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Jam and preserves
All Containers›Shop by use case›Jam and preserves›Growing the operation›The first person you hireShop all jams and preserves →
Growing the operation

The first person you hire

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5
Hire for prep and filling. They are the two longest parts of a batch, they do not get faster with experience past a point, and neither of them is the part where judgment is needed.

What to hand over first

Hand over the work that is repetitive and checkable before the work that requires judgment. Not because anybody is untrustworthy, but because a task with a right answer can be taught in an afternoon and verified at a glance, and those are the tasks eating your season.

  • Washing, hulling, pitting and crushing. Long, linear with volume, and needs no decisions.
  • Filling and lidding, once the headspace habit is taught.
  • Washing and labeling jars the day after.
  • Case packing.

What not to hand over yet

These are the steps where a wrong call is invisible until the product is already in jars. They are not harder than the others; they are simply the ones with no feedback until it is too late to correct, which makes them a bad place for somebody to learn.

  • The stop decision. That is reading a number against a target and acting immediately, and it is where a batch is won or lost.
  • The ratio. Weighing fruit and sugar against the standard is the thing that keeps the product legal.
  • The batch log, until they understand what it is for.

What changes when somebody else is in the kitchen

The regulatory picture can shift the moment the work stops being yours alone, and it shifts in ways that have nothing to do with how good your help is. This is worth asking your state about before the first extra pair of hands rather than after.

Written specifications instead of remembered ones. A target reading, a fill weight, a headspace and a process time, on paper, because an instruction that lives in your head cannot be followed by anybody else and cannot be checked.

The honest constraint

There is a ceiling on what hiring can fix in a business shaped like this one, and it is set by the season rather than by the labor. Worth being clear about before taking anybody on.

A home kitchen operating under a cottage food exemption may not be able to have paid help in it at all. That is a state question and it is worth asking before planning around it.

References

Michigan State University Extension. Selling Safe Food: The Michigan Cottage Food Law (E3363), and related MSU Extension guidance on which preserved products the law covers. canr.msu.edu
Penn State Extension. Food for Profit: Commercial Production of Jams, Jellies and Fruit Butters. extension.psu.edu
Written from federal regulation and published extension guidance, not from a laboratory. A standard of identity is a federal floor and your state adds to it. Anything here is a starting point for a conversation with your state department of agriculture, not a determination that you comply.