Cooks Bounty Fruit Stand — Restaurant in Hawaii

Left a bad taste in my mouth, literally.

Lady was super chatty, as other have noted, but came off as high pressure sales pusher. Flavors advertised were not available and mentioned the fruit smoothies were made to order but using concentrate. Wasn’t a bad smoothie but nothing special, not worth the $10 for what it was anyway.

In chatting she discovered it was me and my wife’s 1 year anniversary and offered a small jar of honey. At first I wasn’t sure if she was trying to convince me to buy it for my wife until she pushed it into her hands and told her to put it in the car before the boss came back. Didn’t sit well with me. But I let it slide.

I asked if she had any white pineapples. (Special fruit for a special person / occasion) She said she’d have to go into the back to grab one and then proceeded to hand my wife a yellow pineapple. I asked again for a white one and she said no it’s yellow… she then switched it out and placed a different, over ripe yellow one on the scale… noting the bottom was soft, she indicated to just cut off the bottom inch or two and that she’d give it to us half off. I didn’t stop and inspect it myself, which was a mistake.

Got back to our place. The fruit was 3/4 rotten. And basically inedible. They bait and switched us for a different flavor of smoothies from concentrate, gifted us stolen goods, dismissed my request for a specific, premium fruit, and sold us a rotten one. We got taken.

My wife and I now have agreed on a sign to communicate to each other that No, we are NOT buying / something is off. That is the best thing we got out of this...

Do not stop here. My whole family got food poisoning from the fruit here. Plus the lady that was working the stand the day we all got sick is extremely rude. If you do not like people than do not do a people job. Avoid this nasty rotten mess unless you want to ruin your vacation. On another front I witnesses the blond gal Kat I think her name was , actually try to swindle a local farm girl by resigning on thier IOU to her for cash. Kat tried to tell her that she could only have 15$ in pumpkins for the 15 dollars she was owed. When the farmer stood up for herself and spoke out against thier bad business practices , Kat threw the 15$ cash at the farm girl thanjustkept screaming at her to leave and get out of her face. I felt so bad for the farm girl. You can't write a farmer an iou for 15$ cash then switch it to 15$ worth of pumpkin when she returns!!! No principles here. No moral compass when it comes ro dealing with the local farmers on which they rely for thier produce. Shame on you Kat!!...

The blonde woman selling at the fruit stand on 1/7 sold us chocolate pudding fruit but failed to inform us that it was unripe and was therefore toxic. My husband ate it, retched and has been in bed for hours. That's irresponsible business practice. Purdue Univ. says, "Unripe black sapotes (aka choc. pudding fruit) are very astringent, irritant, caustic and bitter, and have been used as fish poison in the Philippines." Go to the S. Kona Fruit Stand instead.

Updated response to owner: Yes, indeed, S. Kona Fruit has more integrous and caring people. And if you research your chocolate chipotle, you'll learn their technical name is black sopates and that they are very astringent, irritant and caustic when...