We get this question a lot from our customers! The short answer is no, our trucks don’t visit in each season throughout the year. Currently, our trucks visit in the summer with Georgia peaches and Michigan blueberries, and in late fall with Florida citrus. Here are the reasons why we bring your delicious Tree-Ripe Fruit in person, or whether we offer shipping only on some seasonal offerings!
1. While we love seeing your smiling, happy faces at our in-person truck stop visits at locations throughout the Midwest, a lot (and we mean a lot) of work goes on behind the scenes that allow us to meet you at the truck. Being a small business, we put as much effort into each season as possible. Taking care of trucking logistics, driver needs, staffing and training, permitting for each municipality we visit, supply and harvest expectations, weather forecasts, and arranging scheduling with our friendly, local business that host our trucks in their lots… all needs to be lined up before we can even start getting the word out to our customers that we’re coming to “a location near you!”
2. We may not have enough for everyone! If you visit our trucks in the summer, you know how many fruit lovers track us down. For many of our partner farms, they simply don’t have enough fruit to supply our customers or they aren’t able to guarantee a stable harvest window for us to operate a truck route. And while we love all our fruit equally, some are just more popular than others. We take online orders for the smaller harvests so we can harvest-to-order and bring you the best, very, very quickly!
3. Watching the weather is always a concern for those in the produce world, both for growing and shipping alike. Bringing fruit to stops in the winter is a risky business, but when we run our truck visits each summer or late fall, we usually have decent weather to operate. We can’t say the same for our January thru March season. In those seasons, such as working with our delicate California craft-citrus, shipping direct to you is the safer bet.
We love seeing you at the truck. Yet, when we aren’t able to deliver in that method, we can still get you the best fruit you’ll ever eat delivered directly to your home!
