- March 14, 2025
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An acai and coffee shop coming to Sarasota will be owned by two professional athletes. Raining Berries will soon welcome customers to its store near Morton’s Market on Osprey Avenue.
Part of the Tampa-headquartered Raining Berries franchise, the store will be owned by franchisees Edwin Jackson, a retired pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks, and Super Bowl champion Kenneth Gainwell, a running back who played for the Philadelphia Eagles last season and just signed a new contract with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Raining Berries serves up smoothies, fruit bowls, toasted foods like avocado toast and grilled cheese as well as frappes, lattes and other coffee beverages. The Sarasota store will also sell gelato.
Currently Raining Berries has 10 locations, all in Florida: Brandon, UTC, Gainesville, Lutz, Palm Harbor, St. Petersburg, South Tampa, Temple Terrace, Waterford Lakes and Westchase. It was founded in 2020 by Raining Berries CEO Bimal Bhojani.
“The game plan is to open stores across the country,” Bhojani tells the Business Observer. Currently the company has multiple locations under development nationwide and is looking at sites in Arizona, North Carolina, Texas, Colorado, New York and New Jersey, Bhojani says.
“I live in Tampa and in Sarasota as well, … so I was very familiar with the location” where the new Sarasota store will be on Osprey Avenue, Bhojani says “When it was brought to our attention, we moved on that pretty quickly.”
The Southside Village shop will be at 1935 S. Osprey Ave. where RHA Boutique used to be.
Transforming the space into Raining Berries has resulted in nearly $1 million in construction costs, according to Bhojani. The building has been gutted and rebuilt to make it current, he says, and the exterior has been painted pink to align with the Raining Berries branding. It will feature seating inside and out.
The company’s stores are “minimalistic and very friendly in terms of aesthetics,” Bhojani says. Rather than requiring a commercial kitchen, “everything here is plug and play.” The eatery’s food consists mainly of fresh fruits and items that do not need to be cooked. Whereas competitors add ingredients like sugar to their smoothies, he adds, Raining Berries does not.
Raining Berries’ most popular items are its acai bowls and its coffee, which he says is single-origin and ethically sourced from East Africa near the equator. Bhojani, who is originally from Uganda, comes from a family with a long history in the coffee business.
American consumers are “used to buying cheap coffee or blended coffee,” Bhojani says. “When the consumer comes in and they taste [Raining Berries’] coffee, they don't think about anywhere else…when they have that coffee, it's a home run. And this is going to be a big focus going into 2025 and 2026; coffee is going to be a big focus.”
About 20 to 30 employees will work at Raining Berries’ new Sarasota location, according to Bhojani, who says they will not all be full-time. Among the company’s hundreds of employees are his two children — Deah and Dylan Bhojani — who head up different parts of the business and have been “an integral part of the brand,” he says.
One of Bhojani’s goals is “to put something back into the community,” he says. Before launching Raining Berries, he developed private schools when he moved to the United States in 2007. Now Bhojani is chairman of the board of directors for the nonprofit Early Learning Coalition of Pasco and Hernando counties. In addition, Bhojani says his company is “actively involved” in the communities where it operates. For example, he says, Raining Berries has just signed on as a corporate sponsor of women’s pro soccer team the Tampa Bay Sun and men’s professional soccer team the Sarasota Paradise.
Athletes associating themselves with Raining Berries makes sense, according to Bhojani, who says: “A healthy lifestyle is the focus of the brand.”
