- May 23, 2025
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The grandson of a butcher, Henry Detwiler says he realized growing up that he liked the retail side more than the processing side of the food industry.
While he was in school — he went up to 8th grade — he worked in the butcher shop, making things like sausage and scrapple. When he was about 16, Detwiler recalls he started selling produce in the summer at a little farm market in Pennsylvania. On a successful Saturday, he says, he might have sold 5,000 ears of corn.
“I just really loved that,” Detwiler, now 60, says of selling produce.
The year after he got married, in 1986, he moved to Sarasota, where his wife was from. He worked in construction locally for 15 years.
The journey to founding Detwiler’s in 2009 was a “long route,” he says. It includes stints in Virginia selling produce and Amish sheds. It also includes a return to Sarasota, working out of a 10x20 foot tent grading eggs at Sutter Egg Farm and selling produce from a farm stand at the Fruitville Grove.
In 2009, after losing a lease at the grove, Detwiler found a 5,000-square-foot space on Palmer Boulevard, where he could open a store. He says he was unsure how it was going to work, and a friend told him this was what he had and he would figure out how to use it.
“We learned that every thing, every square foot matters,” Detwiler says.
Today there are six Detwiler’s stores spread through Manatee and Sarasota counties. In addition to the Palmer store, locations are on the US 41 bypass in Venice; on Clark Road in south Sarasota; on Lockwood Ridge Road just off University Parkway on the Manatee-Sarasota line; on US 301 in Palmetto; and on 53rd Avenue West in Bradenton. Stores are up to 50,000 square feet. The business is also building a 133,000-square-foot distribution center in Palmetto to serve all of its locations.
The company, with some 800 employees, has plans to expand too. (Officials decline to disclose revenue figures, saying only that the company averages 100,000 customers per week.)
“We have some stuff that’s actually in the works now” but nothing has been finalized yet, Detwiler says. “We have interest in going north and south,” he says, noting the distribution center will be near US 301 and Interstate 75. “We like the east country too.”
The best advice Detwiler received came from two different sources.
His grandfather told him: “Act like the boss, and pick up the trash.”
To this day, Detwiler says, if he sees trash in the parking lot, he will be there to pick it up.
Another piece of guidance came from God, says Detwiler, who is also a Mennonite preacher-pastor.
“I was so poor … and I’m saying, God, why can’t I succeed?” he recalls. At that moment, Detwiler says he was reminded of the story in the Bible where God asked Moses what was in his hand, and it was a rod. He was directed to look in his own hand.
“Well, I said, ‘I have boys and girls. And I know produce,’” Detwiler told God. He set out to use what he had, building on his knowledge of family and good produce. “For the first time in my life, I saw how beautiful it is to just use whatever someone has, whatever I had, just being so small and so diligent with it that it becomes something of great beauty.”
Detwiler has nine children, including four sons and two daughters involved in the business.
One area where Detwiler says he struggles is having a role that is no longer out in front of the customer.
“I still want to be on the floor all the time. I still want to be the man going and getting the best produce and giving it to you, the consumer. I still want to be in the bakery rolling the cinnamon rolls. I want to be the man out there cutting your steak. I want to dip the ice cream cone,” Detwiler says. “I can't do that.”
As success has increased, he says, his job has increasingly been to manage things behind the scenes.
“Now I find myself having to be the one making sure I have people who can do that,” he says of those other jobs. "It's my sons and my wife and my family that keep me on the straight and narrow; you have to stay focused on what you're really doing."
Indifference and, counterintuitively, success, are the two greatest threats to his business, according to Detwiler.
“I don't want to become indifferent. And I don't want to be the company that becomes just about making money. We didn't start it that way, and I hope we never make that our driving force, even though we have to make a living,” Detwiler says. “I want to be a little bit more like a company that keeps giving back to the community and to the consumers, the customers, and keep being fair for everyone instead of just fair for me.”
Detwiler worries about how he is treating everyone, from the customer to employees.
“If I have a fear in the middle of the night, it is: ‘Am I taking care of everyone properly?’” says Detwiler, who gives employees quarterly bonuses and has a satisfaction guarantee on products.
The toughest part of being an entrepreneur is that “as soon as you think you're successful in an area, it changes,” Detwiler says.
“As soon as you think you're taking care of someone well, at a certain wage, the economy, inflation happens,” he says. "As soon as you think you know how to manage three stores, you have six. And then you have to learn. Knowledge is always yesterday, and wisdom is reaching forward."
Making adjustments to the business is part of the process.
"A true entrepreneur is always adapting," Detwiler says. "There are people who are real, true entrepreneurs. I think I can't help myself. That's what I am."
