Two things that snackers frequently want from their purchases are convenience and better-for-you benefits. Food delivery innovators The FruitGuys seek to provide hungry customers with both, offering a cornucopia of fresh fruits in addition to healthy packaged snacks. To learn more about the company and its mission, we connected with Erin Mittelstaedt, CEO of The FruitGuys.

Jenni Spinner: Tell me about yourself and what you were up to before The FruitGuys was born. Have you always wanted to be a purveyor of fruit and snacks?

Erin Mittelstaedt: I’ve been working for The FruitGuys for 17 years. My older brother started the business 27 years ago when I was in college. Prior to The FruitGuys, I had worked in a couple of different fields, but most recently Trader Joe’s, where I began to realize how much I enjoyed working with food. Learning about the different products and produce and talking knowledgeably about them with customers was really fun. So when my brother, Chris, and his business partner Erik came and asked if I wanted to help The FruitGuys expand to other cities and run our Philadelphia location, it was a natural fit. 

JS: Then, please tell me about The FruitGuys—where the idea came from, how it got started, how it’s grown and evolved since those early days, and what the business model/products look like today.

EM: My brother started The FruitGuys 27 years ago in San Francisco. He had an awful job running faxes at a luxury hotel, and his wife was pregnant,t and he knew he had to do something different. He had friends in the Bay Area that were working for tech companies and heard stories of them eating chocolate-covered espresso beans and drinking Red Bulls all day, and he wondered if businesses like that would be interested in healthier options. Sure enough, he convinced his first customer to prepay for the box so he could afford the fruit and started packing boxes to be delivered to businesses in the Bay Area. 

Over the 27 years, we’ve grown and now ship out of 11 locations nationwide. We’ve survived three economic crises: the dot-com bust, the great recession, and then COVID (during which we lost 90% of our business in two weeks). Today, we still deliver fresh fruit to offices nationwide, and several years ago, we expanded into snacks, and now we deliver snacks to offices as well. We became a B Corp in 2018 to formalize our commitment to giving back to our communities; from the beginning, we’ve always donated produce that was edible but that we couldn’t use, and becoming a B Corp just formalized that, as well as other commitments we’ve made to give back. 

JS: The company has been around for more than a quarter century—could you please share your thoughts on why it’s had such staying power, and why hungry consumers dig you?

EM: The product is great—farm-fresh fruit is healthy and delicious, I think employers and employees appreciate the benefits of having healthy, whole food in the office. Our quality is top notch; we work with farmers across the country, and we have rigorous quality checks to ensure clients receive the best fruit. We are proud of our service level - we offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee and will replace any damaged fruit. 

I also think we’ve made it this long because we are scrappy and adaptable—we never met a problem we couldn’t solve and we’re not afraid to make hard, but necessary decisions. 

JS: You offer folks fruit, which are (to oversimplify) snacks with one ingredient—it doesn’t get more clean label than that, right? How do you decide if a prepackaged snack is healthful and natural enough to be packaged into one of your deliveries? I’d love to hear what the criteria are.

EM: On the packaged snacks, we look at a few things: 

• Clean ingredients, ones you can pronounce
• We think sweets are good, but we aim to ones that are naturally lower in sugar
• They have to taste great, it's no fun if it isn't fun to eat
• We certainly look for any organic and regenerative brands and I gredienta but that isn't a requirement

Beyond the ingredients, we also look for: 

• Mission-driven businesses 
• Diversely owned brands
• Emerging or new brands
• Snacks that are located near our facilities 

JS: Can you share what some of the snack brands you’ve tucked in your crates are? I spot a couple of familiar names in the pics.

EM: Oh, there are so many amazing brands and products. We like to rotate brands and flavors so that clients have new and different items in their box. We also have some mix of crunchy snacks like veggies or chips, bars, jerky, better-for-you sweet treats, and granola/trail mix or nuts. Some items in the boxes right now are:

• Mezcla bars: matcha vanilla and peanut butter chocolate; these are plant-based, crispy protein bars
• Love + Chew chocolate chia cookies: gluten-free, vegan, and non-MO cookies
• Cheddies Double Cheddar crackers: with a regeneratively farmed cheese blend

JS: What do you have planned for the future—please tell me about anything like new products, expansion plans, partnerships with new producers, etc.

EM: On the snack side, we’re adding new brands all of the time. Our buyer Daria is constantly looking for new items and smaller producers. She is also always looking at new trends; for example, we are exploring drink enhancement packets as an add-on for our boxes. 

On the fruit side, we continue to work to expand our farm direct purchases, so that we’re purchasing direct from family farms whenever possible.

JS: What’s your favorite fruit, and your favorite snack?

EM: For fruit, I can’t list just one, so I have to go by season: blueberries and peaches in summer, d’anjou pears in fall, cara cara oranges, and ojai pixies in winter and spring. On the snack side, I love Righteous Felon’s meat sticks, particularly the street taco flavor. And Kate's Real Food bars, particularly the white macadamia mini bars. But like fruit, there are so many tasty snacks!

Related: CVS adds to Well Market line of snacks