Always Fresh, AlwaysWhole, Always Humble

Sep 14

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: Rutabaga Juicery and Eats

The simple creed behind Rutabaga Juicery and Eats, and the schoolteacher-turned-partner, Tim Fry, keeping it alive.

Tim Fry is quick to tell you he’s no health nut. He still goes through the McDonald’s drive-thru. So no one was more surprised than Tim when a summer favor at a little West Annapolis juice shop turned into a new career. A teacher with his summers free, he offered to fill in when Rutabaga found itself short-handed one summer. “I reached out and said, hey, I’ll take over for the summer.” He’s been there ever since.

A love of whole food, brought home

Rutabaga Juicery and Eats runs on a simple idea: real, whole food, made fresh every day. Its founders, Jim and Stacy Heywood, came to it honestly. They met in England, lived in Australia, and fell in love with a way of eating that America doesn’t make easy. Abroad, Tim explains, you go to the markets, pick up fresh food, and build your life around it. Back in the States, everything is processed, and eating whole means shopping daily and racing to keep it fresh. So the Heywoods built a shop that does the hard part for you.

What sold Tim wasn’t a philosophy. It was the startling simplicity of what he saw. Every batch of juice used 40 to 50 pounds of fruit, and that was all that went in it.

“The only thing in those bottles of juices was fruit.”

The shop made 120 juices a day, filled the fridge, and by the next morning it was empty again. “It just boggled my mind,” he says. He wasn’t a vegan or a health nut, but he couldn’t stop thinking about how the place worked.

The summer that changed everything

The founders, stretched thin by three young kids, were quietly looking for a way out of the daily grind. Tim was in. Trading a decade in the classroom for a juice shop was, in his own words, a “huge risk,” but risk suits him. This is his third career, and he likes to change things up. He finished the school year, worked through the fall, and in January 2024 became an official partner.

Raising the team, one first job at a time

Two and a half years later, Tim is largely the one steering the ship, and his biggest mark isn’t on the recipes. It’s on the people. Rutabaga’s staff is young. “It’s their first job,” Tim says of many who come through the door. Drawing on ten years of teaching, he set out to raise the level of the team the way he once raised a classroom, coaching young employees not just on how to make a smoothie, but on how to work, how to talk to customers, or even how to handle the person who’s in a rush or unhappy about a modification. Some new employees arrive nervous and awkward at the counter and later grow into leaders.

Watching that happen, he says, is one of his favorite parts of the job: “They’ve really risen to the occasion. And that has been a joy to watch.”

Fresh, whole, and welcoming

Ask Tim’s advice for anyone entering this world and it comes back to passion and a shared goal. “Find your niche,” he says, and rally the team around common principles. At Rutabaga those principles are easy to recite: “Always fresh, always whole, always humble.” Fresh, because the fruit is delivered daily; whole, because the recipes are simple enough that you can read every ingredient; and humble, because a juice shop can feel intimidating, Tim knows, and he wants everyone to feel comfortable and welcome walking in.

The surprise behind the counter

Here’s what most regulars would never guess about the man who rebuilt Rutabaga around customer service: he’s shy. It doesn’t show; he hides it well. Still, being the face of a business doesn’t come naturally to him. It surprises people, too, that running a juice shop is his third career.