Jarret Liotta | April 22, 2014
Ed Hartz of Sandy Hook sips some coconut milk in front of his delivery truck, Tuesday, April 1, 2014. He os the owner of Noelani Coconut Company, a coconut milk delivery business. Photo: Carol Kaliff / The News-Times | Buy this photo
Making healthy choices can be inconvenient, but Newtown's Ed Hartz is hoping the delivery will come a little bit easier with his new venture.
Noelani Coconut Water and Beverage Co. will come to your door, thanks to Hartz's unique delivery service. The healthy and increasingly popular beverage, which he is retailing through Noelani, comes in its original container -- a coconut.
"No one in the country is doing what I do," said Hartz, who provides customers with de-husked young coconuts from which they can draw around 16 ounces of the juice.
"The coconut water is really fresher," said Edward Townsend, of Ridgefield, who receives regular deliveries from Hartz. "You don't have to guess where it's been. It really comes right out of the coconut."
Hartz is equally enthusiastic about the health benefits of his product, which he imports from Florida and areas further south. He said Noelani means "dew from the heavens" in Hawaiian, and is also the native term for coconut water.
"It's organic," he said. "It's not certified organic, but it's organic. It's organic because there are no chemicals or pesticides used. It just grows naturally."
Ironically, Hartz -- who enjoyed a career in stone restoration -- originally decided to stake his claim in milk. Wanting to find a niche in health and nutrition, he investigated the unique idea of old-fashioned home deliveries of raw milk.
"So I decided to start a farm-fresh, home-delivery service with raw milk," he said, which he provided in glass bottles in a milk truck he purchased.
Hartz pledged to learn all he could about his product, taking time to work with bottlers and on a dairy farm in Wisconsin. "I didn't want to just be a food shuffler," he said.
Unfortunately, he found the price of obtaining the product made it an unprofitable venture, so he abandoned the project. As luck would have it, however, his son introduced him to the idea of coconut water, which sparked his interest.
"I became fascinated by coconut water," he said. "It's not only probably the most nutritious drink on the planet," he said, but it offered potential in a booming market.
Large-scale sales in stores presented initial challenges, so Hartz found a way to eschew them. "I thought, I'm just going to go back to the milkman model and bring it directly to the consumer until I can afford my own shop and sell my products from there."
Hartz serves clients in Fairfield and Westchester counties, and looks forward to growth that will allow him to establish regular daily "milk" runs.
"His service is good and the coconut water's good," said Frank Esposito, a Newtown customer