evolution of an idea

The story of how the jam business came to be is one of complete random thrashing about trying to figure out what to do after I left corporate life in with severe nerve damage from computer use. First there was art school, which led to a life of poverty and low paying temp jobs as I pursued my film and writing interests on the side. I fell into work as a journalist by accident which led to a job at Yahoo! also by complete accident. However, banging away on a keyboard and clicking on a mouse took its toll and I stepped away unable to drive, let alone write with a pen. Millions of dollars evaporated as the dot com bust happened in slow motion and I found myself out of work, unable to work and with no career options. I had some money left I knew with being frugal I could live a few years off of and I started renting rooms in my house I had bought a few years back to European tourists staying for a few months. I just knew I had to figure out some way of supporting myself.

With an interest in architecture and industrial design I decided to get into this field. I spent a few years developing a few prototypes of furniture but I was dependent on hiring other people to actually build the final product making it very expensive and quality control difficult to manage. So I scratched that idea. I then had begun research on a design team called Van Keppel Green for a book I decided to write. I am still writing it…

I then was mulling the idea of opening a fresh juice bar in Shibuya in Tokyo after realizing there was no such thing of freshly squeezed juice in the city. This led to much research on the fresh fruit business on a global scale. I contacted growers, distributors in various countries, researched myriad customs and import/export laws and came to the conclusion this was a bad idea. First the fruit grown in Japan is mainly for gift giving and is super expensive. The stuff imported from other countries is highly taxed to give the Japanese-grown fruit preferential treatment. And then there was the language barrier and the complex Japanese laws surrounding running not only a business but a food business. I even took Japanese lessons for a year. I realized getting into food was just a bad idea.

But while traveling on the western side of Japan I stayed at a famous, old inn known for their regional version of Kaiseki cuisine. The town was Kanazawa and is considered second to Kyoto for food. Long story short I was introduced to a kind of homemade alcohol of steeped fruit. I asked the owner of the inn for the recipe and she gave it to me. Once I was back in SF I became obsessed with making all different types of this spirit which incorporated soju (distilled from all kinds of stuff like rice, potatoes, barley, sugar cane) and fresh fruit. Again I was tapping into the world of fresh fruit but this time in the Bay Area.

I spent extensive time comparing the flavors of different varieties of plums (the most popular fruit used in Japan for this), apples, raspberries, strawberries, pineapples, pomegranats, passion fruit etc. Soon I had a room in my house filled with gallon-size glass jugs of all kinds of experiments. I tried using fresh fruit, frozen, whole pieces of fruit, pureed etc. Then there were all the different ways to filter the final product after aging it for various lengths of time. I had a big list of fruit growers, distributors and just needed to figure out where to get my booze from. I had been buying it at a Korean grocery store on Geary Ave. next to the Jack in the Box by the case and the owner and I would joke about how much money he was making off of me. By the way, he made the best hands down Korean fried chicken I ever had. He said he should go into businesses just making that. He should have but instead opened a coffee shop.

Anyhow, I found a distiller in the mid west and we embarked on a two year back and forth on how to make this on a scale where it could be a product sold across the country. I became familiar with all the crazy laws surrounding alcohol. I even had to have one of the “Notices To Sell Alcohol Beverages” signs you see on new restaurant windows on my house. Why? Well, any space that does anything with alcohol has to have that for people to know what you are doing and so they can protest it. So for my home office, since it was a space where I would be doing work with alcohol (as in paperwork or on the computer) I had to have that sign. The warehouse I was to store it in (and in a special area in a cage), had to put that sign up also. Well you can imagine what my neighbors thought about this. I was getting angry calls and letters slipped in my mailbox about how I could not open up a bar in my house! So I had to write a letter explaining things and drop it in every mail box on the street. Even a cop was called and knocked on my door. I explained everything and he laughed about it. But still he and his friends asked if they could search the house. Of course I said yes. I think I gave them some jam I had lying around.

I decided to design a label for this new product I was going to call sojuice. It was made with a grocery bag I had cut out to an 8.5″x11″ piece and ironed all the wrinkles out. Then I designed a sheet of labels on Photoshop and printed it out. Using the cap of a container of turpentine I cut out the circle with an X-Acto knife.

