My Story
How it started, what goes into it, and why I make it this way.
It started with an orange.
Sun & Peel started as a single product: hand-sliced dried orange rounds. The idea was simple. Take good fruit, cut it by hand, dry it slowly, and see if people wanted it. They did.
It grew from there. The tea kits came from a family member's suggestion: pair citrus slices with organic loose leaf tea, wrap it in cotton, price it so anyone can try one. They answered the question people kept asking me: "These are beautiful, but what do I do with them?"
The vinegar came from not wanting to throw anything away. After slicing dozens of oranges, grapefruits, and limes, I had scraps. Good scraps. They became citrus vinegar. The whole line grew out of the same idea: everything gets used.
Every material is a choice.
Most products are optimized for margin. Find the cheapest material, take the fastest shortcut, get it out the door. People can feel the difference even if they can't name it.
I went the other way. The tea sachets are natural wood pulp. The bags are oxygen-bleached cotton. Every label is ink-plotted onto kraft paper so it reads like it was written by hand. All of the packaging composts. Nothing ends up in a landfill.
The gift sets come in vintage cigar boxes, sourced locally and given a second life. They are the kind of packaging people hold onto long after the product inside is gone.
"You can care about every detail and still build something that works."
None of it is complicated. It just takes the willingness to choose the better option at every step, even when nobody would notice if you didn't.
Four products. Nothing extra.
Dried Citrus Slices
Organic orange, grapefruit, and lime. Sliced and dried by hand. Use them in cocktails, bake with them, steep them in water, or just set them on a shelf because they look good there. This is the foundation everything else builds on.
Handcrafted Tea Kits
Dried citrus slices paired with organic, fair trade Frontier Co-op loose leaf tea. Priced at $2.99 so it is easy to try one. I expect most people to start here, on a slow morning, with hot water and a few quiet minutes.
Citrus Vinegar
Made from the scraps. After slicing fruit all day, what is left over does not go in the trash. It becomes vinegar. Full flavor, nothing wasted. This product exists because throwing good fruit away felt wrong.
Gift Sets
Tea kits presented in vintage cigar boxes, lined with compostable paper. The kind of gift that makes someone ask where you got it.
Small batch is not a label.
This is a one-person operation. I slice every orange by hand. I rotate every dehydrator rack by hand. I assemble every tea kit by hand. When the bag says small batch, it is not marketing copy. It is the literal description.
Sun & Peel is a Florida cottage food brand. Everything is made in my home kitchen under Florida cottage food law. No factory, no warehouse, no production line. Just good fruit, good materials, and the time to get every detail right.