Robin: What’s the story behind your business?

Lev: It was actually kind of an  unintentional genesis. I had owned a smoothie food truck and I was using some fruits from Pine Island. And then when COVID hit, we had a bunch of fruit that was purchased for Reggae Rise Up [music festival]. When they canceled the festival, I was just selling/gifting/donating the fruit to my friends. 

We didn’t know how long the stores were going to be closed. We didn’t know where we were going to get our fruit, and the farmers had nowhere to sell their fruit. I was trying to figure that whole situation out, and we got really lucky because the St. Pete Saturday Morning Market was one of the first markets to open back up. 

And that gave us the opportunity to put together variety fruit boxes from Pine Island for people to pick up Saturday mornings. And then eventually we started setting up at the market to sell fruit.

Robin: So COVID brought some some very cool changes for you, actually.

Lev: Right, this was one of the silver linings for us. Instead of just making smoothies, now I work with a lot of farmers, and I also live on a farm and we grow the fruit and take care of it, so I’ve come full circle. Since 2006 I’ve been, in one fashion or other, working with the land. Now I’ve been hired as a steward for an old citrus grove in Floral City called Wonderfield Farm and Grove. We’re planting new groves, and we’re really pushing the limits of what kinds of tropical stuff we can grow up there and seeing what works.

Robin: You’re buying fruit from farmers on Pine Island, and from farmers in Homestead. Then what?

Lev: The main focus has been selling at the markets, and some fruit and vegetable stores buy from me as well, like Meacham Urban Farm, the Tides Seafood Market & Provisions and Brick Street Farms.

Now we’ve just launched a new website and a subscription package. People are signing up for either weekly or bi-weekly boxes. It’s nice because it’s kind of like a surprise, there’s always an element of novelty to it. But we also get to develop a relationship with our customers, and we end up knowing who likes what.

The big issue is that it’s really hard to get local fruit, because it’s not like there’s a directory. I hear things like, “there’s this Vietnamese family here” and “go behind this house in Homestead” or “there’s this one guy who doesn’t have a telephone number, but you have to find him here in Pine Island.” I have one guy who does that [searching] in Homestead, and then I do that here in Central Florida and Pine Island. And between the two of us, we find enough. I get a lot of my food from the little nooks and crannies in Tampa—I get a lot of passion fruit, dragon fruit, bananas, papayas. And then, of course, the Lakeland area is replete with all kinds of fruit; you’ve just got to find it.

Robin: What kinds of fruit will you be carrying this summer?

Lev: We’re really coming into the peak season here for tropical fruit. We’re about to be in mango season and lychee season, and that’s all coming from Pine Island. Also, we’ll have red dragon fruit, white dragon fruit, a lot of longans, pink guava,  multiple varieties of apple bananas. From Homestead, I get a lot of mamey sapote and brown sugar fruit [sapodilla].

Mamey sapote is like a sweet-potato-pie-flavored fruit. It’s really popular in Cuban cuisine. I sell it to Cuban restaurants and they’ll make a milkshake out of it.

Robin: What’s your favorite?

Lev: My favorite fruit is probably soursop. I tried it for the first time in the Virgin Islands, and fell in love with it. Some people will call it mystery fruit because it tastes a little different every time, but I like to tell people that it tastes like being inside a bag of Sour Skittles because you get sweet and sour, and it’s got flavors like strawberry, apple, banana, pineapple, but also vanilla. Some people say mint ice cream. People have the craziest descriptions for it. It’s a very custardy fruit, and it’s wild looking—people see it and they’re, like, “what is that?” It’s one of those tropical fruits that is a conversation starter, for sure.

Robin: Wow! Will you be able to get soursop and the others all summer?

Lev:  Most of the fruit I get comes from Florida. But there are a few things that, by popular demand, I started to import from  the islands. So I have some soursop in the summer from Pine Island, but it’s very rare and very hard to find. 

Otherwise, I import it from Grenada, and it’s really good quality. It’s overnighted, and so it’s basically picked tree ripe. It’s a much better quality than you would find in the store. So soursop, cacao [from Ecuador], and yellow dragon fruit are my three imports, and people get really upset if I don’t at least try to get those.

Robin: What do you have that people would not be familiar with, that usually gets a big reaction from people?

Lev: I think people are pretty stunned that chocolate comes from this wild-looking, alien fruit pod: cacao. And with the mamey sapote, I’ll tell people, “try the new orange avocado!” because it’s got the texture of avocado and it tastes like sweet potato pie with a little bit of caramelized brown sugar. People definitely go wild for that as well.

I have a fruit called the hog plum that I harvest in Pine Island but it’s native to the Caribbean. Even a small handful of this hog plum smells exactly like Hi-C—that fruit punch sour smell. It brings you back to being a kid.  And pink guavas really bring the people in—they just smell so good.

Where to find Florida Fruit Co-op:
Saturday Morning Market, St. Petersburg
Corey Ave. Market, St. Pete Beach
Twisted Indian, St. Petersburg
Herb Scoop Shop, St. Petersburg
Meacham Urban Farm, Tampa
The Tides Seafood Market & Provisions, Safety Harbor
Brick Street Farms, St. Petersburg
floridafruit.co
Instagram: @floridafruitcoop