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In 2003, Thursday Cottage production moved from its idyllic rural setting in Devon to the Essex countryside, but little else has changed. We use the same recipes and still cook the product in small open pans giving the same great home-cooked flavour that is Thursday Cottage.

Visitors to the new Thursday Cottage production unit have found that it operates quite separate from everything else that goes on at Tiptree, the home of the world famous Tiptree preserves for more than 115 years. Located in a separate unit with a separate production line, Thursday Cottage has its own Board of Directors and management structure.

Thursday Cottage preserves are despatched to fine food shops, farm shops and healthfood outlets right across the United Kingdom. So famous have our products become, that you can even find their colourful, distinctive labels on the shelves of the most prestigious delicatessens and food halls in cities as far away as Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the USA, not to mention on the breakfast and tea tables of lovers of fine British foods the world over. Each year the reputation of our products spreads further - as do new flavours of our fruit preserves on bread, toast, bagels and croissants in the homes and hotels of five continents!

All this is a far cry from the humble origins of Thursday Cottage some 30 years ago. Our small, dedicated team lovingly converts the best quality fruits into jams, marmalades and curds. The refreshingly competitive prices which a small, efficient production unit can offer means that Thursday Cottage now exports over 25% of its production. In the UK we supply the needs of famous names such as Selfridges, Chatsworth Farm Shop whilst overseas the delicious preserves can be found in La Grande Epicerie in Paris, Castroni (Rome), Seibu (Hong Kong), Zingerman's (Chicago), and Dean & Deluca (New York) - to name but a few.

So what unites these famous names, and countless thousands of individual customers, in choosing a small maker of jams rather than a high-volume producer ? Well, some things don't change. We find that, despite all the advantages of modern productivity, really tasty jams can only be produced in small batches of the very finest ingredients. In other words, small is beautiful and a large element of hand production is unavoidable. However fine the packaging and pretty the label, it's what's inside the jar that makes a customer return.

Add to this the finest selection of seasonal ingredients from around the world - superb lemons and oranges from Spain, Israel and Cyprus; top grade soft fruits from Poland; tayberries from Somerset and gorgeous early rhubarb from Yorkshire, all combined with the best quality demerara and golden granulated cane sugars from Mauritius - and you will understand that we make no more concessions to economising on raw material supply than we do to speed and volume of production.

For our diabetic range of low sugar jams and marmalades, we use a fructose (fruit sugar) based recipe instead of the more commonly used sorbitol, which can have unfortunate side-effects.

Even these standards are of no real value without efficient delivery and attentive response to customer needs before and after sales. This we hope to deliver at all times and our longstanding relationships with renowned distributors and outlets world-wide indicates that these efforts are rewarded. All this, combined with our many international accolades for quality and enthusiastic response of individual customers in many countries, repays much of the effort that goes into Thursday Cottage products.

Quality, Taste and Tradition - these are our watchwords.