Lovely wee BBC program about SuperJam!

A few weeks ago, the BBC came along to one of our SuperJam tea parties and filmed everyone dancing, eating scones and having a great afternoon.

They also came round to my house and we made a pot of strawberry jam.

This was all for a wee program that they were making and the whole feature is about seven minutes long and was broadcast on BBC2 last week.

The program is part of a very nicely filmed series about Scottish food and you can see the feature about SuperJam here (we're on at at 6:40).

Win a case of 100% natural juice from our friends at Feel Good Drinks

We’ve teamed up with our friends at the Feel Good Drinks Co. and have 10 cases of their delicious, 100% natural Juice Drinks up for grabs! Refreshing Feel Good Drinks are packed full of fruity goodness, contain absolutely no added sugar and come in a range of gorgeous flavours! Find out more about them at here.

Ten of you guys will each win a case of their amazing drinks.  For a chance to win, just sign-up for our email newsletters via the box on our homepage here.  We'll send you the occasional email love letter with news, jokes and all that.  

t&c’s and blah blah blah's 

1. Each prize includes 12x400ml Feel Good Drinks in a range of fruity flavours. 

2. Prize will be delivered within 28 days.

3. Not open to employees or family of Feel Good Drinks or SuperJam.

4. Your details will only be used by Feel Good and SuperJam to send you email love; you can unsubscribe at any point.

Suggest a new SuperJam stockist and get free jam!

We’re constantly working on trying to get SuperJam into new independent stores; upmarket delis, quirky coffee shops and earthy farm shops, as well as B&Bs and hotels. 

If there’s a particular shop that you visit that you think should stock SuperJam, let us know their details using the form here. 

If they agree to start selling our wonderful products, we will send you a free jar of jam in the post to thank you for taking the time to help us to spread the love!

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Our new friends!

Recently, Eteaket tea boutique opened its doors on Frederick street in Edinburgh. They serve a range of wonderful teas, cream teas, afternoon teas and home baking, soon to include our jam!  You should definitely pop in for a cuppa if you're in town.

Eteaket have very generously agreed to support the regular SuperJam Tea Parties in Edinburgh and will be serving their wonderful teas, alongside the scones and SuperJam. With their help and support, we are hoping to make the events even bigger and better. The guests at last week's tea party (picture here) thoroughly enjoyed Eteaket's teas. You can check out their website, order some of their products or learn more about their philosophy here.

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SuperJam Gift Boxes available from NotOnTheHighStreet.com

Some of you may have already bought one of the great gift boxes made by our chums at FoodieBoxes.

The hampers contain a selection of Scottish products for various occasions, including 'Coffee Lover's Foodiebox', 'Wee Scottish Foodiebox' and 'Wee Porridge Foodiebox'.

You can select from any of the SuperJam products to add them to the hamper.

Not on The High Street is a great site that has all kinds of gift ideas from small producers, you can check it out here.

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Pancake Day!

Pancake day is, of course, one of the best celebrations of the year. I remember always watching The Blue Peter Pancake Day Special as a kid, with various celebrities unsuccessfully trying to flip uncooked batter, making a big mess and having a jolly wholesome laugh about it all.

Anyway, pancakes are of course wonderful with a good blob of SuperJam so I thought i'd share a recipe with with you to help you make some great pancakes next week..

Blueberry Pancakes.

Ingredients: 200g self-raising flour, 1 tsp baking powder, an egg, 300ml milk, 150g blueberries, a knob of butter.

Mix the flour and baking powder in a bowl.  Beat the egg and milk together, then add to a well in the flour and whisk until smooth.  Beat in the melted butter and half the blueberries.

Heat the oil, add a large spoonful of batter, cook for about 3 minutes on each side.

Serve with the rest of the blueberries and a dollop of Blueberry & Blackcurrant SuperJam.  You can also add some maple syrup.

Website of The Month - MySupermarket..

For the past couple of months, i've been writing about a variety of useful and interesting websites that I have come across online. Previous posts were about Graze, the online healthy snack delivery company and A Quarter Of..., the old-fashioned sweet shop on the internet, where you can buy all of the sweets you used to fight over in the playground.

