A secret family jam recipe gave Scottish entrepreneur Fraser Doherty the sweet taste of success when he became the youngest ever supplier of a major British grocery chain, he told a Sub35 audience in Edinburgh.
Doherty, who was born in the Scottish capital, started his first business at the age of 14 after asking his grandmother to teach him how to make jam and over the past 15 years has turned her recipe into a business that has sold millions of jars of jam around the world.
In his early days as ‘the jam boy’, he sold jam door-to-door and was soon making 1,000 jars per week in his parents’ kitchen, which he distributed at farmers’ markets all over Scotland.
After a while, he came up with the idea to make jam wholly from fruit, with no added sugar, and at the age of 16 presented his brand, SuperJam, at one of Waitrose’s ‘meet the buyer’ days – the “X-Factor of selling groceries to supermarkets”.
He had ten minutes to pitch his idea to the senior jam buyer. “He thought it was a great idea, but he explained there was a long way to go until I ever had a product that I could sell to a supermarket,” said Doherty. “I’d have to set up production in a factory and offer him a good price. I’d have to get labels designed that explained to people why they should buy my product.
“He explained to me that if I could do all of that I’d be welcome to go back in a year’s time and he’d think about giving it a shot. Having met with Waitrose, it became my dream to one day see my products on their shelves.”
And one day he did. His first attempt at scaling SuperJam failed on branding and cost grounds, but after altering its image and finding a cheaper manufacturer, Waitrose started retailing the preserve in its 300 stores a decade ago.
Millions of jars of SuperJam have since been sold across the world – from Australia and Russia to Japan and South Korea, where it has been met with its biggest international success.
Doherty received an MBE from Prince Charles for services to business and SuperJam took a place as an iconic Scottish brand alongside Irn Bru and Baxters soup in an exhibition about food producers at the National Museum of Scotland.
The commercial success led to a series of spin-off ventures, including best-selling books SuperBusiness, 48-Hour Startup and The SuperJam Cookbook, as well as a charity, The SuperJam Tea Parties, which organises 100 free tea parties every year all over the UK for elderly people who live alone or in care.
New Town to North Korea
Doherty is now a serial entrepreneur, having founded Envelope Coffee and co-founded Beer52. “Jam, coffee and beer – all loosely categorised as breakfast products,” he quipped.
Beer52 is the world’s largest craft beer club and one of Scotland’s fastest-growing start-up companies. That has been helped by sponsoring podcasts – comedy, sports or political – as well as craft beer festivals around the UK.
It has 65,000 members and ships eight bottles of beer to each per month alongside its own magazine, Ferment, which features the beers, breweries and countries to which Doherty and his co-founder James Brown have travelled to source beers, as well as recipes that complement the beers.
“We’ve been literally all over the world to find the beers,” said Doherty. “We got a really special opportunity to be the first [foreign] people ever to do a brewery tour of North Korea. It’s a very sensitive place, very controversial… but we got the opportunity to see a usual angle to the story.”
The pair wanted to find inspiration for a beer that symbolises hopes for unification with one ingredient representing North Korea and one representing South Korea. “We visited the place where they grow ginseng and decided that would be the ingredient to represent north. We took a 24-hour train back to China and met up with our friends in South Korea and since then we’ve been working on this beer – it’s something we’re really excited about.”