‘We made 25 jars at a time with six pans on the go
There could be no better validation for Nicola Elliott launching her food business in 2016 than winning a gold award just a month after producing her first batch of Seville marmalade. “The fact that the marmalade was so good gave me the confidence to move forward,” recalls Elliott, founder of Single Variety Co.
This year it got even better. At the same World Marmalade Awards, Amalfi lemon marmalade made it to the final round of tasting and then took home double gold and the top prize, an emotional moment for the British entrepreneur. “Doing this at the scale we did shows we did everything right,” Elliott says.
During the early throes of her single-fruit canning venture, Elliott was making 25 jars with six pans at a time, with two part-time employees helping out as well as family and friends.
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Single Variety Co, which has eschewed bulk supermarket listings to maintain independent quality, from selling its jams at Balham market to owning a production facility, now produces 5,000 jars a week and is last set to make annual revenues of £1.7 million.
This is a far cry from seven years ago, when Elliott received its first export order to Germany for 8,000 jars of canned raspberries. “I said ‘yes’ thinking I would make 25 jars at a time. Somehow we did it in six weeks. We didn’t make any money on the order, but that was the turning point for us.”
The business lesson led Elliott to reluctantly outsource production for several years; until her husband, a “people person” and former personal trainer and tennis coach, joined the business and the couple moved to Bristol, where they spent £200,000 setting up their jam factory five years ago.
In his previous career as a fresh food product developer for a company such as Sainsbury’s, Elliott showed a cost focus and frustration in a role where quality was not a priority. She left her supermarket career to set her sights on a product with a short shelf life.
“When you mass produce, quality has to give in. I was determined to get quality as we aimed,” he admits.
At the time, Elliott noticed that premium jams added champagne to strawberries or bay leaves to blackberries, and that “nobody was making strawberry jam that tasted great.”
Not everything went as planned. Elliott once bought the wrong second-hand jam kettle for £12,000 instead of an electric kettle; her husband still reminds this to today’s working mother.
Now a staff of 12, he works directly with fruit farmers across the UK for his products. These include seasonal, limited-edition jams, such as Yorkshire’s traditional rhubarb grown in the dark and picked by candlelight.
