Blog

Have you visited our new website lately? We’ve been busy although I’ve done a terrible job of writing about it. Pull up a chair, and I’ll try to catch you up on our latest project.

We spent a good part of our summer vacation laying the groundwork to make and sell handmade preserves under the White Plains name. I spent months coming home from work and making at least one, if not two, batches of jam to test recipes and flavor combinations. What I learned is that there is an endless number of fruit, sugar, and texture combinations.

At one point, the refrigerator was so embarrassingly full of jam that I couldn’t fit even the milk and eggs. Thankfully, our friends and guests were quick to play guinea pigs as they sampled and tasted batch after batch – some good and some that needed a little (read: a lot) more work. From there, we found our favorite recipes and began to source the best local fruit to make them.

I had a great time visiting farms and farmers in Virginia and then working with a local co-packer to increase production in scalable qualities. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot about what it takes to scale a traditional recipe when making more than four jars at a time.

She would tell me that the preserve was only as good as the ingredient.

It’s important to me that each jar is true to the traditional style jam making that I learned from my grandmother, Grace, twenty years ago. She would tell me that the preserve was only as good as the ingredient.

As I’ve spent years tasting my jam next to that of large commodity brands bought from big-box stores, there’s no way to argue otherwise. Grateful for her teaching me the ropes, I included a little about her on the label and on the website.

I am grateful to Chris K. for hand-painting all of the fruit on each label to bring it all together. He does a phenomenal job with watercolor and the style fits the handcrafted product perfectly.

In between making, tasting, and packaging jam, I spent a lot of time working on our website. It needed a breath of fresh air, and I also a space to start selling online. It has been up and running for the past few months, and I’ve been working to improve our inventory and shipping processes since. I’ve learned how tough it is to compete in an Amazon-led e-commerce world, where consumers expect the bar Amazon has set around shipping costs and delivery times. It’s hard to compete with two-day, free shipping!

With all of this hard work, I have been grateful for the past two months of shipping and delivering jam to old friends and new ones in many parts of the country and local area. We are working on some fun collaborations and hope to share some new projects with you this fall.

I aim to add several new updates to the blog over the coming weeks as there are many new non-jam related updates also. In the meantime, I hope you will check out our work online, and I look forward to hearing from you soon!