Live-Animal Counter Keeps Independent Asian Grocer Going

The San Francisco Public Press and the Ingleside Light are partnering on a series of stories about Chinese American culture and businesses in San Francisco, with a focus on the city’s Ingleside neighborhood, as a way to explore broader social and economic trends.

Content warning: This story contains descriptions of live animals being slaughtered.

Betsy Chow, wearing a light pink jacket and a satchel, took a two-stop bus trip to All Fresh Market in San Francisco’s Ingleside neighborhood. The 70-year-old headed straight to the back, passing aisles of fresh vegetables and the butcher counter, to the tanks holding live crabs, lobsters and fish. She stopped in front of a bucket, covered with a net, holding about a dozen East Asian bullfrogs.

Chow handpicked three frogs, put them in a separate bucket and handed them to the butcher, who told her that frogs are almost in season. She then watched him carefully kill and clean each one. The main ingredient for Chow’s lunch was ready.

“I only come here for the live frogs, fish, shrimp or lobster that are swimming,” Chow said in Cantonese. “If it’s swimming when I buy it, it tastes better because it’s very fresh.”

While Chow can buy prepackaged or frozen frog and other items from supermarkets, All Fresh Market’s live-animal counter satisfies the Hong Kong immigrant’s need for the Cantonese concept of “freshness 鲜(sin1).” For Chow, quality home cooking requires as-fresh-as-possible seafood and meat.

Many of San Francisco’s independent Asian grocers slaughter animals in front of customers, a practice some see as a mark of freshness and others as cruelty. All Fresh Market was among the markets noted last year in a news report that reignited a long-simmering debate over animal cruelty

But offering the ingredients of traditional dishes, from beef tripe, chicken feet and live seafood, the market has built a following that is helping it compete with corporate chains like Costco and 99 Ranch Market.

A business necessity

Jimmy Li acquired the longtime Ocean Avenue Asian grocer Power Trading in 2022 and rebranded it as All Fresh Market. Li, 40, immigrated to the United States from southern China in 2010 and spent years working in restaurants, where he built the knowledge and network needed to source ingredients. When many restaurants closed during the pandemic, he had a simple hunch: Even if a pandemic or a bad economy keeps people out of restaurants, they still have to buy food.

The grocery store spans two storybook storefronts on Ocean Avenue. Customers frequently have to wait in line for the two cashiers.

Li knew early on that he couldn’t beat others on price. The big chains sell in bulk for cheap, and Chinatown markets have sold fresh seafood for decades at low cost. So he focused on what neither could offer: a boutique neighborhood market with live seafood, hard-to-find produce and a kill-to-order service.

“Most of my customers care a lot about freshness,” Li said in Cantonese. “They only believe a product is fresh when they see the fish slaughtered in front of them.”

Last year, scrutiny of Asian markets over inhumane treatment of stock returned after Animal Outlook, a vegan activist group based in Washington, D.C., issued a report and graphic footage from 18 Bay Area markets showing fish, frogs and turtles being beheaded without stunning and stuffed into cramped tanks or baskets. The group alleged the practices violated California’s animal cruelty law and that the city’s Department of Animal Care and Control had failed to enforce it.

The allegations are the latest chapter in a decades-old fight. The state law at the center of the debate was born from a failed lawsuit. In the 1990s, animal rights groups sued 12 Chinatown markets for cruelty but lost when a judge ruled against them. Following the most recent public debate, the city’s animal welfare commission recommended reaching out to business owners about the law and finding ways to issue more citations.

Deb Campbell, spokesperson for the San Francisco Department of Animal Care and Control, said department officers respond to all complaints but can only issue citations when violations are witnessed firsthand. She added that the department is developing more outreach materials but did not say whether enforcement would increase.

Li said an officer conducted a surprise inspection after a customer complaint about overcrowded frogs and found the store compliant.

Ben Gerlofs, a University of Hong Kong geography professor who has researched live-animal markets, said the gap between how different people view the practice is not only cultural but also geographic.

“Like in a local market, you would see animals bought and sold live,” he said. “You’d see them butchered at local markets and sold in pieces. That is a very normal part of life for most people on the planet.”

In the United States, people hunt and butcher animals like deer, for instance, themselves without outcry.

Gerlofs’s research found that what makes an animal worth buying is the encounter with it and signs of aliveness: how fast it moves and whether its eyes are open. What counts as freshness doesn’t have a defined standard and varies across regions and religions. Merchants also use the sense of freshness to negotiate price, which leads them to care for the fish but sometimes also to do things that border on torture, like taking a fish out of the water to show movement as a sign of life.

Gerlofs said older people are more likely to appreciate live animals and value long-standing relationships with sellers. Younger generations, he said, increasingly prefer to go to supermarkets that avoid interaction with both the animals and the workers there. Modernization projects have turned markets into tourist attractions and broken down their role as neighborhood hubs.

‘Freshness speaks for itself’

Li has found a modern way of drawing customers to All Fresh Market.

After he fills the tanks with fish and crustaceans, he posts updates to WeChat groups for hundreds of customers, including neighbors and regulars who drive in from miles away. They’re his ultimate quality control, because if a customer gets a dead crab, they post it in the group chat for everyone to see.

But Li said there’s more to freshness than the time between slaughter and eating. 

“When we unload our product, we need to make sure to have a good living environment to keep them alive until customers come to buy it,” he said. “We put a lot more effort into keeping them alive.”

What sets his store apart, Li said, is sourcing small batches of seafood from around the world, not just from wholesalers. He works with multiple suppliers: fishermen at the wharf and importers. The challenge is keeping each species alive in the right environment. 

“Coral grouper from Australia need to live in a tank with a higher water temperature,” Li said. “And we need a lot of ice for red king crab from Norway.”

Yet at All Fresh Market, those connections keep business thriving. After three years, the market is moving to a larger location in the neighborhood.

For Ingleside resident Chow, homemade claypot steamed frog with ginger and scallion, a dish from her childhood, was on the menu. Fresh frog, she said, means she won’t need much sauce or any MSG.

“The freshness speaks for itself,” Chow said.