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The irony lies in Mrs. Simon's lack of personal enthusiasm for jams and jellies. She doesn't actively dislike the stuff; her taste buds are just indifferent to the delicacies. Paradoxically, it was exactly this lack of enthusiasm that convinced her that processing of wild fruits and berries could be developed into a commercially profitable enterprise.

Her original objective was development of a part-time hobby that would supplement the income from the farm to which she and her husband had moved shortly after the end of World War II. A number of possibilities for home handicraft work were reviewed and rejected. Then she tasted for the first time some wild blue huckleberry jelly made by her mother-in-law.

"It tasted wonderful to me," says Mrs. Simon. "I decided that if I liked it, other people would be crazy about it. I investigated the possibilities and found that it would be possible to prepare a full assortment of preserves and jellies made just from wild fruits and berries. The other equally essential requirement was also present: such a business could be started on a limited capital investment."

Before rushing, into manufacturer, Mrs. Simon called on the buyer for one of Seattle's largest retailers of gift wares and gourmet food items, to whom she described the type of enterprise she had in mind. The buyer agreed such products should sell readily and indicated that she would handle them if they came up to expectations. She did not, of course, commit herself definitely in advance, but on the basis of her assurance Mrs. Simon went ahead with her first season's pack.

MRS. SIMON started her first year of operation In 1947 by packing over 5,000 jars of jams and jellies, all made from the wild varieties of berries. Most of these, however, were made up in small jars for the twelve-jar gift assortment that she developed, so the quality was modest compared to her present scale of operation. The jars were placed in a carton filled with moss packing to carry out the rustic nature of the product and to provide protection in mailing as well. The simulated wood cover of the carton has an attractive reproduction of the log cabin design. This is still her most popular pack, though the variety has been reduced to eight wild berry jams and jellies. The first year's pack was prepared primarily with Christmas gift possibilities in mind.

Her first year's investment was approximately $1,500, Mrs. Simon recalls. Expenses were low because she did most of the work that year, assisted by her husband and one part-time woman employee. The latter helped the enterprise by voluntarily waiting for her pay until the products began to sell with the approach of Christmas.

Until the orders started coming in, it seemed to Mrs. Simon that she had taken an unwarranted risk in making up so large a pack her first year of operation. However, the gift ware buyer whom she had queried previously placed a fairly large initial order that was followed by others as the items sold readily in that store. With this outlet and two others, one in Seattle and the other in the nearby smaller city of Bremerton, she disposed of her entire stock at the moderate prices she asked, for a gross sales total of $3,000 and a moderate profit.

Her sales have increased steadily ever since, with a gross sales figure of $25,000 for 1952 and a still further increase anticipated for 1953.

TO KEEP pace with demand and as a matter of good merchandising policy, Mrs. Simon has increased considerably the variety of her products. She now offers thirty varieties of jams and jellies, each one of which is available in three types of pack. The first pack is the original five-ounce jar used in the Old Cabin gift package and sampler. The two other packs added later are the eleven and one-half-ounce jam pot and the twelve-ounce tumbler type glass container.

Wild berry jams and jellies include wild blackberries, wild black raspberries (blackcaps), wild cherry, elderberry, red huckleberry, blue huckleberry, evergreen blackberry, wild plum, Oregon grape, and salal berries. The latter two are often combined into one. Jams and jellies made from domestic berries and fruits have since been added to give wider variety and appeal. These are processed by the same home preserving methods used for the wild berries, in small batches, to assure top quality flavor and appearance. As a deluxe pack, these sell for a considerably higher price than the standard grocery store product, the retail prices of some items being about double that of grocery store preserves. Products made from domestic fruit and berries now outnumber the wild in variety and by a slender margin, in quantity sold.

Despite the considerable quantity of domestic fruit and berry products that she now packs, Mrs. Simon points out that it was the wild berry items that made it possible for her products to sell in the first place in competition with established brands. It will be the presence of these wild products that will make continued success possible, she believes. As much as possible, she will therefore continue to expand the wild berry items.

THE PRINCIPAL limitation on the wild berry pack is not the demand, but the supply. And the supply of berries in turn depends not so much on their availability in the woods as on the willingness and availability of pickers. There are many more wild berries that go to waste each year than are harvested even by those who pick for their own use, she points out. This is due to the fact that most wild berries are so small that it takes a lot of picking to produce a sizable quantity of the fruit. Hourly earnings are comparatively slender even when pickers are paid an above-average price per pound or per gallon. Accordingly, pickers are scarce when there is other work available in the area.

The most popular of all the wild berry preserves is wild blackberry. To obtain them in adequate quantity, Mrs. Simon last year decided that she would advertise for berries in a medium that would circulate in the center of greatest nearby population. That was Bremerton, a city of over 30,000 population but located some thirty miles from Kingston. To handle the berries, she made an arrangement with a locker operator near Bremerton to accept and weigh the berries, and to pay the pickers a specified price per pound. The operator placed the berries in the deep freeze, from which they were taken as needed by Mrs. Simon. The classified advertisements in the Bremerton daily newspaper identified the locker plant and listed the price per pound that would be paid. This arrangement was successful and supplied most of the wild blackberries that went into last season's pack. It will probably be extended to other communities next season. Mrs. Simon pays the locker operator at the rate of 5 cents a pound for berries received.

Setting a price per pound for wild berries is fairer and will get better response from free-lance pickers than will payment of a price per gallon, Mrs. Simon points out. She pays about 30 cents a pound. There is considerable variation in weight per gallon, depending on the comparative ripeness of the fruit. In addition, berries will often compress themselves in the container, particularly when they must be carried a considerable distance. A picker who starts out of the woods with three gallons may arrive at the locker plant with little more than two. If paid by the gallon he would consider himself "shortchanged" and would be unlikely to do any more picking.

WITH ALL the berries she is able to buy, Mrs. Simon must still spend a number of days each summer picking berries to fill out the necessary quantity and variety of her pack. Except for wild blackberries, she considers this a not too welcome chore. In picking, she is usually assisted by one or two employees. For wild blackberry picking, however, she has developed a fondness that extends beyond its economic necessity. Because she knows the woods and has developed an effective picking technique, she is able to average better than five gallons a day.

A minor hazard of picking in the Kingston woods is the considerable black bear population that abounds in the best berry-picking areas. Normally, the bears are not troublesome unless provoked, and Mrs. Simon has learned to ignore them, preferably at a distance. However, their fondness for berries makes them her most formidable competition for the best berry patches, so that the process of berry picking usually develops into a race against the depredation of the bears.

Her closest brush with one of the animals came on a picking expedition when a large black specimen thrust his head up behind a log not twenty-five feet away. When tentatively challenged, he clambered over the log with the apparent intention of charging Mrs. Simon and her companion. The unarmed and justifiably frightened women watched in tense relief as he abruptly turned and lumbered off in another direction.

Though most of her wild berries are obtained in nearby woods, wild cherries and elderberries must be obtained from an area of eastern Washington that is over 200 miles from Kingston. With two companions, Mrs. Simon drives to the area in her station wagon. The three women spend two or three days picking berries in the eastern Washington canyons, returning only when the station wagon has been fully loaded with the fruit.

A PRINCIPAL reason for the prompt acceptance that has been won by her product is the maintenance of strict standards of quality, Mrs. Simon believes. The fact that a berry is wild does not necessarily qualify it as a source of jam or jelly; it must make up into a product that will pass her exacting taste requirements. If it is too flat, some lemon may be added; or two berries such as salal and Oregon grape, may be combined to make a tastier combination than either ingredient by itself. She does not, of course, use any artificial flavoring or any filler. This is one reason, she points out, why her jams and jellies are a good buy from the point of view of cost as well as quality. Due to their greater purity of flavor, a small amount will go farther on a slice of bread or toast than will the competitively priced product of the large packers.

Mrs. Simon purchases most domestic fruits and berries direct from local growers. Raspberries and strawberries, for example, are purchased only from growers In her immediate vicinity. There is a quality factor here, as she is thus able to obtain the berries when they are at the peak of their flavor, and pack or freeze immediately. In packing, she drives to the grower's the first thing in the morning and gets just enough berries for only the morning pack. A second trip is made at noon to pick up berries that have been harvested in the morning.

