Fruitful Venture

Dressed in her tropical garb, a wide-brimmed straw hat atop her head, Gabrielle Berryer is the personification of Gaby’s Farm Tropical Fruit and Ice Cream.  “Now, you don’t want mango,” she clucks, in her singsong lilt, to the ladies clustered around her demonstration table at an organic food market in Miami. “Try the jackfruit,” she coaxes, “You’ve probably never had it.”
   I’d never had jackfruit either, but her jackfruit ice cream was delectable, and I found myself wanting to learn more about this lady, who turned tropical fruit into a delicious frozen concoction, even as most of the world seemed content with Ben & Jerry’s. So, a few weeks later, I found myself bouncing along, riding in Gaby’s rusty golf cart as she showed me not only jackfruit, but Jamaican akee trees laden with red fruit, blossom-covered passion fruit vines, and fencing lined with lime trees. I was in heaven.
   This was the Florida I’d been searching for since moving to the state from Connecticut three years ago.  My minuscule state, despite its measly growing season and stony soil, turns out bushels of fresh produce and sells them at farm stands. Homemade-ice-cream stands are plentiful as well, including one where the very cows that furnish the cream eye me as I slurp a cone. However, in the Miami area, from what I’d seen, the main crop seemed to be condominiums. Then I happened upon Gaby, who, after spending 34 years as a private-practice psychologist, exchanged retirement for the life of a full-time, tropical-fruit farmer.
   Raised in Haiti, Gaby was educated in France and the United States before permanently leaving her homeland in 1964. She settled in New York, married (she’s now divorced), had children (a total of four), and earned her undergraduate degree at Queens College. She applied to Yeshiva University, intent on getting a master’s degree, but the dean insisted she enroll in the doctorate program. Flying through Miami, on her way back-and-forth to visit her family in Haiti, she fell in love with the city. So, the day after defending her doctorate, she headed to South Florida.
Like all things fated, her new career happened accidentally. A friend told her about the farming area about an hour south of Miami where tropical fruits grew. “I want to see that,” she recalls saying.
   She was amazed by what she found. She also discovered the area's Tropical Fruit and Spice Park, home to 500 varieties of fruits, vegetables and spices,  where she was handed a black sapote, also known as the black persimmon. “I took it home and played with it, and I came up with the ice cream,” she recalls.
   Before long, people were lining up for her ice cream at the park’s festivals. She would commute from North Miami Beach, where she still worked. Then she found her perfect house. Perched on stilts, it sat on two-and-a-half acres of orchard-growing land. Her passion for ice cream was turning into a business. Encouraged by her friends at the park, she applied for, and was given, a USDA grant. With that, Gaby’s Farm was born.
   Dr. Carlos Balerdi, a retired University of Florida agriculture professor, helped her apply for the grant.  “In our area, tropical fruits are grown, but there are no processing plants. Gaby freezes the pulp, rather than throwing it away. It’s a small operation, but it’s doing something different. And it’s good for Florida agriculture,” he says.
  Not only that, but he loves the ice cream too: “Whatever Gaby does is top quality, and that’s why she’s getting into the good restaurants in the area.”
   So, instead of retiring and taking it easy, Gaby these days is busy working 12- to 15-hour days. She grows, harvests, creates recipes, processes, takes orders and wrangles her ice cream into supermarkets (her biggest client is Whole Foods) and restaurants – all with the help of one assistant and a part-time gardener. “It is crazy,” she acknowledged as she mixed flavors in her culinary laboratory, located next to her home (the manufacturing is in Fort Lauderdale).
   A tireless recipe creator, she’s developed 30 flavors of ice cream. The line includes Go Coconutz, Mango Passion Mélange, and Me Gusta Guava. There’s also a line of sorbets that includes Dragonfruit, Lychee, and Black Sapote a l’Orange. (Try the Crème de Canistel. Canistel, known also as eggfruit, has the texture of the old-fashioned frozen custard that’s too expensive to make these days, and her version carries a hint of rum raisin. Yum!).
   A pint of Gaby’s Farm costs a few dollars more than premium ice creams. The reason is obvious after one taste. First, her flavors are unique – who else offers dragonfruit or sapodilla sorbets? And, although her ice creams are flavorful and creamy, many have a fraction of the fat found in rich ice creams. Their rich taste comes from a high concentration of fruit.
   The company turns a small profit. When asked how her labor is factored in, she explodes in laughter. “It’s a labor of love,” she exclaims and offers a lesson into the economics of Gaby Farms. Taking a passion fruit, she expertly cuts it in half and cracks it like an egg. Then, she takes a small portion to puree aside, and dumps the rest in the trash. Or take the jackfruit. Although it’s a 20-pound behemoth, only a quarter of it is usable. That portion is so deeply embedded that it takes two hours to pry it out. Or consider the mamey – 18 months from blossom to harvest.
Gaby is driven by a passion to spread the word about the vast array of tropical fruits. She also derives a deep contentment from living surrounded by the colorful bounties, which take her back to the days when she was a girl living in Haiti. “Living here, with the mango trees and the tropical fruits, is almost like reminiscing about the beautiful, good old days.”