This week, I came across a website called mySupermarket.co.uk. This site allows you to compare the price of your online grocery shopping from Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and Ocado. You are able to import your favorites from your existing supermarket's online shop, to compare how much it would cost elsewhere. It also displays the offers that each supermarket has, which means you can take advantage of the best prices at all the supermarkets, while only doing your shopping through one site.

You can also calculate how many calories are in your basket and compare the calorific content of different products, which would probably be quite a handy function if you are watching what you're eating.

Anyway, i'd suggest trying it out here.

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'Jam and Jelly Fight Cancer' (Sky News)!

As reported by a number of publications, including Sky News, Fruit Pectin (which is a natural ingredient added to jam), could be beneficial to the fight against cancer.

The article says:

"The binding of pectin with gal3 (a protein that influences all stages of cancer progression) is thought to affect its ability to promote the growth of cancerous cells, according to the study published in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal.

Professor Vic Morris, who led the study, said the modified pectin used in jellies and jams was likely to produce the anti-cancer effect."

This is certainly good news for jam-lovers.

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The Do Lectures.

I have today been spending a bit of time watching the amazing talks and lectures you will find on the 'Do Lectures' site. The speakers include the inventor Trevor Bayliss, author and bread expert Andrew Whitley and Guy Watson of the Riverford Organic box scheme.

The idea behind the event is that 'People who DO things can inspire others to DO things'. Every year, the event invites DOers from business, the arts, campaigning, inventing and so on to share their stories and give insight about what inspires them, what motivates them and why they do what they do.

The event is sponsored by the wonderful Howies company, who produce a great collection of ethical clothing.

David Hieatt, co-founder of the event says "When you listen to their stories, they just light a fire in your belly to go and Do your thing, your passion, the thing that sits in the back your head each day, just waiting, and waiting for you to follow your heart.

To go find your cause to fight for, your company to go start, your invention to invent, your book to write, your mountain to climb."

The event takes place in West Wales and all of the 60 delegates camp out over the course of the days. For more information, check out the website.

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A rather cool online business.

Today, I signed up to a pretty cool website. I thought i'd post about it since it is similar to SuperJam in its approach to health, super foods and good packaging design.

Graze is an online subscription service, created by the founder of LoveFilm. You can sign up for relatively little cost to have healthy, natural snacks delivered to your desk or home once a week or even every day.

The boxes come with nuts, dried fruit and various other things. You can actually sign up for a free trial on their website.  They will send you a box of snacks for free, which is rather generous of them.

I'd say it is a business to watch over the coming year, I think their concept will be very popular.  I wonder if people would subscribe to have their jam delivered every week?


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Blueberries improve your memory (if you're a rat, anyway.)

As you know, we use Super Fruits in our SuperJams, such as blueberries and cranberries. 

This is because they contain particularly high levels of vitamins and antioxidants. I'm often reading articles about these amazing fruits and came across a particularly interesting one in a recent edition of New Scientist (you can read it here).  I've been meaning to post about it for a while, but kept forgetting.

A scientist called James Joseph from Tufts University in Boston was studying antioxidant-rich foods like strawberries, spinach and blueberries. Antioxidants reverse some memory loss linked to old age, probably by mopping up free radicals in the brain.

For eight weeks, Joseph fed supplements of strawberries, spinach or blueberries to three groups of 19-month-old rats; —the equivalent of 60 to 65 years old for humans. He then assessed their memories and mobility with a number of standard tests.

All the rats showed improvements in memory compared with rats that were not given antioxidant-rich food to eat. Surprisingly, the rats fed with blueberries also had better balance and coordination in tasks such as running along a rod.

The whole article is here, if you fancy reading more.

The 12 Year-Old Burger...

Today I came across something truly astounding.

Karen Hanrahan teaches a workshop titled Healthy Choices for Children. It's a class for parents seeking solutions to how to improve the way they eat. It's about the alternative food market, organics, and the top ten food additives to avoid and why, menu planning and more.

