Our Kitchen

Our first kitchen amounted to two gas fired copper kettles that we stirred with long wooden paddles, a three-compartment sink and a maple block table where we filled jars one at a time by hand, in the basement of a candy store on Howard Street in downtown Petoskey. The fragrances of the local fruits we were cooking wafted up and out through a vent on the sidewalk and people tried to see where these wonderful smells were coming from. But we were invisible down there so, in 1983 we moved the kitchen upstairs into a shop at 411 East Lake Street where we cooked with three copper kettles and a single head filling machine behind a window with our very first retail store in the front. Now customers could see the source of those captivating aromas and taste and buy jars of the fruits that produced them. The New York Times wrote about us and our summer visitors swarmed the place. We were so successful there that we had to keep expanding into adjacent basements, and within five years we were forced to build a large kitchen/ small jam factory with nine kettles right at the edge of town, not far from the Bear River.

After all these years, we still prepare fruits by hand and cook them in small copper kettle batches under the watchful eyes of our skilled cooks whose deep experience and judgement are critical to the rare quality we achieve. We think of our kitchen as a pretty amazing place, operated by genuinely dedicated, truly remarkable people. Because of them, a kind of culinary magic with fruit happens there that occurs nowhere else.