Pinoy street food and sidewalk vendors doing better selling fruit snacks
For many health-conscious Filipinos, taking fruit snacks and natural juice is a refreshing break after a hard day’s work.
Nowadays, it’s easy to find fruit snacks from a growing number of sidewalk fruit vendors in this booming city known for years as the “fruit basket of the Philippines”.
Take your pick: red papaya, green mango, white singkamas, sweet pineapple and giant guava — all peeled, sliced and packed in small clear plastic packs, ready to eat and sold for only five pesos.
Thousands of students, office workers and commuters who streamed out to the streets at lunchtime, gobble up these “instant” fruit snacks daily.
“We’re always running out of fruits, that’s why we have to replenish them all the time,” says Nimfa Lansing, 43, a sidewalk vendor here who peddles her fruit snacks on a street corner near the city hall providing a new source of livelihood for hundreds of street vendors here.
She sells small slices of green mango, semi-ripe papaya and giant guava, all peeled and cut by her into small bite-size slices or chunks, ready to eat with a pointed bamboo stick.
A typical sidewalk fruit vendor like Lansing spends about P700 to P1,000 daily as capital for all the various fruits she buys cheap at the nearby market. She comes home at the end of the day with gross sales of P1,200 to P1,500, averaging about P15,000 monthly.
“More and more people like to eat fruits these days, specially when they’re very cheap and easy to eat — it doesn’t take long to sell out all our fruits,” says Lansing who comes from neighboring Cotabato province with three children who are all in school, thanks to her small snack fruit business.
For Limuel Somosa, 28, however, he’ll sell nothing else but ripe pineapples, piled up in a big heap on his wooden cart, all “rejects” bought direct from the huge pineapple plantation of Dole — the world’s largest pineapple exporter — in Polomolok, South Cotabato.
Like many street vendors like him who sell only pineapples, he proudly shows the customer how he peels the fruit in less than two minutes flat — peeling off the fruit skin in one quick circular cut, slicing it into cubes from the inside, before slipping them into clear plastic bags, ready to eat using a bamboo stick as fork.
“Customers like to watch us peel the fruit quickly right in front of them, I think that also helps us sell the fruit,” says Somosa who sells each pineapple for P5 to P10 each, depending on the size. On a typical day, Somosa sells close to a hundred pineapples often taking home gross sales of P800 to P1,000, enough to cover his daily capital costs of about P500 for his supply of the fruit, plus a good profit for himself.
Basilio Aragon, 24, on the other hand doesn’t sell any fruits but only ice-cold “buko” juice from young green coconuts, mixed with little milk and sugar. Peddled on rolling carts for only P5 a cup, “buko” juice has become the latest craze for busy people on the street, health-buffs mostly, especially during hot afternoons.
“Lots of people like to drink ice-cold buko because its good for the health and it’s much cheaper than soft drinks,” says Aragon who can generate sales from P500 to P800 daily from his buko juice, keeping about half of that amount as net profit after deducting his capital costs.
Sources of daily capital outlay for these vendors usually come from very enterprising Indian (“Bombay”) “5-6″ money-lenders who can provide very small loans from P500 to P1,000 at 10 percent interest, collected daily.
Sidewalk vendors like Lansing, Somosa and Aragon are still classified as informal “micro-enterprises” if one goes by the official definition of Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME), according to the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).
“We’re trying to work out some programs that can help these street vendors because they’re paying very high interest on this kind of financing,” says Teolulo Pasawa, DTI city director.
Micro-enterprises are registered businesses with a capital outlay of P3 million and below which, according to Pasawa, also includes these street vendors, even if they are sometimes tagged as the “underground economy” — which has shown to be as bustling as the more legitimate businesses.
In this southern city alone, 99.71 percent of all registered businesses are classified as MSME which been helping the steady growth of the region’s economy over the years.
