Alice Kimbrough has owned the Honey Dripper House since 2008. She is an Eastside native who started the business as a way to supplement her teaching income. It has grown big enough to form a partnership with the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp baseball club. | Will Brown, Jacksonville Today
Published on May 22, 2025 at 12:40 pm
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For Alice Kimbrough a honey dripper is more than a sweet, sugary sensation. The Jacksonville treat is a sign of obedience.
The Eastside native has owned and operated Honey Dripper House since 2008. What started as a way to earn supplemental income over the summertime blossomed into a venture that is now in partnership with Jacksonville’s professional baseball club.
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Starting Saturday, Kimbrough’s pineapple, mango, blue raspberry and other flavors will be for sale at VyStar Ballpark for the rest of the season.
Jacksonville’s Triple-A baseball team will be known as the Jacksonville Honey Drippers during its contests Saturday and Sunday against the Memphis Redbirds.
The nickname is an homage to the fruity concoction that has enjoyed Out East for decades. The team has worked on the two-day promotion for more than 18 months. In January, its leadership reached out to Kimbrough to determine whether she would like to take part.
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“It’s a surreal feeling, just to bring something that was so small back then, and it’s so large right now,” Kimbrough says. “It just makes me feel good to have stuck with it all the years. Because a lot of times early on, when I first started my business, I wanted to stop. I wanted to quit. But I hung in there, and it’s paying off day by day.”
Kimbrough grew up Out East. She recalls Mary Jones was her Honey Dripper Lady during her childhood. Jones lived on Milnor Street and sold them out of a room with a sliding window in her home.
Kimbrough says her mother let her walk across a field and buy a 10-cent honey dripper. She laughs at the memory.
Ms. Jones used to sell grape, red and pineapple flavored honey drippers. Kimbrough says the pineapple remains a favorite among her older consumers.
Noel Blaha says mango is his favorite.
Blaha is the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp vice president of marketing and media. Over the years, he saw Kimbrough’s truck as it trundled along A. Philip Randolph Boulevard and was amazed by her activity and presence on Instagram.
Over the winter, Blaha reached out to Kimbrough to see whether she would be interested in the team’s honey dripper promotion. The email came shortly after Kimbrough had left church one evening — during a period where she was completing a 21 Days of Consecration devotion.
Kimbrough says her faith helped her persevere last fall when she was forced to reconsider where she could park her sherbert-colored food truck.
“I even thought about selling my business or releasing my truck,” Kimbrough says. “I really did. In December, I didn’t go out at all. Since I bought the truck in (2011) that has never happened to me. January was rough, I picked up some other schools and things of that nature. Then, this happened in February.
“The biggest part is you have to have a good circle. I have a great circle around me. They had faith and they believed. They kept encouraging me when I would call and say, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t go there.’ They would keep pushing me.”
Blaha recalled there was an immediate connection the first time he spoke with Kimbrough over the telephone.
“I couldn’t have Hollywood scripted it better to play a Honey Dripper Lady,” Blaha says. “She is a longtime educator, an Eastside native and has bubbly energy and feels like everyone’s auntie.”
Kimbrough graduated from Andrew Jackson High School and served as a Duval County educator for 29 years. Outside of her spell in Atlanta earning a business degree from Morris Brown College, she has lived in Jacksonville most of her life.
Kimbrough says it is an unexpected blessing to partner with the Jumbo Shrimp. Even her repeated runs to retailers to purchase 25 pound bags of sugar — she estimates she purchased more than 500 pounds of sugar to prepare more than 1,000 honey drippers — an excursion filled with gratitude.
“We know what we’re doing,” Kimbrough says with a smile. “You have fruit and you have fruit juice and you also add water. It’s not a cup of sugar. It’s a cup of goodness. As one man said, it’s like a cup of heaven.”
Harold Craw, Jumbo Shrimp executive vice president and general manager, has been a longtime advocate for connecting the club with the community — from the High School Heritage Classic that pits Ribault High against Raines High, to creating internship opportunities for Andrew Jackson High students, to celebrating the legacy of former Negro National League team the Jacksonville Red Caps.
In a statement released earlier this year, Craw considered the team’s honey dripper promotion as a way to honor the historic Eastside.
The first 2,000 fans in the gate at VyStar Ballpark on Saturday and the first 500 fans on Sunday will receive a honey drippers item. The team, which has the best home record in Triple-A baseball so far, will wear blue, magenta and yellow jerseys that evoke honey dripper flavors.
A second honey drippers weekend will be on Aug. 30 and 31 when Jacksonville hosts the Rochester Red Wings.
This weekend will be the first time since the Jacksonville Suns rebranded as the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp in 2017 that the club has sported an alternative identity.
Blaha says the Jacksonville Honey Drippers moniker came from years of listening.
“By listening to our neighbors, working with the Melanin Market, working with the Eastside Coalition, working with the Florida Avenue Main Street people and making sure we were intentional, we learned there were people who lived within a bike ride of the ballpark but were not welcomed as much as we might have thought,” Blaha says.
“We wanted to show this is a ballpark for everyone. Yes, come on in. We are the Honey Drippers. We hear you. We recognize what this means to the community and what the Honey Dripper Lady means to the community and we want to be a part of that.”
No one has to tell Kimbrough what happens to faith without works.
“We are going to continue to bring smiles to young and old, one honey dripper at a time.”
