Issue link: http://maconmagazine.uberflip.com/i/1407173
W hen I stopped by the Northside Drive fruit stand to ask Trey Brown a few questions about tomatoes, I half expected him to be a farmer. He's not a farmer, nor does he have any major ties to the food industry. He tells me this whole fruit stand operation actually began to come together in Iraq in 2003. "I'd ended up over there the same way as countless others, by being a broke college student," he says with a laugh. "I'd signed up with the Army Reserves for a little spending money, and not long after, we invaded." Time moves slowly when you're deployed, and Brown found himself looking forward to letters from home, as well as thinking up ways to fund paying rent that didn't involve assault rifles and the desert sun. "I had this one buddy who'd write occasionally, Jason Reott, another chronically poor college student. Jason had recently quit his job waiting tables to open a fruit stand, and while the details were scarce, he made it sound like a good gig." Brown shared the info with another Army buddy, and upon returning to the U.S., they opened their own stand. "I'd planned on running the stand just that one summer until school started back," he says. "The extra spending money was nice, and I began to grow a passion for sourcing the absolute best produce I could find. Then, I'd decided to run it through college, as I had the summers off anyway. After college, just one more summer to get my feet under me before finding a real job." He gestures at the stand behind him, "and now here I am, 40 years old, still running the fruit stand." The passion for the industry has clearly grown on him. "Every year I have increased my knowledge and built a few more contacts. I source my produce from a wide range of people, from professional farmers to people who do it as a passion project," he says. "The only thing that matters is the quality of the food. One lesson I learned early on was that if you want people to keep coming back buying from you, the quality has to be there." AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2021 | maconmagazine.com 83