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03 November 2021
Fresh faces after fruitful era One great harvest ends, another begins BY ALEX PURCELL EXCLUSIVE: After seven and a half years, Cooroy Harvest Fresh owners, Joe and Kate, are moving on. The well-known couple have sold the iconic fruit and veg store on the corner of Maple and Emerald streets to a family from Nepal. Joe told the Cooroy Rag that it had been a wonderful experience and he was sad to be saying goodbye to the community he loves. “Everyone I know is in Cooroy. We’re going to miss all the people, all the characters and all our friends. That’s the bit I’m sad about.” No doubt Cooroy will miss Joe and Kate too. The couple bought what was then the Cooroy Fruit Bowl, when they were looking for a business that they could call their own. "This business was on the market and we thought we could do a lot with it. “And we have. We added a coffee shop and more items to the juice bar menu. “We introduced a bigger variety of fruit and veg, Kate expanded the grocery range, and over the years, both the wholesale and retail businesses have grown so everything has grown nicely together. “We worked hard, the customers came and then we made friends and built it up. It has been a wonderful experience.” While locals will continue to see Joe’s smiling face behind the counter until December, they will also see the current staff, who are staying on, as well as the new owners and their full-time manager.
Joe and Kate with the new owners of Cooroy Harvest Fresh - Kamala, Durga and Pratiksha, and manager Saroj.
Husband and wife team, Durga and Kamala along with daughter Pratiksha Pageni will continue to run the store as a family-owned and -operated business, just like Joe. New manager Saroj Baral has been working alongside Joe for
the past couple of weeks and he told the Rag that he loves Cooroy already. “Cooroy is a really lovely place. I can see the people around here are like family, a real community," Saroj said. “We are really happy with how Joe has been running
the shop and we will continue to operate the same as Joe and be as close to customers, meet their demands and offer quality service in the days ahead.” After working seven days a week for nearly eight years, Joe said that he and Kate don’t have any
immediate plans, other than to spend Christmas with family. “We’ll have December off and go to Mackay for Christmas with my family. Usually, we go up on Christmas Eve and come home on Boxing Day, so it will be nice to spend more than a day with them.”
Cooroy Rag, 03 November 2021 - Page
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