Fresh fruit ordered by text, delivered to dorms

Food delivery on campus is part of the college culture. Pizza, cookies, breadsticks, Chinese food ... and now, fresh fruit. 

And you order it via text, thanks to IU Eats Fruit, a business venture started by senior Matt De Leon this year.

The goal of the business, De Leon said, is “uber-convenient access to fresh fruit for dorm residents, individuals whose eating habits are crippled by mandatory meal plans and lack of transportation.”

By “uber-convenient,” De Leon means that all of the fruit is ordered via text and delivered to the residence halls, making it easy for student customers of IU Eats Fruit to incorporate the simple process into their weekly routines.

“Two or three times a week, I get a text from Matt with the current menu of what fruit he has available and how much it costs,” freshman Andrea Balzano said. “I reply with my order, which is always bananas, and Matt delivers them to the front desk of my residence hall that night.”

The way students pay is through an online credit-based account, set up by De Leon. He said he aims to ensure his customers are getting their money’s worth.

“I search for good fruit prices and the best quality of fruit,” De Leon said. “I always get my fruit locally sourced when possible.”

When ordering from IU Eats Fruit, customers are looking for the variety they can’t find in dining halls, said freshman Emily Walling.

“The dining halls always have the same fruit,” Walling said.  “But this service provides me with many other options besides apples, bananas and oranges. I order kiwi and peaches once a week.”

Currently, IU Eats Fruit serves about 13 customers. De Leon said the business is in its “primal” stages, but he and his partner, senior Brian Bollinger, said in an e-mail that they are implementing plans for large expansions starting in the spring semester.

“At the moment, we are concentrating a lot of our time on refining the business’s operations so that it can be scaled up to serve all of Indiana University,” Bollinger said in an e-mail. “As we conduct more market research, we expect our growth plans to become solidified.”

De Leon and Bollinger will be working with University of Notre Dame MBA student Shormilia Sarkar to enter their fruit delivery venture into the Notre Dame Business Plan Competition.

They said they hope this process will refine their business to provide the best service to students at IU.

“We simply want to provide students with convenient access to healthy, affordable fruit products,” Bollinger said. “I expect the journey ahead to be filled with rich learning opportunities, wild twists and, hopefully, a fruitful outcome for everyone.”