Since she cannot pack all she needs of some domestic berries in season, frozen berries must be used to some extent. To control the quality as well as the cost, Mrs. Simon freezes her own berries in rented locker space. The fruit is packed in tins of the same size and type as used by commercial canners, and frozen immediately, to be packed later as needed. Besides the quality control the saving is considerable since raspberries, for example, could be obtained for 17 cents a pound last year in season. The frozen berries, later, would have cost her 24 cents. Only when there is some special advantage as with machine-cleaned gooseberries, does Mrs. Simon buy from a canner.

One of the most important quality factors of all, Mrs. Simon believes, is her method of cooking in small batches, whether the fruit is wild or domestic. The more speedily the fruit can be cooked, she points out, the more of its flavor remains in the product. With mass production methods of cooking in fifty-pound batches and larger, the fruit unavoidably takes longer to cook, losing a correspondingly greater amount of its flavor. Mrs. Simon cooks to the proportions specified for most home canning recipes, using only seven cups of fruit juice per batch of jelly, or two pounds of fruit per batch of jam.

The small batch method inevitably keeps labor costs high. Labor is her biggest single expense, taking over half of her gross receipts. However, the quality advantages of cooking in this manner fully justify the greater expense, she believes. It gives her domestic as well as her wild berry products, the competitive advantage that has continued to build sales for Old Cabin Ranch.

COOKING AND packing were first done in the kitchen of her home, but as the venture gave indications of being increasingly profitable it became obvious that a good deal more space would be needed. Mrs. Simon therefore sold her small herd of dairy cows and moved her packing operation to the building that formerly served as the milk house. That building is clean and well-built with concrete foundations and a concrete slab floor. The end room, taking up about one-third of the 1,800 square feet of floor space, is used for cooking, filling and sealing the jars. The other, larger room is used primarily for packaging and preparation of orders for mailing and shipping. Some supplies are also stored here.

Cooking is done on a two-burner gas stove that actually has even smaller capacity and occupies less space than a conventional three or four-element home unit. Since no more than two batches cooking at one time could be handled without a larger crew and a larger packing house, there is no need for a larger stove.

On this small unit, however, Mrs. Simon's employees are able to turn out a considerable quantity of jams and jellies in an eight-hour period. The work is planned so that two batches of fruit or fruit juice are cooking continuously. Twelve-quart flat bottom kettles are used so that the fruit will come quickly to a boil. Sugar is then added, and the preserves are boiled for the prescribed number of minutes before being taken off the burner for packing. The entire cooking process takes no more than ten minutes per batch, and kettles are filled in advance so that the minute a batch is completed, another is ready to be put on the burner in its place. The crew thus averages approximately twelve batches per hour, which adds up to a sizable daily production.

An occupational hazard of a business that depends so heavily on Christmas buying is the heavy production expenditures that must be made before payments for sales begin to come in. Part of this expense Mrs. Simon was able to defer the first five years of operation by hiring local women as employees with the understanding that the seasonal, part-time employees would not be paid until Christmas orders started coming in during October, November, and December. Since the women were wives of working husbands, the arrangement was entirely agreeable with them. Though she now pays all her employees on the preferred current basis, as she has done for over a year, the deferred wages agreement was instrumental in making it possible for her to operate on limited original investment.

MRS. SIMON has developed three main outlets for sales. They are (1) direct mail; (2) commercial customers who order her products as gifts, also sent by direct mail; and (3) commercial customers such as gift shops, who buy for resale. The first two classifications buy almost exclusively for gifts at Christmas.

As a former regional executive and dietitian for the U. S. Department of Agriculture, Mrs. Simon was fortunate in having a large number of friends and acquaintances living in the western states. From her personal friends she made up an initial mailing list of about 300 names, her first year of operation. From this, her list has grown to a present active mailing list of about 1,500 individuals located in all parts of the United States and in a number of foreign countries. Most sales to these customers are made at Christmas, when they order for gifts, though some reorder throughout the year for their own tables.

