There couldn’t have been a better validation for Nicola Elliott to launch her food business in 2016 than winning a gold award just a month after producing her first batch of Seville marmalade. “It gave me the confidence to go ahead if the marmalade was that good,” recalls Elliott, founder of Single Variety Co.
It went one better this year. At the same World Marmalade Awards, her Amalfi lemon marmalade went through to the final tasting round and went on to take double gold and top honors in an emotional moment for the British entrepreneur. “Doing this at the scale we do means we’re doing everything right,” says Elliott.
At the beginning of her fruit canning startup, Elliott was making 25 jars at a time, with six pans working at once and two part-time employees, as well as family and friends helping out.
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From selling jams on a market stall in Balham to owning its own production plant, ditching mass supermarket listings to retain independent quality, Single Variety Co now produces 5,000 jars a week and has latest annual revenues of £1.7m.
It’s all a far cry from seven years ago, when Elliott received her first export order to Germany for 8,000 jars of raspberry preserves. “I said yes thinking I would make 25 jars at a time. Somehow, I did it for six weeks. We didn’t make any money on the order, but it was the turning point for us.”
The business lesson led Elliott to reluctantly outsource production for several years until her husband – a “people person”, former personal trainer and tennis coach – joined the business and the couple moved to Bristol and spent £200,000 to set up their jam factory five years ago.
In her previous career as a fresh food developer at Sainsbury’s, Elliott cut a frustrated figure in a role she admits was focused on costs and where quality was not a priority. He left his supermarket career to set his sights on a product with a short shelf life.
“When you mass produce, quality has to compromise. I was determined to make quality what we set out to do,” she admits.
At the time, Elliott noticed that premium jams had champagne added to strawberries or bay leaves to blackberries, and “nobody was just making delicious strawberry jam.”
Not everything went according to plan. Elliott once bought the wrong £12,000 second-hand jam kettle instead of an electric kettle, which her husband still reminds the working mum of today.
Now with a staff of 12, she works directly with UK fruit farmers for her produce. These include limited edition seasonal jams such as traditional Yorkshire rhubarb, which is grown in the dark and picked by candlelight.