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:
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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.
It has been three years and fifteen days since we launched overnight this crazy jam business. (All the background info is on our website below for those of you who don’t know much about us). The original plan back then was to keep ourselves very hidden and private and interaction from our site just to email due to our limited time. We had a policy never to have our photos taken, and even thought of posting one photo of the two of us with wigs and huge sunglasses incognito.
Flash forward three years and we have become more public. One of us, Eric, has become visible doing farmers’ markets and supermarket demos, and is full time with this venture. Phineas, the other half of this duo, has an incredibly demanding full-time job and is rarely seen. He is the silent partner who does extraordinary things behind the scenes.
It is our goal here to offer more in depth postings about what we learn day by day running a food businesses and being surrounded with all elements of food basically 24/7. We hope this area can spark friendships and discussions between our customers locally and nationally who mostly don’t know each other. And since we come into contact with so many people who have so much to offer, some postings will be sparked by what they share with us.
For example, I (Eric) do demos most weekdays in supermarkets and just last week at the Los Gatos Whole Foods met an extraordinary bunch. Most knew what Blenheim apricots were and had personal stories of working on local orchards as kids pitting them (or cutting cots which is the local lingo). They all bemoaned how these orchards have virtually disappeared. We have one customer who lives in San Jose who is in her 80s and told us back when she was in her 20s, she could drive through what is now called Silicon Valley with the windows rolled down in the summer and the air was thick with the smell of ripening apricots.
an old abandoned farm house in Gilroy
Then there was the woman who told me about a secret apricot orchard up in the west San Jose Hills owned by an old timer who no longer could pick all the fruit and I should contact him. She gave me detailed directions and I am just waiting for some free time to go and knock on his door to see if we could help. Many of our customers want fresh apricots in the summer and if they could pick them off his trees that would solve everything. I was told a few months back about a similar story up in the Saratoga hills but had no luck getting in touch with anyone.
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I learned from another customer about a Chinese Cultural park her parents created in San Jose I never heard of.
Chinese Cultural Garden
Then there was the fellow who had a former student who was starting a food business and wanted advice. I felt like saying: ‘Stay away!’ But I was nice and answered all his questions. Then he asked what I would say to this women. And this is what I will tell anyone:
Starting our own business is what many of us dream about. You are the boss, get to do what you want and have bragging rights when you are at dinner parties. But on the flip side after you get into your own business you realize that it assumes a life all of its own, and that you become more a slave to it than you ever dreamed. Why? Well if you are small like us and do everything, and are in sales, everything is customer driven. Sure you want to hang out with friends Friday night, but instead you get a big order for bbq sauce and have to drop everything to make it. And don’t even mention summer vacation to us. We work basically 24/7 from July through September making the apricot and plum jams. It takes several months to recover. Phineas also uses up all his yearly vacation to take the time off to help leaving him exhausted and with absolutely no vacation off from work for the rest of the year.
The two of us have pretty much resigned ourselves to devoting all our time to this venture. It is incredibly demanding emotionally, physically and financially – especially since we had to build from scratch a commercial kitchen which was definitely not cheap. A good comparison of how we feel would be if you got laid off, had quadruplets, just started building two houses, had all your in laws move in and started training for a triathlon all at the same time. Maybe throw in a tornado knocking over one house and breaking a leg for emphasis and you can get a feel for our daily lives.
Another analogy that makes me feel better sometimes is to call all of this just one big adventure. Where every day brings surprises, new people and new things to learn. So in that light, yes, this is very exciting. And meeting our customers who are so sweet, appreciative and full of compliments really makes us feel maybe we made the right decision to drop everything for this venture. But then I am the crazy person who loves taking huge risks and despite my complaints of always being stressed out and broke, secretly this is just one fun roller coaster ride with no end in sight. If this sounds like you, then welcome to the club and jump right into adventures in jam. Of course you can live vicariously from the safety of your computer. That is what I recommend.