Live From The HIBT Summit: Tariq Farid Of Edible Arrangements

Hey, just a quick note before we start the show, we have one week left in our annual public radio fundraiser, and we're asking you to show your support for your local public radio station. You've heard me say it all month, so please just take a moment to give your gift by December thirty-first. Just go to donate.npr.org slash built. And thanks. Hey everyone, so today we're releasing another live interview from or how I built this summit. It's my conversation with Tyreek Farid, the founder of Edible Arrangements, and you might remember from the original episode he was on that he started his first business in high school. It was a little flower shop near his home in West Haven, Connecticut. And after a few years, Tarek pivoted from flowers to fruit and eventually built a$600 million company. And Tarek's story is also about family. the immigrant parents that raised him and helped support him in the early days of the flower shop, and the sacrifices that all families when somebody they love becomes a full-time entrepreneur.

But before we got into that part of the story, I asked Tarek about the idea behind edible arrangements, the idea of cutting up melon and pineapples and strawberries and arranging them into edible bouquets. I have a lot of questions for you, but I wanted to start on this idea about bad ideas. How did you know that That cantaloupe cut into the shape of flowers was gonna work. Well uh you know the the way we always do was the the customers, right? So you put it together and and you start selling it in the floors, but before I ever started selling it.

There were all these ideas of sharing it with friends and sharing it with people in the industry. We had a family friend, he was a doctor, he taught you know, kids on on starting ideas and everything. I shared the idea and I said, you know, stay in your flower business. This is crazy. Who would buy fruit on sticks? In a basket, especially if other price you're selling it. But every time we sent it to a customers, the customers would call back and said, Can I order one? You know? And so it you know almost became more uh more popular than flowers. So you kinda knew it was it was the customer. And it was the as I shared with you, it was my mom who was really the inspiration as soon as she saw saw it. She used to work at the flower shop. She goes, honey, this is going to be really big. You know The thing about their products is they were kind of weird at the time, like merino wool shoes or, you know, dates and nuts mashed into a bar, but that weirdness was almost the thing that

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