Rungis: Inside the World's Largest Food Market

Rungis: Inside the World's Largest Food Market

From Fabulously Delicious: The French Food Podcast by Andrew Prior

March 24, 2026 · 24 min

About this episode

This episode explores Rungis, the world's largest wholesale food market located near Paris.

Rungis: Inside the World's Largest Food Market Seven kilometres south of Paris, larger than the entire Principality of Monaco, there is a place that most visitors to the city will never see. It opens at three in the morning. It employs 13,000 people every single day. It supplies food to 18 million people across the Île-de-France. And it quietly underpins every extraordinary meal you have ever eaten in France. This is Rungis — the world's largest wholesale food market — and in this episode of Fabulously Delicious, we're going inside. But to understand Rungis, you first have to understand what came before it. For nearly a thousand years, the beating heart of Paris's food supply was Les Halles — the sprawling, magnificent market in the centre of the city that Émile Zola called le ventre de Paris, the belly of Paris. We're telling the full story of that market, its iconic Baltard pavilions, the last extraordinary night when Parisians gathered to say goodbye with flowers and brass bands and farandoles around vegetable crates — and then the move of the century itself. Over one weekend in February 1969, 1,000 wholesale companies, 20,000 people and 5,000 tonnes…

People in this episode

Host: Andrew Prior

Topics covered

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Rungis, Paris, Île-de-France, Principality of Monaco

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