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Jam and preserves
All Containers›Shop by use case›Jam and preserves›Growing the operation›Making more of itShop all jams and preserves →
Growing the operation

Making more of it

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5
You scale this craft by running more batches, not bigger ones. Batch size is a named cause of two separate failures, so the pan has a ceiling that is about physics rather than ambition.

Why not just a bigger pan

The obvious answer is the wrong one, and it is wrong for a reason specific to this craft rather than a general caution about scaling. A deeper pan changes how the batch concentrates, and it changes it in the direction that costs you the set. Volume has to come from more batches rather than larger ones.

A deeper mixture cannot shed water as fast, so it needs longer on the heat, and the longer cook is what produces a dark, stiff product. Wide helps and deep does not, and there is a practical limit to how wide a pan one person can safely lift when it is full of boiling syrup.

What actually limits throughput

Once the pan is fixed, the bottleneck moves somewhere less obvious, and it is usually not the cooking at all. Finding the real constraint before spending money is what separates a useful purchase from an expensive one.

  1. The canner. It holds a fixed number of jars and each load is a fixed time at a rolling boil. That is the bottleneck, not the cooking.
  2. Filling and lidding, which is per jar and does not speed up much.
  3. Sterilizing jars, if you are, which stops being practical above a few dozen.
  4. Cooling space, because jars must stand undisturbed overnight and that is bench area you cannot use for anything else.

The order to spend money in

Spend in the order that removes the current bottleneck, not in the order of what looks most like a real production kitchen. The purchase that makes the biggest difference is rarely the one that looks most impressive, and in most small jam operations it is something that shortens the time between batches rather than something that makes a batch bigger.

  • A second canner, which doubles the bottleneck for little money.
  • More bench and rack space for cooling.
  • A wider pan, not a deeper one.
  • Only then a bigger kitchen.

Where this stops

At the point the bottling day limits what you can sell rather than the fruit limiting what you can make. That is the point to look at somebody else making it: having someone else make it.

References

United States Department of Agriculture. Complete Guide to Home Canning, Guide 7: Preparing and Canning Jams and Jellies (rev. 07/2015). National Center for Home Food Preservation. nchfp.uga.edu
National Center for Home Food Preservation, University of Georgia. Causes and possible solutions for problems with jellied fruit products. nchfp.uga.edu
National Center for Home Food Preservation, University of Georgia. General information on canning jams, jellies and marmalades. nchfp.uga.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.