Where does my food come from?

Azadpur Mandi of Delhi is a wholesale Fruits and Vegetable(F&V) market where various F&V arrive in large quantities either directly from farmers or through middlemen from different parts of India and also imports from several other countries.

In terms of arrival quantity, Azadpur Mandi is the largest F&V market in Asia. Sopore Mandi of J&K is the second largest fruits market in Asia. If you are a resident of Delhi, chances are that any fruit you purchase in Delhi is coming from the Azadpur Mandi. The Mandi is a vibrant place of bustling activity especially in the wee hours, when the produce arrives in trucks from different parts of the country. Upon arrival, the produce is auctioned for sale by registered agents of the market. Buyers range from the hospitality industry to the pushcart vendors.

The Marketing Committee of Azadpur Mandi publishes daily market bulletin on it's website providing information on the arrival quantity of various food items each day along with the places from where the food item had arrived. Here I visualise the data for the F.Y. 2016-17 of some fruits of interest.

To get a sense of the scale of the market and find out where your relished fruits come from, explore the visualisation by scolling down.

• It is important to note here that the data does not provide information on the arrival quantity per location. It only provides the total arrival quantity of a food item for the given month and the list of locations it arrived from, in the given month.

How to read the visualisation:

Top 10 Fruits of the year, by domestic arrivals

Did you know?

• Apple trumps all F&V by being the largest arrival of the year in both domestic and international arrivals. A massive 4.7 lakh tonnes of Apples came to the Mandi in domestic arrivals in the year 2016-17, which is 1 lakh tonnes more than Potato, the second highest domestic arrival in combined F&V category, and 3 lakh tonnes more than Mango, the second highest domestic arrival in Fruits category.
• 6,783 Tonnes of Apple arrived on 26th September 2016. This the highest arrival quantity of any food on any given day during studied year.
• Mango is by far the most grographically diverse fruit from the perspective of domestic arrivals. It arrives from 9 different states in the whole year. The other 'geographically diverse' foods, in the above context, are Sarda Melon with 8 states & Banana,Guava,Water Melon with 7 states.

The next 10 fruits ranked by domestic arrival quantity for the year

Did you find out ?

As we moved from the top ten to the next ten (abovementioned fruits), the set of ten is predominantly sourced from North India as is clearly visible from the colors. West India stands a close second. This trend will be even more prominent when we look at the 10 bottom most fruits by domestic arrival, next.

The 10 bottommost fruits by domestic arrivals

Top 10 internationally imported foods in the Mandi

Pay close attention,

to the pattern of arrivals for Apples in imported category and then go back and match it with the arrival pattern for Apples in domestic category. What did you find out?

Some interesting imported fruits

Rambutan, a tropical fruit native to Malay-Indonesean region and some other regions of tropical Southeast Asia. It's meat is similar to Lychee in taste and texture.

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Mangosteen is a sweet and tart pulpy fruit, also known as the "Queen of Fruits". It is native to Malay-Indonesean region, but is also grown in India since 1800s in parts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala.