| Frequently Asked Questions | ||||
|
Some Questions folks ask... & some answers from us
Q
How long does a jar last?
A
It depends on you... Some people empty a jar in five
minutes once they find a spoon!
A
Remember, it is fruit sealed in a jar!
Please eat your
jar’s contents within 2 weeks of opening and always
refrigerate the unused portion.
A
Unopened, a little over a year in a temperate room
environment.
Q
Do you sell wholesale?
A
Yes, this is our primary business, selling to Wholesale
accounts mostly through
small
Distributors.
A
West Coast States have good store distribution in
Natural Food stores as well as Specialty Food stores.
A
Our products can sometimes be found in some large
discount stores.
Q
I
have seen your products selling for less at a store than
mail order price. Why?
A
It is all about shipping costs. Pallets with boxes of
1944 jars, shipping from our facility lowers the cost on
every jar.
Q
Can we order by phone?
A
If you are a mail order customer shipping to a household
address, do what seems more convenient to you- order by
phone or by the web. (Sorry, we can’t always answer the
phone while we’re jamming and jarring the fruit.)
A
If you are a
wholesale customer, please contact us directly @
530.342.8750
for pricing and shipping information.
Q
I
bought a jar of your jam and didn’t notice that it was
unsealed. What should I do?
A
Give us a call and we’ll try to help you out.
Q
I
would like to give your fruit spreads as gifts. Do I
have to buy at least six for each person? And can you
print a personal message card?
A
Yes, due to shipping costs, six jars is the minimum.
A
Yes, please email or call us and we can add a simple
message card per gift.
Q
Your website shows a 9.5 oz. jar. Are there
other sizes available?
A
Sorry, not for the individual consumer.
A
We do make half
gallon jars for chefs, restaurants, hotels, bakeries,
yogurt stores, ice cream stores, cheesecake stores, etc.
Q
Do you have other websites selling your
products?
A
Yes, we sell to some other websites that feature
Q
I
see that you use small amounts of cane sugar as an
ingredient. Why not use juice to sweeten your products?
A
We do not use
juice because we want our finished product to have the
actual intense flavor of the fruit you thought you were
buying.
A
Juice sweetened products end up being a lot of juice and
pectin with only about 50% - 60% fruit; ours are 75% -
80% cooked down fruit. (If we were using juice for a
sweetener, our products would certainly be cheaper and
easier to process, but what would be the advantage?
Mountain Fruit
Co. Fruit Spreads
do cost us more to make because of the high percentage of fruit. Fruit
costs more than juice or sugar, and working with solid
fruit requires plenty of hard physical labor. Since
we want you to be able to afford them, we do not charge
a lot for them.)
Q
What is fumaric acid?
A
Fumaric acid is one of the organic acids.
A
Fumaric acid is used to lower the pH (make something
more acid).
Q
Okay, but what about Organic Fruits and/or
Organic sugars?
A
This is a negative question to many small manufacturers.
To claim “organic” on the label, our food facility
itself would need to be certified. This certification
costs big dollars in annual fees and inspections, plus
an enormous amount of paperwork tracking every fruit. So
we did an experiment. We cooked a “Good Ingredients”
batch of several flavors. The ingredient list specified
“Organic Apricots, Organic Sugar, Organic etc...”
However, the products did not sell well and we
discontinued this line after two years.
A
Many times we do use organic fruit because it may be the
best fruit of its kind that we can find. The Black
Mission Figs we use in our fig spreads are from a
certified organic fig grower.
Q
What does an expiration date mean?
A
The expiration date is how long a properly stored
product should be good unopened.
Q
Serving sizes can vary, so how did you decide to
use 20g per tablespoon on your nutrition label?
A
Well, we mostly followed our peers.
20g of Fruit
Spread on a tablespoon would look slightly rounded on
the spoon and delivers enough on a slice of bread to get
the fruit flavor. All the numbers on the label for
calories, sugars and carbohydrates are directly affected
by the weight of this serving size. Unfortunately, some
call 14g a tablespoon which would give lower numbers on
the nutrition facts, also. 14g on a tablespoon would not
look full!
Q
Never Boiled?
A
If you are craving a
fresh, alive and
intense flavor, boiling your product is not the
answer. Many of the big companies and co-packers cook
under a vacuum where they can cook large batches fast
yet without high temperatures. Mountain Fruit Co. is not
so sophisticated. Instead, we cook in forty quart
stainless pots that sit in large double boiler pots and
cook slowly for 2½ hours. The boiling water inside the
double boiler transfers heat into the fruit pot, thus
pasteurizing and cooking, but never boiling.
Q
How much jam do you make in a day?
A
We can cook up to sixteen pots at one time- around 2,000
jars! If we need to make more than sixteen pots in a day, we just start
the process all over.
A
Not so much compared to big factories. We do not have a
lot of competition in our simple cooking methods- it is
just plain hard work:
Stirring steaming
pots by hand, pouring jam into the jars, and screwing on
the lids.
A
One by one they add up. It’s amazing that in such small
batches, at 2½ hours each, with every jar passing
through real hands, that it is possible to produce about
500,000 jars per year.
Q
What
about allergens?
A
The Mountain Fruit Co. facility and all its products are
1)
Dairy free
2)
Nut free
3)
Gluten free
4)
Soy free
5)
Corn and High Fructose Corn Syrup free
6)
GMO free 7)
Preservative free |
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