Date shop offers unique taste of history
When you turn off Scottsdale Road onto the gravel parking lot of Sphinx Date Co., the hustle and bustle of Old Town fades into the background and time seems to slow down. Palm trees cast leggy shadows over patio seating areas, perfect for sipping a date milkshake made with the locally grown fruit.
Sphinx is a staple in Scottsdale, where some customers have been shopping for generations, stopping in to snack on sweet, fresh dates plucked from Arcadia and Yuma area trees. But the company doesn’t just sell dates, it also preserves history.
Mother and daughter team Sharyn and Rebecca Seitz are the latest to take over the task of preserving the company’s history, educating locals and tourists and sharing the story of Arizona’s date farms. The pair bought the store in 2012 and this year, in 2021, Sphinx Date Co. celebrated its 70th anniversary.
What’s sold at Sphinx Date Co.?
The two most common comments Sharyn and Rebecca hear from customers are exclamations of how glad they are that the shop is still open. Or that, despite driving past for 25 years, they’ve never stepped foot inside.
“People say, I thought you were a palm reader, I though you were a dating service, we’ve heard it all,” Rebecca says.
Sphinx Date Co. is a specialty food store that sells different varieties of dates, ranging from the namesake black sphinx and popular medjool to more rare types of the sweet fruits like barhi and honey dates.
The dates are sold in bulk or in gift baskets, with medjools served plain, chocolate covered or nut-filled. The store also sells Arizona products, including Hayden Flour Mills White Sonora Wheat Flour, locally made prickly pear jam and syrup, Queen Creek Olive Mill oils and Arizona-grown pistachios and pecans. Racks in the back display a selection of Arizona wines and Superstition Mead.
Many tourists and locals stop into the store to find uniquely Arizonan gifts, or to enjoy subtly sweet date shakes, a newer Arizona tradition. While they are there, Rebecca looks for opportunities to educate customers about the history of date farming.
“A lot of people don’t know how dates grow. They don’t know that they grow on palm trees or they think that they’re figs,” she says.
The history of dates in Arizona is ‘obscured in the blowing winds of time’
Sphinx Date Co. has a long history in the Valley and the details about the origins of both the fruit and the company aren’t entirely concrete.
Originally from the arid regions of the Middle East, one of the reasons dates have done so well in Arizona is the hot and dry climate. According to NPR, they were first introduced to the U.S. by Agriculture Explorers, a special group formed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1800s. The group’s purpose was to travel
the globe in search of new food crops.
The history of the Black Sphinx date in Arizona, however, is not so clear. The state’s date history was written about in an article for The Arizona Republic in 1987. The author stated that “doing research on dates is like searching for a dust mote in a sand storm. Historical facts are obscured in the blowing winds of time, leaving the searcher to wonder if the information is yet another mirage.”
Sharyn and Rebecca Seitz stick to the history they were provided with in a packet of notes from the Brophy family, collected by Frank Brophy Jr. in 1985.
As the story goes, Phoenix resident Roy Franklin discovered a new variety of date in a Phoenix yard in 1928. The theory is that two other varieties of dates may have cross pollinated to create a new fruit. He introduced the dates to Ellen Amelia Goodbody Brophy, a pioneer, prominent land owner and philanthropist. She had multiple acres of the dates planted in Arcadia and this grove became the original Sphinx Date Ranch.
Black sphinx dates became popular because they are a wet variety of date, meaning they’re juicy and soft. The Arizonan fruit became a gourmet item, sold to resorts and country clubs for wealthy guests to enjoy.
Preserving a tradition on the verge of extinction
Fresh dates spoil easily if it rains, and in the 1950s, a few wet years led many of the Arcadia sphinx date farmers to loose their entire crops.
At that time, many people were moving to Phoenix and looking for houses and a spoiled crop meant it was far more lucrative for farmers to sell off their land to developers.
Over the next decade, most of the area’s date farms, including the original Sphinx Date Ranch, had been split up and sold.
Some farmers, however, weren’t ready to quit growing dates. So they moved to Yuma where temperatures are just a few degrees warmer and there’s less chance of rain. New date groves were planted and the Arizona tradition continued.
Around the same time, medjool dates were introduced in the U.S. first landing in California. These dates, the kind now typically found in grocery stores, are much bigger than other varieties. They are also less likely to spoil, last longer and require less delicate handling.
“The medjools quickly became the farmers’ favorites because they have more likelihood of success,” Rebecca says.
In the 1940’s, a partnership between Sphinx and food and gift company Harry & David led to the creation of specialty dates covered in chocolate, stuffed with nuts or rolled in coconut. They remain among the most popular items the store sells today. All of the chocolate covered and coconut rolled specialty dates are medjools, because they are reliably delicious and available all year round.
Despite the abundance of Medjool dates and the destruction of the original groves, some Phoenix black sphinx date palms remain and a portion of the black sphinx dates sold at Sphinx Date Co. come from neighboring backyards in Arcadia.
When the groves in Arcadia got split up as houses were built, often the tall, established palm trees were incorporated into the landscaping.
There’s now a community of date growers and local farmers who work with homeowners to keep the tradition alive. They sell their dates direct from yard to Sphinx Date Co.
Why the flagship date might not be available this year
Much like the rain that devastated the date crop in the 1950s, this year’s heavy rainfall has spoiled the black sphinx dates in Arcadia.
This is bad news for Sharyn and Rebecca’s customers who eagerly await the fresh date harvest every fall. As for the store owners, they’re waiting to see how many black sphinx dates they can source from specialty farmers in Yuma, but even that harvest has been delayed.
How to visit Sphinx Date Co.
Sphinx Date Co. Palm & Pantry in Scottsdale is open Monday to Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Orders can be placed online at anytime and are typically processed within two days. Same-day hand delivery is available within the Valley. Call between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. for details.
Details: Sphynx Date Co. Palm & Pantry, 3039 N Scottsdale Road, Scottsdale. 480-941-2261, sphinxdateranch.com.