By Michael F. Carmichael
Sept. 29, 2011
With more than half of us overweight – and many of us saying we are so stressed we don’t have any available timeslots for eating healthily – 14 years ago one man started a crusade to change what we grab to keep us going. Meet Chris Mittelstaedt: The FruitGuy. And, he’s making inroads.
| The FruitGuy,Chris Mittelstaedt. |
|
Mittelstaedt is based in the San Francisco area, the home of Silicon Valley and its classically stressed-out techies. “The thing that started our movement was the dot-com boom,” Mittelstaedt explains. “Back then it was all Jolt Cola and those chocolate-coated espresso beans. It was a ‘treat’ mentality to keep people motivated so they could spend tons of time at work.”
“I had a number of friends in the industry and when I talked to them they would ask me, ‘Don’t you know of anything we could snack on instead of Jolt Cola?’ That’s when I said I’d bring them fresh fruit. One thing led to another and I started building wooden crates and stenciling them with my home telephone number on the side, filling them with fresh fruit and taking them to offices in my car,” he recalls.
Mittelstaedt, now calling his delivery service The FruitGuys, soon moved on to a U-Haul truck and started hiring people. “In the first three years we grew from nothing in revenue to $1 million in sales by year three. We thought the world could never end. I bought five new trucks and two months later the economy cratered. We had five new trucks and had lost half of our revenue and had mountains of bad debt because a lot of the Internet companies shut their doors and never paid their bills.”
That’s where, in effect, Mittelstaedt’s operation became a startup company all over again. “I got personally in debt on my credit cards trying to keep my family going. A hundred grand in credit cards. I had to make the mental shift from being a growth-oriented CEO to becoming a delivery truck driver once more. It was tough. We had just had twins. But, we believed in the concepts and we always have.”
| The FruitGuys grew to $1 million in sales by the end of its third year in business. |
|
“Out of that experience,” Mittelstaedt says, “came the idea of expanding nationwide and not being so focused on one local economy. We could divide our risk among different localities, with different economies. That’s served us very well. We’re very evolutionary-based in the way we grow.”
A challenge to geographic expansion for a fresh produce company is ensuring adequate supply. Mittelstaedt addresses that by saying, “In order to grow the business we had to have as many local resources and people on the ground as we could. In order to really affect change in behavior for people’s health you have to know the people you’re dealing with. Having a national brand is good but it’s even better if it has a local implementation and local flavor. One of our goals as we open facilities is to work with as many local growers on the ground – when in season – as we possibly can.”