We recently connected with Lori Bean and have shared our conversation below.

Lori , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today One of the toughest things about entrepreneurship is that there is almost always unexpected problems that come up – problems that you often can’t read about in advance, can’t prepare for, etc. Have you had such and experience and if so, can you tell us the story of one of those unexpected problems you’ve encountered?

I never expected the complexities of the fruit crops grown in Georgia. Native to Georgia, I grew up with the basic knowledge of fruit as an ingredient, but not an agricultural crop—which are two very different things. A few years into my jam business, I witnessed fruit crops bitten by a late spring freeze. Late freezes are one of the biggest stressors for fruit farmers, as well as pests and diseases, all of which affect the amount of fruit available for my jams. Weather in Georgia has a huge impact on fruit crops. I’ve become a bit of a meteorologist:

My first experience with a spring freeze resulted in a loss of peach crops. Peach season lasts 8 to 10 weeks in Georgia, depending on the weather. When we receive a late-season freeze, the peach trees that bloom first are in danger of losing their buds. Larger farms have systems in place to save their trees from freezing; most use spray misters to coat the buds in water and protect them from dangerous temperatures. One farmer in my area hired a helicopter pilot to fly low over his peach trees during the frozen night, using air convection to prevent frost. Several nights of frozen temperatures lead to crop loss, shortening the peach season, and creating a supply and demand problem. Fruit arrives later than expected and costs more than in a year where the peaches benefit from a full harvest. It is a rare and blessed occasion when we have a full, healthy peach harvest here in Georgia.

And it is not just peaches that suffer. One ruthless freeze a few years back not only killed all the figs on the trees but damaged the trees themselves. The following year’s harvest was depressed and practically fruitless.
Freezing isn’t the only problem. The heat wave we suffered in July this year stopped the blackberry production at our farm partner in South Georgia. As a result, we have only the blackberries from last season to cook and sell this year.
Rainy nights in Georgia also mean something to the fruit crops. Rainy spring and summer seasons in Georgia cause fruit that is ready to be picked to become washed out and pale in flavor. The sweetest, best quality fruit is found after a hot, dry day or two leading up to harvest. When we have consistently rainy seasons, I watch the weather and try to only acquire fruit after a few dry days. Blueberries, blackberries, and strawberries are also susceptible to a particular pest that targets soft fruit, which is especially bad in rainy years. So some years, the harvest is done when the pests move in, not when the fruit season is over.

We’ve had to learn to roll with the punches regarding fruit. Even when we diversify suppliers, we’re sometimes left with much less fruit than our customers demand. This is the challenge we face by buying locally and working with the seasons, potential for supply shortages. Local sourcing is the foundation that Georgia Jams was built on, but it is also the most challenging part about sticking to our core values.

Lori , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a classically trained pastry chef turned fruit spread maker. I’ve always loved being in the kitchen, learning to cook from my mom and grandmothers. In my late 20s I quit my job at a big box retailer to attend culinary school in Florida. It was a big move, I had never lived out of state, and although Florida isn’t far, I attended the school too far from my home south of Atlanta to visit. Pastry school was an education beyond value in this business. I learned about kitchen production, food service, and how to balance flavors and treat ingredients with the highest regard. Although I didn’t learn to make preserves in culinary school, I did learn a lot about food science and how ingredients work. The scientific approach to baking and pastry applies directly to what I do today, helping me write recipes and understand the function of ingredients.

I started Georgia Jams soon after graduating from culinary school. I’d moved back home in 2008, during the recession. It was impossible to find a job in Florida using my education. I had a heap of school debt and all kinds of knowledge. I started selling baked goods at my local farmers market in Peachtree City, and that summer offered my first few jars of jam alongside the pastry and bread rolls we offered. The jam I made then was the traditional kind of jam using lots of sugar, local fruit, and pectin from the grocery store shelf. I dropped the baked goods and returned the following summer with jams and preserves.

It was through talking to other jam makers and homemakers that I found a few new tips and tricks about how to handle the fruit I was processing into jam, but my favorite tip was delivered to me as a word of warning. As I was attending local markets to hock my wares, I encountered another preserver who had a vast line of jams and jellies on her table. I love to talk business with other folks, and I asked her where she purchased her pectin. I was spending a lot of money on pectin from the grocery store. She said she used Pomona’s pectin but that it was difficult to use and implied I wouldn’t be able to figure it out. I went home and ordered my first pound of Pomona’s Pectin and started experimenting.

