SUPPLIER SUMMIT


ADVENTURES IN JAM MAKING AND MARKETING


Fraser Doherty is the entrepreneur behind the Super Jam and Beer52 brands. He shared with the NBG Supplier Summit some of the things he’s learned along the way.


H


e was still at primary school when Fraser Doherty decided he wanted to run his own business. It started out with eggs: he and his best friend – both only 10 - visited a chicken farm and decided that it would be a great idea to set up their own egg-selling business. Somehow, they persuaded a farmer to give them a free box of eggs and they set about hatching them on top of the TV. “Amazingly they hatched and we set them up in a hen house and run in the back garden.” The hens then did what hens do and Doherty and his friend started selling eggs to their neighbours.


So far so good, he told the NBG Supplier Summit delegates. An early lesson in the


Doherty continued to develop his jam products, all of which are made without sugar and with 100% natural ingredients, and decided, somewhat naïvely, he admits, to try and sell the product to the large supermarkets. “My big break was being invited to pitch to Waitrose at one of the company’s Meet The Buyer events – a sort of X-Factor for jam-makers, which gave me the chance to spend 10 minutes in front of the Senior Jam Buyer for Waitrose. He liked the product, but explained that I would need to do a bit more on the development, marketing and recipes before it would be suitable for a supermarket.”


Doherty then spent time working on flavours, labels and coming up with the Super Jam brand


If you send someone a well-designed, well-targeted, professional piece of direct mail, it can perform incredibly well because people notice it.


occasional harshness of the business world was learned when the local fox ate all his chickens, thereby cutting-short Doherty’s fledgling career as a chicken farmer.


His next inspiration came from his grandmother who was making jam in her kitchen one day when Doherty went to visit. “I got really excited about this as I could see another business opportunity, so I asked my grandmother to teach me how to make jam,” he said. Having persuaded his neighbours to buy some jars, the jam-making business started to take off to the point that the Edinburgh Evening News featured his efforts. “I was soon spending every spare minute making jam in my parents’ small kitchen and selling it at farmers’ markets all over Scotland.” Eventually, however, Doherty’s parents couldn’t actually get into their kitchen, so full was it of jam and jam-making paraphernalia, so he decided he needed his own premises.


January 2020


and eventually went back to Waitrose and got a listing for the product in all the supermarkets. Doherty said that his story got picked up by the media and he ended up doing a ‘rock and roll style tour’ of all the Waitrose supermarkets, promoting the story of his grandmother’s recipe and his Super Jam. On the back of the publicity, Doherty said that one Waitrose sold over 1,500 jars of Super Jam in one day - “more jam than they would normally sell in a whole week. I think it got to the point that if anyone was trying to go through the check-out without buying any Super Jam, they were asked why”.


The Super Jam story went global and Doherty reports that the brand has even been successful in places like Australia, Russia and South Korea, thanks to its adoption by local ambassadors, like a Korean chat show host.


Having successfully launched Super Jam, Doherty moved on eventually to Beer52, a beer-club that brings the best bottled


beers from around the world to customers in the UKvia a subscription. Once a month, subscribers receive a box of eight beers from a different country; in order to increase customer engagement, there is an online forum for rating each one of the beers once tasted. “We give customers who do rate their beers points towards rewards or special prices and discounts. We are addicted to feedback from our customers. A lot of businesses say that they listen to customers but don’t always fully listen. We try to actively get as much feedback as possible from all of our customers. The more they tell us, the better we can be at selecting products that we know they are going to like. Sometimes we get feedback that we don’t really like, but that is the way you learn to develop your product. Our team are passionateabout beer and giving the customers the best possible service we can.” Doherty says that the company still uses direct mail as an advertising medium and that it works well. “So much advertising has gone online now that I think if you send someone a well-designed, well-targeted, professional piece of direct mail, it can perform incredibly well because people notice it. For us, it’s a really important channel of getting news about the club and promotions out to customers and potential customers.


“The best way we have of getting new customers, however, is by getting existing members to recommend us to others. Referrals are key and we try our best to make it easy for customers to invite their friends. So that might be by putting Christmas cards in their pack in November with a ‘first month’s on me’ offer. Customers who are good spenders tend to recommend us to other customers who may spend a lot so this works well for us.” The best lesson that Doherty says he believes his story brings is that a good idea doesn’t necessarily have to be high tech. “A good idea definitely doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel. It is possible to make something extraordinary out of something as ordinary as jam.”


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