Sandbox

Meet a Sandbox member: FRASER DOHERTY

November 17th, 2009 by Sara Usinger

Fraser Doherty is 20 years old and comes from Edinburgh, Scotland. He runs SuperJam, a company making a range of 100% fruit jams and supplies all of the major UK supermarkets. He is a member of Sandbox since October 2009.

Hi Fraser, what is the story behind Superjam?

Aged 14, my Gran taught me to make jam in her kitchen at home. I started selling jam door to door and to small shops. After a couple of years, I had developed a process for making jam entirely from fruit and fruit juice; without adding any sugar or additives. I set up factory production and got the products into Waitrose and later Tesco, Asda, Morrisons and hundreds of independents.

What were the biggest failures concerning your project? What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

I spent a year developing the recipes, setting up production and creating a brand. I pitched to the supermarket buyer and he said it was too expensive, he didn’t like the flavours and the branding was off-message. I threw it all in the bin and started all over again, which was hard to motivate myself to do.

What do you want to achieve in the next week, the next year, the next 10 years?

I am giving a few talks in the coming week, at universities, conferences and awards dinners; I hope that people enjoy what I have to say and maybe even laugh at my jokes! In the longer term, I hope that SuperJam will become successful around the world and we will launch a variety of other flavours.

What was your most inspring moment during the last two weeks?

Every month, I co-host a dinner where my friend and I each invite three of the most interesting people we know. There’s always a really interesting group and on Monday, I was inspired by some of the stories people told about getting their ideas off the ground and building amazing companies.