ARDROSSAN, Alta. – Shirley Alton has a warning for people wanting to make the leap from selling jam at farmers markets to marketing it in stores.
Make sure your jam won’t go rancid.
Alton was forced to pull all her jam off store shelves after customers complained their unopened jars had spoiled.
Last year the Ardrossan saskatoon berry farmer began selling her whole-berry jam to stores. Her customers said they liked the jam she made with whole saskatoon berries suspended in a jelly: They liked the flavor, they liked the low-sugar content and they liked that her jams didn’t contain preservatives.
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It’s possible to make jam without preservatives if it is processed hot and made with more sugar. But the whole berries wouldn’t stay suspended in the jelly unless the jam was cooled before packing.
That didn’t matter when the jam was snapped up at farmers markets and eaten quickly. The fuzzy problem erupted when the jam sat on store shelves for a long time.
Originally, Alton worried the rancid jam would hurt her Prairie Orchards label, but she said customers seemed to appreciate that she was trying to make a jam with low sugar content and no preservatives.
Still, Alton was forced to choose between keeping her unique whole berry jam or adding preservatives.
She chose preservatives.
“Once I moved onto the store shelf I had to move that way,” Alton told a group of potential berry and vegetable producers on an Alberta Agriculture rural business development specialist’s tour of horticulture operations.
Once Alton recalled her jam, she went to work with the food scientists at Alberta Agriculture’s Food Processing Development Centre. The scientists and technicians helped her develop a jam with whole berries and the least preservatives possible while maintaining a good shelf life.
Alton would have liked a jam with no preservatives, just as she would like to be able to avoid herbicides and pesticides on her 11Ú2 acre A-5 berry farm, east of Edmonton.
But after nine years, a couple crop failures from entomosporium, hours beating back the weeds and other diseases, Alton now says an ideal chemical-free orchard isn’t always possible.
“We depend on chemicals so much. You have to start an orchard with chemicals and then you can move to an integrated pest management plan,” she said.
“To come out here and see your bushes loaded with fruit and see no fruit at picking time because of disease is really discouraging.”
