Fruit At Your Fingertips

by Eileen Weber

It’s hard to think about picking fresh fruit when it’s below freezing. And when places like Plant City, Florida have to huddle up to keep their strawberries warm because of the recent cold snap, the idea of wandering aimlessly through a local orchard to pick a fresh snack seems like nothing more than a daydream.

But that didn’t stop Kaytea Petro, Co-Founder of Neighborhood Fruit, LLC. Established in the spring of 2009, the San Francisco-based company developed a web site to help people find local orchards and backyards to pick fresh fruit.

On their web site, people offer excess produce from their yards while others search for what to pick. The site also features an interactive map of over 10,000 fruit-bearing trees growing in parks and along roadways. The point: Why waste the fruit?

Petro and her business partner, Oriana Sarac, have now developed an iPhone application to find the nearest bountiful tree. Sarac says the application "unlocks this hidden urban bounty and makes it accessible on the go."

"We are surrounded by millions of pounds of potential harvest. Besides, picking fruit is a lot of fun, and just tastes better!" said Petro in a company press release. In a previous article on this site, she discussed the word-of-mouth phenomenon of local fruit-picking.

Like a LocalEats or UrbanSpoon for freshly picked produce, the application is called Find Fruit. Got a hankering for a ripe peach? You can locate fresh fruit nationwide as well as in eleven urban areas including New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Austin, and Portland, Ore. With the same information available on their web site, all of the Neighborhood Fruit services are conveniently searchable by proximity, fruit type, and what fruit is in season. 

“Neighborhood Fruit's growth happens organically,” said Petro in a recent e-mail. “[I]f we get one user that is passionate in a new area, we quickly have a lot of data and a lot of new users in that area.”

In California, as with some other states across the country, the growing season is longer than it is here in the Northeast. So for people in those regions, it makes sense to have a way to find something fresh at the touch of a button.

"Imagine standing at an intersection and wanting a snack,” said Sarac. “You pull out your iPhone, locate a pear tree, walk there and pick it. It doesn’t get more local than that!"

True, you can’t get much tastier than freshly picked fruit. In the summer, I take my own children to pick strawberries and blueberries at Jones Famly Farm in Shelton. Not only do the kids get a sense of where their food comes from, they get to taste something fresher than anything you can buy in a supermarket. Those little berries weren’t frozen and didn’t travel several thousand miles to get to their little mouths.

"We created the app so that people could have more 'fruitful' trips around their neighborhoods," said Petro, "but we never imagined how much fun it would be to explore and discover that how full of edibles our city is. There are over five thousand fruit trees in San Francisco alone!" 

And, new trees are added all the time. "In addition to information provided by our partner network, much of our tree data is generated by our users and is updated daily," she said.

Other applications like Locavore do the same thing. They find the freshest fruit in peak season nearest you. Locavore uses a GPS system to find the food nearest you. Similarly, Find Fruit uses Google maps to locate the nearest trees.

“It is about the fun of adventure and discovery and learning about food and nature in our urban environments, as opposed to directions to a commercial transaction,” said Petro.  “Find Fruit is just the first step of a larger vision, a vision that includes advocacy for the planting of edible plants in our cities, parks, and along roadways, to help urban dwellers be more resilient, as well as living in greater harmony with the environment that supports us.”

Using the application, results can be displayed as a list or as a map view. Users also have the option to save individual trees as Favorites or get immediately routed to that destination. So for those who want anything from the common apple to an exotic yellow mangosteen, Find Fruit also provides identification information, unique illustrations, and factoids for all available fruit types.

In the future, Petro and Sarac hope to provide this application for other smart phone platforms. So for less than a downloadable dollar, you too can find that perfect peach just steps away from where you are right now.

Image courtesy of HillCountryTrees.com.