Radnor Preserves make award-winning preserves from natural ingredients – they even have an exclusive flavour for Spinneys. Founder Joanna Morgan tells us about her products.
In her previous career as a theatre producer, Joanna Morgan was working for the Royal Shakespeare Company and living just outside the playwright’s birthplace of Stratford-Upon-Avon. She had a cottage without electricity at the edge of the Arden Forest, where many of the trees were growing tall before Shakespeare was born.
“That really struck a chord with the theatrical, romantic side of me,” says Joanna, “and it was incredibly beautiful when I moved in at the height of summer. But then in winter you find yourself lighting candles at two in the afternoon. You learn to appreciate natural light, and how we take it for granted that we can buy food out of season and put it in the freezer.”
Having grown up with a love of gardening like her father and grandparents, she started making preserves for the same reason that people did centuries before refrigeration – to keep their harvested fruit and vegetables in a way that would sustain them through the dark and cold months. She used her grandfather’s wax-stained recipe book, his old copper pan and a stovetop running off an unreliable oil-fuelled Rayburn heater. It’s worth asking what secret, what magic, she unlocked in the process, given that she soon came to make the best marmalade in the world, as confirmed by her double gold prize at the World Marmalade Awards in 2015.
“I sometimes ask myself the same question,” she says. “I think I was very disciplined when I started. I really concentrated. It’s like teaching yourself any craft. You create your own building blocks and it becomes quite intuitive. But I never set out to build a marmalade empire… ”
That’s more or less how it has turned out though, through the business she founded in 2010 as Radnor Preserves. By that banner year of 2015, she was upscaling to a bigger food-grade kitchen near her new home in the Cambrian Mountains of Wales, while also showing her ever-expanding range at trade fairs such as Dubai’s own Gulfood exhibition.
Being listed by Spinneys was her ideal for breaking into the Middle-Eastern market, even as her various jams, chutneys and jellies were making the shelves of luxe British institutions like Fortnum & Mason. Six years on, Spinneys stocks a selection of Radnor Preserves that includes her classic Seville Orange Marmalade and the Hand-Cut Lime & Laver Marmalade that was the overall winner in the Marmalade & Preserve Category at the Great British Food Awards 2020 – laver being a seaweed harvested from Welsh beaches, “which really gives the lime extra zing”.
She also developed an Orange & Date Marmalade specifically for Spinneys, with a dual flavour profile that serves as a kind of “bridge” between British and Emirati palates. All of these are still made the same way, “hand-cut” by her small team of five women, with Joanna herself still using her grandfather’s copper pot when developing new recipes (a forthcoming range is inspired by the surrounding landscape, infused with wild mountain gorse flowers.
A lot of people now will say their product is artisan, but ours truly is.
“Cutting peel by hand makes for a very slow process, but I feel it gives an amazing taste that you can’t compare to something done with a machine. A lot of people now will say their product is artisan, but ours truly is. And a lot of those people use pre-prepared ingredients, but ours are locally sourced, all our oranges come from organic farms and we prepare everything in-house. It’s just the natural fruit and vegetables.”
Now that her wares are being advertised at Heathrow Airport and served at British embassies around the world, does she ever miss the days when it was just her alone in a candlelit cottage?
“I miss doing it purely for pleasure. Now it’s a business, it’s work, lots of other things tied into it. The element of it being a hobby, that’s gone.”
At the same time, she’s been known to go on holiday with her family and immediately buy apricots at the market to make a jam for their breakfast. Or she recently made a Victoria sandwich cake with an inner spread of her own Raspberry & Crushed Cardamom Preserve, the first jam she ever created.
“I thought ‘oh my goodness, I’d forgotten how good this is’.” So, whatever got into her in the Arden Forest, it is still very much working its magic.
