Cheers to 27 Years of Corporate Fruit Delivery

This week marks twenty-seven years since The FruitGuys—and the concept of corporate fruit delivery—was born. The story goes that my brother, Chris, and his wife, Pia, had recently moved back to San Francisco. It was the height of the dot-com boom. Chris was 28 years old, Pia was pregnant, and he was running faxes (delivering papers from those old-fangled machines that sent documents over the—gasp!—telephone lines) to make ends meet while he contemplated what to do next.

Early Days at The FruitGuys

Chris had friends at internet startups, and they raved about their amazing company perks. Employees were drinking Red Bulls and eating chocolate-covered espresso beans all day to fuel the startup culture. Chris wondered if there was a way to get something healthier into those offices—something like fresh fruit. He started pitching the idea to companies and eventually convinced one to prepay so that he could afford the product. He boxed up a variety of fruit into wooden crates, delivered them to the office himself, and a business was born!

Corporate Fruit Delivery Through the Great Recession, COVID-19, and More

The FruitGuys has been through a lot in the past twenty-seven years, including three major business-changing moments: the dot-com bust, the Great Recession of 2007–2009, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic (which was by far the worst). Someone asked me recently how we got through all of that, and I attributed it to two things.

• Our ability to take action and make changes quickly, even when those changes were extremely difficult.
• Our team’s resiliency and scrappiness. Whether we needed an office worker to pack and deliver boxes or an operations manager to call clients after COVID and see if they were returning to work, our team always rose to the challenge.

Cheers to Our Fruit Family

So all that is to say, happy birthday FruitGuys family! This isn’t a celebration of the company, but of the people it touches: the farms we partner with, the clients we serve, the coworkers we work with, and the people in need that we feed. I’m grateful for the opportunity to serve you and to continue making a positive impact through food.