Pomona’s is the backbone of all my recipes, the ingredient that changed how I make jam. This pectin allows the user to choose the amount of sugar they use in a recipe, unlike traditional pectin, which requires at least as much sugar as fruit to set. Pomona’s doesn’t use sugar to set, so I was able to rewrite recipes using far less sugar than traditional jams and jellies. The focus of Georgia Jams is to use what we grow here in Georgia, source the fruit in season, buying it at the peak of freshness when the fruit is ripe and ready to be plucked. Starting with perfectly delicious, ripe fruit allows us to put the fruit first, adding just enough sugar to make it taste like the peaches ripened in the sun, blueberries fresh off the bush, and wild blackberries like I picked off the thorn-ridden vines as a child.

We have a line of around 15 low-sugar fruit spreads, most of which we grow here in Georgia – cranberries are the exception. I just can’t get through a holiday season without cranberries on the table! I am proud of the relationships we have with our local farmers. We wouldn’t be able to offer the quality product without the farmers growing the fruit for us.
Georgia Jams caters to those who like to eat real food, want to recognize all the ingredients on the label and appreciate the delight of eating with the seasons. We don’t utilize artificial flavors or preservatives; our low sugar spreads are purely delicious.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

I started Georgia Jams with a flat of mason jars and a bag of Muscadine grapes. My mom helped me design simple jar labels, which we printed at home. It was a very low-key and inefficient operation. I used the cash from my jam sales to buy more ingredients, labels, and jars and built the business that way. My parents were very generous in supporting me as I started this business. Scaling up for me has always meant putting out the money first and recouping the expenses with sales. Georgia Jams operated as a bootstrapped business for at least 9 years. I wouldn’t have been able to keep this business operational if it weren’t for my Mom and Dad helping me financially.

My mom went on a lot of road trips with me to pick fruit and sell jams. She was my faithful farmer’s market sales partner and road trip buddy. She provided a lot of free labor that helped me get this business up and running.
Scaling up has been the most difficult hurdle that continues to present itself. At every turn, with every improvement implemented, I’ve found that we are thrust toward the next hurdle. Sometimes it is simple things like acquiring a steam kettle that allows me to make a bigger batch, but being limited by the size oven, we were using to process the jams. I could cook the fruit for 120 jars but only process 60 of them at a time. So, the implementation, although helpful, immediately illustrates the next improvement that needs to be made.

I took on a business partner in 2020 who brought some capital to Georgia Jams. That capital allowed us to finally move our facility into a larger space in Williamson, Georgia, and gave us the ability to invest in equipment to facilitate our growth. Although we decided to discontinue our partnership in 2022, I am glad we worked together for two years.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

During the first year of the pandemic, I entered Georgia Jams in Garden and Gun Magazine’s prestigious Made in the South Awards. We received news that fall that Georgia Jams won the top prize for the food category – I was absolutely elated! I reached out to a previous winner to talk to him about his business journey and how his work was impacted by the recognition. That conversation was very informative and helpful, but I was not at all prepared for the onslaught of orders that were about to hit my website. I expected a boost in business but had no idea what was about to hit.

Luckily, during the pandemic, my partner and I had time to work on the e-commerce side of GeorgiaJams.com, which put us in a better position with the volume of orders that were about to arrive. I was not prepared with staffing or supplies, though, and the volume of sales that came in quickly illustrated our shortcomings.

I had friends, and family members pitch in to help with packing the orders but still had to drive those boxes to my local shipper to send out every single day, sometimes returning to the kitchen to cook after the late-afternoon drop-off. I was the person in charge of making the jams, labeling, packing, and shipping, and dealing with the onslaught of customer emails that came with the orders. One afternoon, I ordered sugar through Instacart, and when my driver showed up with my sugar haul, I offered her a job. Jenny was energetic and intelligent, and I desperately needed someone who could solve problems without my help. She took the job, and still works for Georgia Jams to this day.

The worst of the problems came when I needed to order jars to put all this award-winning jam into. Supply chain shortages meant that the suppliers I normally get jars from had no inventory for me and no lead time on when the jars would be back in stock. I had to order a similar-looking jar for my jams with a different kind of closure, or cap. My partner was scouring the internet for the jars that might work for us, and we bought all of what we could find. These new jars had a 30% failure rate in sealing, which meant that 20 out of 60 jars in every batch I made could not be sold. I was coming to work every day and making 4 to 5 batches of jam but could only sell a fraction of what I produced. Even the jars that appeared to seal had problems, some of them leaking in transit to the customer, which had to be replaced. Winning the award was a real boon in a pandemic year but came with plenty of problems, too.

Contact Info:

• Website: GeorgiaJams.com
• Instagram: Georgia Jams
• Facebook: Georgia Jams

Image Credits
Jeff Davis