Interviewer: We’ll hop right into today’s interview. Did you start selling Strawberry Jam at the shop?

Chef Mike: So, yeah, we just started selling our homemade strawberry jam at the shop. 

We had all the things from the health department, so we can sell them for grab and go. We make the strawberry jam 100% fresh in-house. We use fresh strawberries, usually kind of the ones that don’t look pretty enough to make it to the strawberry shortcake. 

We cook that down with sugar and a little bit of Trefilio. So it’s all-natural, with no preservatives made with it, so there’s no extra stuff added.

We don’t list the expiration date but use by date is written which is seven days, but it’s good for much longer than that. 

But what should we eat it with? We sell our Shokupan in stores – homemade. So we recommend the jam with our bread. We also sell hot sandwiches that have a warm peanut butter and jelly sandwich that we use homemade strawberry jam on. 

It would be good on the cheesecake too if you like doing it like a strawberry cheesecake or I guess whatever you like. Strawberry crackers. 

Chef Misuzu:  We’re making strawberry-flavored tea with strawberry jam as well. So you can try that at home too.

Hopefully, we can sell it for a long time, but we don’t have a time frame, and it will be limited. We probably won’t have huge amounts in the store at one time, but we should have a few each day for sale. 

We’re still kind of working on the packaging. I like the jars we have, but that might kind of switch up to something else. But we kind of wanted to get it going once we got the new stickers and everything, so I wanted to get it before the holidays.