She uses this burger as a prop. She purchased the burger in 1996, 12 years ago, from McDonald's and it looks identical to one that she might have purchased today.

The flecks on the burger are crumbs from the bun, the burger is starting to crumble a bit and smells a little odd. However, the point is that it has been laced with such a cocktail of chemicals and preservatives that it hasn't degraded, and perhaps never will.

Clearly, eating food that isn't natural is unlikely to be very good for you.  It is important to me that SuperJam is made entirely from fruit and fruit juice, without anything artificial.   Sure, it will only last a month or two in your 'fridge - but surely that is preferable to your food being so artificial that it can last forever...

How do you eat yours?

A lot of folks kindly send in their serving ideas and even recipes using SuperJam, which is always pretty cool to receive.

However, I also come across a lot of people who use jam in quite odd ways...

Jessica, from Sacramento, California has sent in a picture of herself eating SuperJam on boiled eggs. 

Not sure if it's a US thing.  I haven't tried it myself yet so I won't put it down entirely but I don't think we'll be adding it to the serving suggestions on the back of the SuperJam jars...

Alan, from Balloch near Glasgow, has sent in a picture of himself eating what he has imaginatively dubbed 'Jam-Offee'. 

He puts SuperJam in his coffee in the mornings. I find this a particularly weird concept. Alan, whose surname is Beverage and he is studying for a PhD at Strathclyde (which will make him Dr. Beverage), is an avid inventor of new drink 'mash ups' and says that he has ambitions to, one day, build the 'Jam-Offee' brand into a worldwide chain of coffee shops. 

Good luck with that.

Do you put your jam anywhere unusual? Feel free to send in a picture (unless it's particularly unsavory), and I'll maybe write about it.

Orange & Passion Fruit SuperJam

SuperJam launched over eighteen months ago, with three original flavours.  Following the massive success of the range, we've finally managed to develop a fourth flavour, Orange & Passion Fruit.

One of the most common questions of the past couple of years has been 'Why don't you make marmalade?'.  Well, after lots of recipes and all kinds of different ideas, this is a really fab tasting addition to the SuperJam range - available now at Asda and soon at Waitrose and everywhere else..

Ging gang goolie goolie..

I went to scouts as a kid and it was a lot of fun; cooking/burning sausages on an open fire, camping in the rain and playing since-banned games like 'British Bulldogs'. Recently, my old Scout group in Cramond, Edinburgh went all the way to Iceland for a Jamboree.

You couldn't really go to a jamboree without some jam, so I gave them a bunch and they kindly sent back some snaps from the trip.

If you are a community group and would like some jam, let me know. Always happy to help out.

A gigantic toaster made out of...

Toast!

I recently came across this work of art, which is currently housed at the Modern Art Gallery of Buenos Aires. It is constructed from an incredible 2,500 slices of toast (which took several friends with their toasters a few days to make..), all toasted for different lengths of time. The overall piece is 5m by 4.5m and you can read more about it here .

The International Toaster Museum...

Although I like to promote jam as being versatile and tasty on porridge, oatcakes, yoghurt, rice pudding and all kinds of things, one thing remains true, nothing beats some buttered toast with a healthy layer of jam.

I recently came across one of the oddest and frankly coolest 'museums' in the world, The International Toaster Museum . I'm a big fan of old typewriters, toasters and general retro contraptions. The Toaster Museum, created by designer Jens Veerbeck, boasts a collection of about 600 old toasters, ranging from the likes of this 60's beauty to toasters that twirl and flip your toast and even toasters made out of porcelain.

I must confess that my own toaster is fairly standard issue but this website has inspired me to hunt out an impractical mechanical monster with levers and springs that'll probably burn my toast but look damn cool in my kitchen...

Porridge!

Real men eat porridge for breakfast. I do anyway. Of course, porridge tastes great with a generous blob of SuperJam. Here's a wee video about how best to make porridge, courtesy of Jaqueline O'Donnell, chef at the award winning restaurant 'The Sisters'.

Porridge oats are also a 'super food' and you might have seen on telly recently that they help lower cholesterol. Porridge sets you up for the day. I have a chum called Tony who runs a really good organic porridge company called Stoats . Of course, he uses really good jam when he serves his bowls of hot porridge....

