food over the decades became more familiar to natives, the less insular the enterprises became.

The history of Sahadi’s, the Brooklyn-based food giant that combines retailing, wholesaling, manufacturing, and importing, illustrates the steps in this evolution. Abraham Sahadi, the great uncle of Charles Sahadi, the firm’s owner, opened an “Oriental” grocery in the “Little Syria” district of lower Manhattan in 1895. The merchant sold fellow ethnics spices, nuts, olives, dried fruit, bulgur, and other grains. He imported sesame seeds—the basis for tahini paste, the flavoring for hummus—orange blossom water, lentils, and other goods.

Wade Sahadi, Charley’s father, who worked for his uncle, set out on his own. He soon bought his own shop on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, which had replaced Washington Street in Manhattan as New York’s Middle Eastern commercial hub. Charles, who took over the shop, catered to the special tastes of Syrian and Lebanese Christians during the fifties and sixties. The Sahadi Importing Company stocked chickpeas, apricots, okra, and other Arabic staples. It also sold Turkish tea glasses, backgammon, and clay water pipes.

Today, the original small grocery has burgeoned into a vast emporium. Sahadi’s now attracts both old and new immigrants — Moroccans, Yeminis, Egyptians, and Palestinians — as well an affluent, sophisticated clientele of locals craving gourmet olive oil and take-out tabbouleh, the minty Lebanese salad.

The Assimilation of Ethnic Food

Foods once considered peculiar and unpalatable have been absorbed into the culinary mainstream with the help of ethnic entrepreneurs. Yogurt (which comes from the Turkish word “to thicken”) was at one time a mysterious item mostly enjoyed by Middle Easterners. Its later popularity is in large part due to the business prowess of the Colombosians, an Armenian family who owned a small farm in Andover, Massachusetts during the Depression. They made old country yogurt and peddled it in horse-drawn wagons to local Syrians, Lebanese, Greeks, and Armenians.

The family named their product Colombo because many of their customers could not pronounce Colombosian. The merchants purchased a plant to manufacture the country’s first commercial yogurt. Originally sold in glass bottles in ethnic stores, blue and white papers cups of Colombo yogurt began appearing in supermarkets in the 1960s.

Similarly, other ingredients, many now commonplace, were introduced to natives by newcomers. Like many Italian farmers and produce merchants, the D’Arrigo brothers, Sicilian immigrants, transformed U.S. agriculture. The young farmers transformed broccoli from an Italian vegetable into an American staple.

The first shipments of broccoli grown in California were sent by the D’Arrigos to the East Coast in 1924. Innovators in advertising. they marketed bunches of broccoli with a pink label and a picture of the cherubic Andy, the son of brother Stephen. Andy Boy broccoli was a groundbreaker in ethnic food branding

Ethnic merchants have traveled from early jumping-off points on the East and West coasts to the hinterland. In the process, immigrant food has become more familiar. Greeks fanned out across the country opening diners, candy shops, pizzerias, and restaurants. The Thais have been equally intrepid. Most substantial cities across the country can boast at least one eatery offering pad thai and satay.

Crossing Boundaries: An Italian Goes Chinese

Some entrepreneurs have not been satisfied with simply merchandising their own ethnic foods. William Gebhardt, a German café owner in New Braunfels, Texas developed one of the earliest commercial chili powders, during the late nineteenth century. Joseph Di Giorgio, the son of a lemon grower in Sicily, sold fruit in Baltimore during the early twentieth century. When lemon imports slowed during the winter months, the Sicilian chartered steamships to bring in cargos of bananas from Cuba, Jamaica, and Honduras to the Maryland port.

Jeno Paulucci, the son of an Italian immigrant iron miner in Hibbing, Minnesota, popularized Chinese food in mainstream America. A natural huckster, the one-time grocery barker went from canning bean sprouts during World War II to manufacturing chow mein and chop suey under the Chun King brand name in the 1950s.

The Transformation of the Ethnic Food Enterprise

Ethnics have operated a wide range of food businesses, from small groceries and restaurants to wholesaling, manufacturing, and importing firms. Some of the most successful enterprises have developed into large corporations using modern technology and marketing. The Sara Lee company, for example, sprang from a small chain of Chicago bakeries run by Jewish merchant Charles Lubin. Lubin, who named his signature cheesecake for his daughter because of its “wholesome and American” ring, devised an inventive production method. An aluminum foil pan, in which the cake was baked, was also used to freeze and package it. By 1954, the Kitchens of Sara Lee were marketing the cheesecake in forty-eight states. Lubin sold the business to the Consolidated Foods conglomerate in 1956.

The saga of Progresso Foods encapsulates the stages in the history of the ethnic food business. Its founder, Giuseppe Uddo, a Sicilian immigrant who arrived in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century, started out carrying olives, cheeses, and cans of imported tomato paste in a horse-drawn cart to nearby Italian truck farmers. The family firm expanded into importing and wholesaling items like capers, chickpeas, anchovies, and pine nuts to ethnic groceries. During World War II, the company began processing domestically grown tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. By the Fifties, Progresso’s olive oil, roasted peppers, crushed tomatoes, and other wares were being sold in the chains. The products were grouped together in the first ethnic food section to be displayed in supermarkets.

Looking for a year-round product, the family stumbled into the soup business. They launched their line with lentil, escarole, and other flavors made from old family recipes. The soups became the mainstay of the business. Today, the firm that started with a horse-drawn cart is owned by Pillsbury.

In the latest twist in the history of the business, firms have begun focusing on selling their products to second and third generation ethnics. Often too busy to prepare recipes from scratch, they are eager for quick and easy-to-prepare foods. Goya, the largest Hispanic food company, offers customers frozen yucca and packages of ready-to-make paella.

The ethnic food business mirrors the crazy quilt of American immigrant life. As Chun King titan Jeno Paulucci  put it, “Only in America would it be possible for a man named Jeno Francesco Paulucci, son of poor Italian immigrants, to get rich selling Chinese food in a Scandinavian region.”

Further Readings

Denker, Joel. The World on a Plate: A Tour through the History of America’s Ethnic Cuisine. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003.

Gabaccia, Donna. “Immigration and American Diversity: Food for Thought.” In Reed Ueeda, ed. A Companion to American Immigration. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 443-470.

Gabaccia, Donna. We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Rozin, Elisabeth. Ethnic Cuisine: The Flavor-Principle Cookbook. Lexington, MA: The Stephen Greene Press, 1983.

Shenton, James, ed. American Cooking: The Melting Pot. New York: Time-Life Books, 2003.