Here you can see this first version which has a mysterious piece of cork in it for some reason:

Simply apply after the daily shower for pharmacy cialis healthier, more responsive penile tissue. online generic cialis Have light food before have this medication. Yes, when you are unable to get an erection, that condition is called as erectile dysfunction and there can be many reasons as to why women don’t reach an orgasm including fear, lack of knowledge about sex, being rigid during intercourse, not receiving needed stimulation, mood swings, relationship problems, and traumatic sexual experiences in get viagra australia http://aimhousepatong.com/rate.html the past. Erectile dysfunction can continue reading that drugstore sildenafil tablets cause a whole host of issues in any relationship.
I then got the idea to pitch this product to airlines and contacted JetBlue and they agreed to sample it. So I made a bunch of tiny labels by hand and mailed them off some bottles just like this:

Around this time I had heard of some of the health benefits from fruit with higher percentages of polyphenols. So I found a laboratory up in Napa that tested mostly wine and had them do some tests on the amount of these antioxidants. I put this info on the back labels which I knew was against the law. Even today any health claims cannot be put on any alcoholic beverages, though you can put them on herbal medicines and other foods.

Then the clincher came. Finally the distiller and I had worked out all the manufacturing details and negotiated back and forth over a non-disclosure agreement I had drafted up for free by a friend of a friend who was an attorney. This sucker was like 40 pages long!  The distiller then told me to run a test of my product would cost around $60,000! ‘What?” I asked. Apparently for the facility to produce my product in a reasonable amount they would have to make around several thousand gallons. The idea of having something made with no assurance it would remotely taste like what I had been making in my home kitchen and having so much of it for so much money was simply terrifying. I immediately abandoned that idea. The alcohol businesses was way to backward in regulations and the upfront cost was prohibitive. I vowed never to ever do any type of job that required outsourcing or manufacturing. And I definitely meant it this time I would never go into any type of food or beverage business. I would go back to e-commerce where all you needed was a laptop and an internet connection to build a business.

All along Phineas and I were making jam each summer from his mother’s backyard tree in Santa Clara. I decided to send a jar to some food magazines to see what they thought. My furniture idea was a bust. The alcohol business was a bust. But all along people were going nuts over this jam. ‘Maybe this is what I should be doing?’ I thought. So I made up some labels for the jam based on the idea for the alcohol but changed it a bit, moving the circle cut out to the other side and using a quarter as a template to cut out the circle. Now, making these labels was extremely exasperating. I would always screw up and have to start again. It took maybe making 10 labels, which took an hour, to get one good one. Not to mention using the Xacto knife flared up my nerve damage so I was in complete pain by the time I had one good label.

Here is a jar of the apricot cherry jam we used to make and looks exactly like what I sent to the food magazines – except they just got the apricot:

And the text for the label:

So I shipped off a jar to Food & Wine and to Saveur, both of which we had subscriptions to. This was April of 2006. By this time I had run out of money and had landed a job from a neighbor as a consultant to the San Francisco Unified Public School District setting up technology programs in schools. It was a load of fun and I figured I would stay in education. I got a special vocational teaching credential no one knows about. You have to prove 10 years full time job experience in a certain industry and bingo – you get a credential. Based on my experience I got one in computer software, one in journalism and one in business management.

Then one day in November I came home from school and there was a message on my answering machine from an editor of Food & Wine raving about how much they loved the jam and they wanted to schedule an interview. I had completely forgotten about the jam I had mailed out. So we set up a phone interview and answered their questions. We were told we would be mentioned in the February 2007 issue. I promised them I would make a little website for the jam so people could contact us. Neither of us really took this seriously so when they asked how much the jam would cost we tossed out a crazy number: $10 for an 8 oz jar. We hoped the high price would keep anyone from ordering it. I mean we made just about 60 – 100 jars a year depending on how much fruit there was on the tree. And I had vowed twice never to get into any type of business to do with food. I thought I was safe.

So when the issue came out we were immediately deluged with hundreds of emails a day. ‘Wow!’ we said. ‘There sure are a lot of people who like jam!’ Every day for weeks we would come home and have hundreds of new emails from people wanting to buy this jam. There were people from South Korea, Greece, Germany – all over! They offered to pay immediately to get a jar that summer.

We even got an email from a local woman who owned a bakery in Marin who told us she loved our jam and wanted some. We were confused since we knew we never gave her a jar. ‘Where did you try it?’ I wrote back. She told us she met an editor from Saveur who had a jar of our jam in her purse and gave her a sample. She said this woman had been traveling around the country with it and was giving people a taste. We never heard back from Saveur so hearing this was very mysterious.

This is when panic mode hit.