The Celery Fortune Under Heathrow: How a Pizza-Roll King’s Farm Became a Gated Town
Before the guard gates and fairways, Heathrow's muck grew celery for Chun King. How Jeno Paulucci — who sold his pizza-roll empire in 1985 — turned Seminole County farmland into a gated community the same year.
3 minute read
Every gated community in Florida has a founding myth involving a developer and a rendering. Heathrow has something better: celery. Before the guard gates, the fountain lake and the fairways, the flat Seminole County muck south of Lake Monroe grew celery for Chun King, the line of Chinese-style foods built by a Minnesota grocer’s son named Jeno Paulucci. The community that now defines luxury in Lake Mary began as farmland its founder already owned — and the story of how a celery field became Heathrow is the best short history in Seminole County.
The pizza-roll king buys the farm
Luigino Francesco Paulucci — Jeno to everyone — was born in 1918 in Aurora, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range. He built Chun King into a national brand, then built Jeno’s, whose pizza rolls became an American freezer staple. In 1985 he sold the Jeno’s brand to Pillsbury for well over a hundred million dollars. The same year, he started his last big build on ground he already knew: the Central Florida farmland his food empire had drawn on for years, a few miles south of Lake Monroe and just west of what was becoming Lake Mary. He called the new community Heathrow.
Why Heathrow? The story usually told — and we flag it as story, not record — is that the name was borrowed from London’s Heathrow Airport, a piece of imported British polish for an address being pitched as exclusive from day one. What is documented, in the Heathrow Collection held by RICHES of Central Florida at the University of Central Florida, is the result: a private, gated community founded in 1985, growing to roughly two thousand homes, a country club and an office park on former farm fields. Aerial photographs from 1993 in the UCF collection show the fountained entry lake and divided boulevard already in place, the fairways drawn over the muck.
From muck to master plan
The muck mattered. Seminole County’s black soil had made the Sanford area a celery capital, worked by hand at wages the old growers’ accounts do not romanticize. Paulucci’s plan replaced that economy wholesale: villages of homes arranged around lakes and a Ron Garl golf course — the Garl course at Heathrow Country Club opened in 1985, the year of founding — with guard gates at the entrances and a country club as the social engine. It was, from the start, a complete world rather than a subdivision, and it set the template Lake Mary’s growth followed: master-planned, amenity-first, unapologetically private.
The office park was part of the design, not an afterthought. The Heathrow International Business Center grew along International Parkway into a 370-acre corporate district, and its signature tenant became the American Automobile Association — AAA’s national headquarters sits at 1000 AAA Drive in Heathrow, one of the largest employers in the Lake Mary area. The community’s name went onto the Interstate 4 exit signs, a distinction few subdivisions anywhere can claim.
What survived, what changed
Paulucci died in 2011 at ninety-three, the same year Concert Golf Partners bought Heathrow Country Club out of foreclosure — a reminder that even the most polished enclave rode the housing crash like everyone else. Concert, for whom Heathrow was its first club, later added The Legacy Club at Alaqua Lakes and has since put $3 million into upgrades across the two properties, a reinvestment we detail in our country club profile. The gates never came down. The oaks Paulucci’s planners kept have had forty years to become the canopy residents now treat as the community’s birthright.
Drive Heathrow Boulevard today and the celery is invisible — it survives only in the UCF archive photographs and in the flat, rich ground under the fairways. But the shape of the place is still Paulucci’s: a self-contained world behind gates, built in one decisive gesture by a man who had already built two food empires and decided to finish with a town. For the community as it operates now, see our Heathrow guide, and for the city that grew up around it, our Lake Mary hub. The field became a gated town named for an airport on the other side of the ocean. Seminole County has stranger stories, but not many.
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