LIFE

Roots of success

Alfie Oakes is a self-made, hard-working businessman inspired by his heritage.

Cathy Chestnut
Special to Grandeur
Alfie Oakes got back into farming a few years ago and now has the fastest growing agribusiness in the state of Florida.

Alfie Oakes doesn’t let an opportunity slip by.

As he recounts in fine detail how his company evolved from a roadside vegetable stand into one of the largest independent agribusinesses in southern Florida, his boots aren’t propped on a mahogany desk. The 48-year-old chief executive of Oakes Farms is busy creating displays and stocking shelves at Oakes Farms Market in Naples.

Putting in 70-plus-hour weeks has propelled Alfie to top $200 million in his produce, food service and distribution, packing, shipping and retail operations. In five years, he’s gone from growing 50 acres and packing 90,000 cases of produce to 4,000 acres and 5.5 million cases, providing livelihoods to 700 employees. This year, Alfie is poised to open a regional foodie paradise. Three years in the making, Seed to Table store and restaurant in North Naples on Immokalee Road will be a singular destination, which required special permitting attention. “It’s not a restaurant; it’s not a grocery store,” he explains. “It didn’t fit in the boxes well.”

The artisanal mecca revitalizing an abandoned Albertson’s will seat 300, feature a large courtyard, and “feel like nine different restaurants” offering from-scratch breads, pastries, roasted coffee, churned butter, pasta, sushi, salads, fresh-squeezed juice and carry-out.

“It’ll be 77,000 square feet of nothing but fresh,” he says. “It’s one huge ‘fresh concept’ with a big piece of it being a place for people to meet, sit down and enjoy food or freshly prepared grab-and-go.”

He’s expecting to hire around 400, and has already recruited chefs from the Culinary Institute of America in New York City. He says the much-anticipated Seed to Table will open by fall.

“It turned into a much bigger project than I originally anticipated,” he concedes. “It’s going to be unlike anything that exists, especially from the culinary end.”

Alfie grew up working at his father’s small roadside store near Morse Shores in east Fort Myers and started his own venture as a teenager. He’s made huge windfalls in Southwest Florida and other states and countries — and gone bust, too. The winds of fate — weather, crop yields, pricing, demand — have both buoyed and sunk him, but Alfie has always picked himself up.

Alfie remembers the days when his family lived in an east Fort Myers duplex, where he moved at the age of 5 after his father’s produce business in Delaware failed. His mother took a menial job at Yoder Brothers nursery to earn Christmas money to buy a $25 Evel Knievel bicycle, which was quickly stolen. (In a stroke of kismet, Alfie later unknowingly hired the thief, and reports “he was a good worker.”) While his friends at North Fort Myers High School were hunting or fishing on weekends, Alfie started selling produce at the foot of the Cape Coral Bridge and the corner of Pine Island and Pondella roads from his pickup truck after securing his restricted driver’s license. At age 18, he opened Hancock Farm Market on Hancock Bridge Parkway and hired a cashier named Deanne, who became his wife. They have three children: Dain, 25, Kyle, 18, and Hannah, 13.

Alfie Oakes shows the different types of eggplants he grows to a tour group from Seagate Christian School at his farm on Immokalee Road on Tuesday, January 10, 2017.

Settling in Collier County in 1993 with $500,000 from a Punta Gorda cucumber bumper crop, he started Oakes Farms Market on Davis Boulevard with his father, Francis “Frank” Alfred Oakes Jr. By then, Frank had become obsessed with growing produce organically, but the weak demand at higher prices was a losing gambit, and they fell into debt. The elder Oakes went on to pursue organics and opened Food & Thought in Naples, while Alfie continued brokering produce.

Today, Oakes Farms grows 120 commodities, shipping 64 to the Northeast and Canada. Along with tomatoes, bell peppers, eggplant, cucumbers and squash, a specialty is “every kind of chili pepper you’ve ever heard of and never heard of. That’s our niche,” says Alfie. “We do intensive varieties.”

A broker at heart, Alfie finds himself running a massive growing operation that he didn’t set out to. “I’d rather buy and sell. I didn’t want to be farming this land. The overwhelming demand is what keeps driving us to expand,” he says.

Alfie will be the first to admit that his father wasn’t a savvy businessman because he wasn’t driven by big profits, though he was a visionary on organics. While Frank did not get bank rich, more than 1,000 people, including Gov. Rick Scott and musician Chuck Mangione, attended his funeral in 2013, many genuinely sharing how he had impacted their lives. One way Alfie is keeping his father’s legacy alive is by nurturing the soil. “I’ve incorporated a lot of his wisdom on composting, micronutrients and trace elements, creating an environment to put super quality on the shelf.”

Alfie plans to transform his expanding universe into an employee-owned enterprise, and consistently praises his staff.

“I surround myself with the best people,” he says. “It’s about human relationships rather than making money.”

Despite his busy workload, Alfie personally guides schoolchildren around his 10-acre demonstration farm, and Oakes Farms Market has become a site for Trailblazer Academy, a vocational training and life-skills program for people ages 18 to 35 with developmental or intellectual disabilities.

Named 2016 Vendor of the Year by the American Culinary Federation Naples Chefs Chapter, Alfie isn’t quite sure where his boundaries lie. “My wife asks me, ‘Where does it stop?’ I don’t know. Things keep popping into place. It’s not planned; it’s wherever it guides you,” Alfie says. Frank would “be really happy with what we’re doing here. I don’t know if it’s my dad looking down at me, but we keep doing amazing things.”