Bloomin good business

Bloomin good business

Entrepreneur Ruth Doroslovac has started small but wants to

make Flowers to Eat a nationally franchised food products company.

ENTREPRENEUR by Dave Szymanski | Tampa Bay Editor

Ruth Doroslovac, grew up east of Tampa in Valrico and sold commercial bakery equipment for 23 years. She was successful and happy.

But a family reunion changed all of that.

Doroslovac and her sister made a centerpiece for that reunion at her brother's home in Plant City.

But instead of using flowers, she took pieces of fruit, and cutting and shaping them, arranged them in a basket and made them look like a bouquet of colorful flowers.

After seeing it, more family members wanted one. There are 12 siblings. Then friends of the family asked.

Doroslovac enjoyed making the centerpieces so much that she decided to become an entrepreneur and hasn't looked back.

In 2005, using her own savings, Doroslovac started Flowers to Eat, a company that makes fruit and vegetable arrangements that look like bouquets.

A friend from Miami told her to contact James Parker, a chef from Washington, D.C., who had designed fruit bouquets. Doroslovac flew to Washington for a class with Parker. She then brought him to Tampa for a few days as a consultant and he helped her come up with different bouquet designs.

She has opened a Temple Terrace store and production facility and plans to open a South Tampa location this year. Her clients include individuals, companies, business and non-profit organizations as well as retailers, such as Wal-Mart, which refrigerated and shipped her strawberry creations to its stores in the Northwest and Northeast.

Her goal: Make Flowers to Eat a nationally franchised company.

It was already received interest in franchises, through its Web site, from more than 300 people around the world, including investors in Saudi Arabia and Brazil.

"There has been tremendous interest," Doroslovac says.

Although proving popular with the luxury and health-conscious markets, a lot of work lies ahead to identify and train franchisees.

"It's going to be a long, hard road," says Doroslovac, the president. "We've developed a system for training new employees."

Doroslovac is looking at finding investors to buy franchises. She will start franchising in Florida and then move to other states.

She enjoyed selling bakery equipment and misses the people in the bakery industry she spend time with, such as Tampa's Phil Alessi. She once sold an oven the size of a living room to an Middle East company.

"I liked the bakery people," Doroslovac says. "I miss talking to them. But the food business is more creative. I love it. I love coming to work."

Doroslovac always enjoyed baking and especially liked decorating cakes. Ironically, earlier in life she took a class in floral arranging. But although she enjoyed it, she thought the floral business was too crowded.

Product challenges

Each of the 38 bouquets is either all fruit or all vegetable. Part of the challenges in this kind of business include maintaining freshness, creating attractive, colorful bouquets that maintain their shape and strength for travel.

The bouquets need to hold up to 60 to 70 mph speeds and stay intact. The company learned this a little by trial and error.

"Once we factored that in, we had to design them differently," Doroslovac says.

Products range from $8 to $99. Holidays, like Mother's Day, are a busy time for Flowers to Eat. Timely ordering, so enough product is on hand, is key.

The bouquets take different amounts of creation time, depending on the complexity. For example, the vegetable medley takes an hour to cut and assemble.

The menu is standard, streamlined for franchise sales, to control quality and speed. On rare occasions, the company will do a custom order.

Because the product is perishable, Flowers to Eat has a night crew that works through the night to prepare bouquets for large orders or busier times.

One of its biggest creations was a wedding cake covered with more than 900 chocolate strawberries.

Decorated strawberries are a major part of the bouquets. One berry looks like a tuxedo, with buttons, a bowtie and a black coat, while another looks like it is wearing a white-on-white wedding gown. There are pineapples that look like daisies, melons that look like leaves and apples drizzled with different toppings that look like Christmas ornaments.

Vegetable bouquets include items like zucchini, radishes, broccoli, red and yellow peppers, carrots, celery and other vegetables.

To maintain stock and freshness, the company orders fruits and vegetables daily, and locally whenever it can. For example, its strawberries come from Driscoll's in Plant City.

Flowers to Eat does most of its business with existing customers. But it goes to business events to network and does bouquets for those events and for charity programs for organizations like The Spring and the MacDonald Training Center in Tampa. It did centerpieces for the Tampa Chamber's "Women of Influence" dinner.

In the quest to grow, it opened a location in a new shopping center in fast-growing Wesley Chapel, in south central Pasco County. Despite a consultant's recommendation, the customers did not come. So Doroslovac recently closed it.

However, Flowers to Eat plans to open a South Tampa location by the end of the year. Because of its upscale demographics and established neighborhoods, in between the Westshore and downtown Tampa business districts, the company thinks that location should be successful.

It would not be far from Tampa General Hospital and St. Joseph's Hospital, where it does many deliveries.

"I always felt that would be a successful location," Doroslovac says. "Summers are slow for us. As soon as school picks up, business will pick up."

Competition aplenty

Flowers to Eat has several competitors and the primary one is a behemoth: industry leader, Edible Arrangements. Edible, based in Wallingford, Conn., has 842 stores. It was founded in 1999 in New Haven, Conn.

"Like any business, there are copy cats," says Jeff Alexander, director of communication for Edible Arrangements.

Other than its numerous locations and Web site, Edible Arrangements offers a variety of bouquets and value, Alexander says. Privately held, the company started franchising in 2001.

Doroslovac takes the competition in stride. They can't all compete closely with her on the Gulf Coast, hitting all the events and making all of the local contacts like she can.

"You have one large company and a slew of smaller ones trying to jump on the bandwagon," she says.

Plus, the healthier eating trend should help the industry. And people with flower allergies will appreciate the different bouquets, she says.

"Some people think they get the same quality from different companies," Doroslovac says. "Quality is not same across the board. Freshness is critical. That's how we set ourselves apart."

REVIEW SUMMARY

Company: Flowers to Eat

Employees: Four

Industry: Specialty foods

Key: Growing the business by doing quality work, keeping the product fresh.