In fact, my buddy Pete has a business called Foodie Boxes - you can get a gift box with Stoats porridge and SuperJam in it.

The Queen of Morning Telly Eats SuperJam!

Lorraine Kelly wrote in her dieting blog on The Sun website today: "I had some wholemeal toast today with that new 'SuperJam' created by a teenage entrepreneur in Scotland.  He has made a range of healthy jam with no added sugar that tastes brilliant.  My favourite is the rhubarb".  Mine too.  

Thanks Lorraine!

Enterprise Week

To be honest, I've only really written this post so that I can put up this picture. It looks like I am just a head, haha.

Anyway, if you didn't know, this week was 'Enterprise Week'. This is the one week of the year where thousands of enterprise related events take place simultaneously, with the aim of encouraging young people to think about starting their own businesses or become more enterprising in their lives. As this is something that I am quite big on, I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck in with helping at various events around the country.

On Monday, I spoke to about 1,000 schoolkids from around Scotland at the annual Young Enterprise Scotland conference. This was quite a laugh and the kids were visibly enthused by my story - hopefully some of them went away thinking 'well, if he can do it then why can't I?...'

The picture at the top of the page is of me 'launching' the Biggart Baillie Innovation Awards at the Glasgow Science Centre. I gave a talk about the process of coming up with my innovation, which led to me being a winner at last years awards. If you have invented something or started an innovative business, I would urge you to check it out . There are three categories (Student, Open and Female) and a prize of £1,000 for each.

I have also been involved in the Make Your Mark Challenge , which is the biggest live enterprise event in the country and will see teams of schoolkids compete next Thursday to solve a problem that will be set on the day. This is being hosted by Heather Suttie, the Xfm DJ and I will be helping to judge the entries.

To finish off the week, I was invited to speak to students at Bath University about starting a business, juggling studies while running one and what help is out there for young entrepreneurs. That was all rounded off by a drink in the rather impressive setting of the city's famous Roman Baths.

The worst jam in the world?

I spend a lot of time trying other peoples' jams from around the world. Partly looking for ideas but mostly since I just love jam. Ocassionally, however, I come across a flavour of jam that doesn't really work.

This morning, I was trying the range of jams made by a German company called 'Muhlhauser'. They make all the old classics like Strawberry and Raspberry, which they didn't do a bad job of really. What really amazed me though was their 'blackcurrant and chocolate jam' ("with fine chocolate"). This was obviously the brainwave of someone in their marketing department ("chocolate spread sells well.....blackcurrant jam sells well....").

As wonderful as blackcurrant and fine chocolate sounds, it is quite inedible.

SuperPudding

Hello,

I've had a pretty eventful week. Spoken at three conferences, won an award and organised another couple of weeks of tastings.

On Thursday, I spoke at a big education conference in London (before flying back to Edinburgh to speak at a similar event). The topic was 'enterprise in education', something that I am quite passionate about. As a young entrepreneur still passing through the education system, I guess I'm a good position to give pointers on where improvements can be made to help others become more enterprising.

I don't have many major criticisms of the education system but there are a few things that I think are important for the policymakers to think about when trying to create a 'culture of enterprise' in Britain. There's an article on the BBC News website about what I said, if you are interested.

BBC News Website

After these two speeches, I went along to 'The Outstanding Young Persons of the World Awards'. I won an award in the Scottish Economic/Enterprise section, alongside Michelle Mone (of the 'Ultimo' bra). TOYP is a worldwide competition and previous winners (of the global round) include Elvis and Jackie Chan. There were a lot of inspirational people at the ceremony in Edinburgh and I was, obviously, delighted to be given an award.

We all had a lovely meal overlooking Edinburgh Castle, chatting about all of the amazing stories that had led to everyone being given awards. My favourite part of the meal was a 'Blueberry and Blackcurrant SuperJam sponge mille-fieulle with a Raspberry and Cranberry SuperJam coulis'. The photo above is of the chef, Joe, with myself.