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A 29-year resident of SF (he grew up in the Sunset after immigrating with this family from Ukraine at five years old), Konstantin Kosov has been coming to the Civic Center farmer's market for 20 years.
Photo: Courtesy Of Christopher PaniatiA 29-year resident of SF (he grew up in the Sunset after immigrating with this family from Ukraine at five years old), Konstantin Kosov has been coming to the Civic Center farmer's market for 20 years.
A 29-year resident of SF (he grew up in the Sunset after immigrating with this family from Ukraine at five years old), Konstantin Kosov has been coming to the Civic Center farmer's market for 20 years.
A 29-year resident of SF (he grew up in the Sunset after immigrating with this family from Ukraine at five years old), Konstantin Kosov has been coming to the Civic Center farmer's market for 20 years.
“Hello?”
I answer the phone to the faint sound of slurping in the background.
“Um ... hello?”
“Sorry,” Konstantin Kosov finally replies. “I literally just started eating a plum. I don’t know why I did that right after I called you.”
I’d expect nothing less from the man they call “Fruit Jesus.”
It’s been 10 months since we spent a morning riding around San Francisco delivering fruit. And four months since the 34-year-old San Franciscan’s one-man fruit delivery operation bottomed out.
The weekend before The City issued a shelter-in-place order due to the coronavirus pandemic on March 16, Kosov — who has been delivering fruit to all sorts of SF-based companies for years, including the likes of Spotify, Zynga and Match.com — went from an all-time-high of 90 office clients with hundreds of fruit-eating employees down to just five.
Worse still, he had 1,000 pounds of fruit in his possession and no one to deliver it to.
“It was really s—y,” he says. “I gave some of the fruit away, but there was also a lot of citrus, and that keeps well, so I ended up living on that. For like six weeks I ate that citrus. That was probably the toughest spring I’ve ever been through. I had a full-on nervous breakdown — I didn’t take any of this well. I literally didn’t even get on my bike for two months. That hasn’t happened since I was a teenager.”
Kosov, who has been biking custom trailers full of farmer’s market fruit around SF since 2014, started anew in May — except this time, delivering directly to the people.
Konstantin Kosov believes in fruit for the betterment of humanity, and so should you.
“Residential is different: It’s all over the city, it’s not as easy to do by bicycle, there are hills and things, and I realized I need a car, too,” he says, in between exasperated breaths.
“Why are you breathing so heavily?” I ask.
“Oh, I’m biking while we’re talking. ... Anyway, so right now, it’s half and half with a car. Everyone that I bike to is all in SoMa, the Mission, Castro, and Hayes Valley, then I do all the peripheral things with the Mercedes, and those are in North Beach, Pac Heights, the Richmond, Sunset, the Excelsior ... .”
The used Mercedes, which Kosov recently procured, runs entirely on (prepare to not be surprised in 3 … 2 … 1 …) veggie oil and has helped him quickly grow to a client roster of 80 San Francisco households (which equates to less than half the income his office clients provided). Most of those were added via word of mouth, including Fernanda Alferez, who has lived in Ingleside for the past eight years.
“My mom’s office used to order from him, and then when the pandemic happened, Fruit Jesus had to stop doing offices, and my mom’s boss ordered one for her. And we just became addicted to his fruit,” says Alferez, who’s a medical assistant in Marin. “At the stores, you can barely find fruit right now, and it’s not as good quality, even at Whole Foods or Rainbow (Grocery). And local farmers are struggling through all of this, which makes this a bonus that he’s getting it from them.
“We started with a $35 box, but we’d finish it in two days, so now we do a $50 box and with the $50 box — we’re three people — that lasts the whole week.”
Beyond the shift to a residential operation, a lot has changed for Fruit Jesus and his glorious mane — as it has for everyone in the pandemic.
Konstantin "Fruit Jesus" Kosov lost 85 of his 90 office clients when the pandemic hit. Four months later, he's finally rebuilt some of what he lost with an entirely new business model.
He’s got a new site (spiritfruit.co), a new business partner named Christopher Paniati (a long-time SF resident who built the new site) and a much larger footprint thanks to Paniati and an Astro van, which together handle a newly started East Bay branch of the Fruit Jesus enterprise.
“He’s East Bay; I’m doing SF. Ideally, I’d like it to be a four-person team — one in Marin, one in The City, one in the East Bay, one on the Peninsula,” says Kosov, who still lives in an RV parked at the bottom of Potrero Hill (that he hopes to trade in for a boat if he can capitalize on the current scarcity of RVs).
He’s also now offering more than just fruit with the addition of eggs, dairy (raw milk, raw cheese, goat cheese), raw spirulina (see: superfood) and some greens like kale (because you can “just pluck some things off and it survives” but nothing like a carrot, which you pull out of the ground and “kill”).
And he’s, of course, wearing a mask, which absolutely eats him up inside. Not for political reasons, or discomfort ones, but because Fruit Jesus built his fruit empire largely using his gregarious personality, which is now hidden behind a mask.
“One third of my clients I’ve never even seen,” he says. “It is a personal struggle for me. When people talk about the masks — I see it on Facebook and in articles — it’s framed as a health thing or a civil rights thing, but to me, the weird thing about the masks is it’s very isolating. You can’t see people smile on the street. There’s a subtle undertone that you have to be scared of other people, that we have to be wary of each other. There’s a profound psychological effect of that which we haven’t seen play out fully.
“One of the things I love about SF is you never know who you’re gonna meet. There are different people from all over the world, different viewpoints — you get exposed to so much, and it’s good for the soul. It’s a chance for personal growth and development. I feel like that’s been shut down a lot. People are only talking to who they know, and there’s a wariness toward strangers. I am a very social person, so it’s a huge struggle for me.”
A look at one of Konstantin Kosov's fruit (and more) deliveries.
Still, Kosov has tried to make the most of things digitally.
“I do it all via text. People will text me pics of meals they’ve cooked, or things they’ve baked, which is super cute. The personal messages from people are so kind and heartwarming.”
Alferez, who has never seen Kosov in person (but has seen him lugging his fruit on his bike), echoes the odd and wonderful thing that is a text relationship with Fruit Jesus.
“We text, he checks up every week, he’s always asking for input when he gets new stuff, and I remind him I’m not a super fan of spirulina,” she laughs. “It’s pretty cool to be texting a guy while he’s biking around with 1,000 pounds of fruit in his trailer. I’ve always said, he’s such an ‘only in San Francisco’ kind of person.”
And for now, he’s not going anywhere.
Grant Marek is the Editorial Director of SFGATE. Email: grant.marek@sfgate.com | Twitter: @grant_marek
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After losing 95% of his clients, San Francisco's 'Fruit Jesus' rises again - SF Gate
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