A mailing list, Mrs. Simon notes, has a way of multiplying almost automatically. A customer who orders a number of the items for friends and relatives supplies the names and addresses of those individuals, to whom Old Cabin Ranch mails direct. Those names and addresses are kept on file for mailing of promotional literature the following Christmas season. She does not mail to those individuals during the current season even though their names are often received far enough in advance. Out of ten names received from one customer, for example, four or five may order as buyers of Old Cabin products the following season and these in turn furnish additional lists of names. Mrs. Simon keeps check on the response she gets from each of these new names, and if they do not respond after two mailings they are dropped from the list. Other names are obtained from lists furnished by commercial customers for seasonal good-will, giving, and still others are those who have purchased from a gift shop retailer and write in direct.

To OFFER variety both in merchandise and in price, Old Cabin Ranch currently offers seven different gift packs. These vary in price from $1.95 to $6.95, postpaid, and include both wild and domestic berry packs and several combinations of the two. There is an "Old Cabin 1890 Duet," which holds eleven and one-half-ounce jam pots of gooseberry jam and tomato preserves, as well as an "'Old Cabin Wild Berry Duet," also holding two jam pots, one of wild blackberry preserves, the other of wild blue huckleberry jelly. The Old Cabin Sampler contains the largest assortments, holding twelve five-ounce jars including five wild and seven domestic berry jams and jellies. The best seller is still the Old Cabin Gift Package with its eight varieties of wild berry preserves.

The commercial customer who is looking for an unusual item to mail as gifts to a large number of friends or customers has proved to be an excellent sales outlet. Mrs. Simon's first commercial customers came to her during her first season of operation following appearance of her products on gift store shelves. Additional customers have been solicited the past several years by members of a Seattle chapter of the Orthopedic Guild, in return for commissions paid to the guild on all sales made. That guild last season earned about $1,000 in commissions from sales of Old Cabin products. Commercial customers usually order in large quantity, as many as 300 packages being sold to one customer.

The third sales outlet for Old Cabin products is the gift shop or gift departments of department stores. Mrs. Simon's first account, the store whose buyer she queried before starting her venture, has also turned out to be her best one. It now takes about twenty percent of her entire output, which is sold under the store's own brand. Mrs. Simon's product has won unusual acceptance by that store's customers, with a threefold sales increase there for 1952 over the preceding year's figures.

The comparatively few dealers who carry her products in Seattle and Bremerton were solicited personally by Mrs. Simon her first year in business, and they account for a substantial share of her business. The number is limited because she makes it a policy to grant the dealers who carry her lines, exclusive representation in that city or district. She believes this policy pays, since it gives the dealer an incentive to promote her lines aggressively.

OLD CABIN products are carried by some 200 gift shops in western states. These accounts were solicited by an agent who acts as representative for a number of small manufacturers. This agent looked up Mrs. Simon, and the arrangement has proved to be profitable for both of them. It is not practical to solicit store accounts by mail, Mrs. Simon believes, yet she cannot provide the personal solicitation and services necessary to handle them. The agent also exhibits her products along with his other lines, at gift shows and similar occasions.

Most of these dealers prefer to sell the product with the Old Cabin Ranch label, but for those who would like their own private label on the product, Mrs. Simon devised a method that has proved practical even when the gift shop orders in limited quantities. She had a standard label printed which is affixed to jars going to each retailer. The label is the same for all retailers except that the name of the individual dealer is imprinted inexpensively on his labels, without the Old Cabin identification. Since most gift shops sell in small quantities and order accordingly, this method is superior to having entirely different labels printed for each dealer.

For all dealers, the same assortment of thirty different varieties is packed in the five-ounce jars and the eleven and one-half-ounce jam pots. In addition, Mrs. Simon also packs in the conventional twelve-ounce tumbler type of glass container. The latter sell on a year round basis, with the result that she is now developing an increasing volume of steady sales for consumption by the buyer. Her volume is sufficient that glass containers and sugar are purchased at wholesale costs.

Mailing problems are not difficult with her direct mail orders even though her product is put up entirely in glass, Mrs. Simon has found. By packing securely she has had no difficulties with breakage, even of packages shipped out of the country. With packages that are to be mailed on a specified date to reach their destinations just before Christmas, she still takes precautions to get them to the local post office the first part of December. The postmaster weighs and stamps them in advance and puts them aside to send out on the specified date later in the month.