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Coronavirus Florida: Local distributor offers $10 produce boxes for drive-through customers – Entertainment – The Ledger

When business took a dive last week, wholesaler East Coast Farms and Vegetables shifted its focus: It began to sell its fresh vegetables and fruit directly to the public. The drive-through, cash-only service has been a hit.

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The anonymous woman in the modest car made all the difference this week. She had reached the front of the line of vehicles that stretched outside a Lantana Road warehouse where drive-through customers waited to snag the hottest produce deal in town — $10 boxes filled with a variety of fresh fruit and veggies.

“There’s this giant line of cars and this woman pulls up and says, ‘I want to buy a box for the car behind me,’” says Randy Kay, who manages shipping and receiving at East Coast Farms and Vegetables, a local produce distributor. “We asked her, ‘You know them?’ She says, ‘No.’”

The customers in the vehicle behind her, “an older couple in a minivan,” according to Kay, were taken aback. “They go, ‘Does she know who we are? We’re a foster couple.’” says Kay. “It was really something. They had five children in the minivan. Everybody started crying.”

It was a scene that reflects the layers of this coronavirus moment: A customer’s compassion lifts another during a crisis. A business pivots to serve a new clientele and remain viable. An improvised community service promises to spin off into a new weekly feature after the shutdown.

The family-owned produce distributor normally sells fruits and vegetables to wholesalers, who in turn sell them to local restaurants and other establishments. But when sales took a dive last week after a statewide shutdown order closed restaurant dining-room operations, East Coast Farms Executive Vice President Katelyn Garcia shifted into survival mode.

She’s 22, a third-generation produce wholesaler. Her parents, Mercedes and Otto Garcia, own East Coast Farms. Her grandfather, Enrique Gonzalez, got his start in the 1970s in Northwest Miami’s bustling wholesale produce hub. Through the decades, her family has endured the same kind of challenges faced by produce distributors everywhere: weather catastrophes, market woes, unexpected crop damage. Last week, she recognized an opportunity in the midst of a pandemic.

“When we saw the orders weren’t coming in, I’m thinking we have to act fast. We have to do something that caters to the public, something where they don’t even have to get out of their cars,” she said.

The 10-buck farm box was born. This would be a drive-through, cash-only service offering a mix of fresh produce directly to the public. The conventionally grown fruits and vegetables would be packed at the 38,000-square-foot warehouse by East Coast Farms’ employees, hauled to a pickup area outside, where workers would load them into customers’ cars.

The service began last Friday at the warehouse, which sits near Jog Road in suburban Lake Worth. The response has been huge, says Randy Kay, who estimates they’ve sold an average of 800-plus boxes a day. On Wednesday, the number peaked to nearly 1,400 boxes, he says.

“Katelyn was ahead of the curve. She said we need to pivot and prepare ourselves for a massive slowdown, and we did,” says Kay, who notes East Coast Farms has not had to lay off employees.

Selling one box at a time is unusual for a business that moves thousands of produce cases at a time, he says. But with the food-service industry hit hard by the shutdown in the midst of Florida’s growing season, the produce distributor faced a new reality: a surplus of product with fewer buyers.

“The farms are growing their crops. The weather has been beautiful. Nothing is wrong with the product on the field,” says Garcia.

In the stream of customers, she sees parents who bring their kids along for the ride and fresh air. “They bring their dogs and we give them treats,” she says.

She says she’s heard raves from her new drive-through customers, many who are posting Facebook photos of dishes they’ve made with the farm-box ingredients.

“People are loving the corn, the watermelon, the tomatoes,” says Garcia. “They’re asking if we’ll do this long-term.”

That’s certainly possible, she says. In fact, her team is considering launching a weekend produce stand that would sell to the public. But that would come post-shutdown. Right now, the focus is on keeping the business alive.

“Our main goal is to keep everyone working. But we are just one piece of it, one cog,” says Kay. “We want the farmers to stay working, the people repairing machinery and farm irrigation systems to stay working, the people who sell fertilizers and feeds to stay working. One leads to another. One disruption can affect thousands of lives.”

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IF YOU GO

East Coast Farms and Vegetables

What: The wholesale produce distributor is offering $10 boxes packed with a variety of fruits and vegetables.

Where: 6796 Lantana Rd. (near Jog Road) in suburban Lake Worth; 561-286-0286

Hours: Open Monday through Friday from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

About the boxes: Packed onsite at East Coast Farms’ warehouse, the boxes are sold as-is. A la carte fruit and vegetables are sold as well. The daily box selection is posted each morning on East Coast Farms and Vegetables’ Facebook page.

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For more food and dining news, subscribe to Liz Balmaseda’s weekly “At the Table” newsletter. Follow her on Instagram @silkpalm.

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