Excerpt from the report Foreword: This report was done under contract by the Stanford Research Institute. It relates to the factors responsible for costs of transporting and handling fruits and vegetables in terminal markets in Oakland and San Francisco. It makes available facts relating to the efficiency of marketing fresh fruits and vegetables and suggests methods of improving transporting and handling practices in these and other cities. The Oakland and San Francisco terminal markets were selected for the study because they offered a chance to observe and analyze costs of marketing fruits and vegetables under two substantially different methods of operation, and because they are the concentrating and distributing markets for one of the major fruit-and-vegetable-producing areas in the United States.