Not a lick has yet been tasted by the masses, but the headlines around Meghan Markle’s American Riviera Orchard strawberry jam continue unabated. Fifty pots were sent to influencers, and all the hype around it helped spike sales of King Charles’ own-brand organic strawberry preserve. Is it just a PR gimmick, or will we all taste the red stuff soon? Royalist Correspondent Tom Sykes and Senior Editor Tim Teeman discuss the impact of Meghan’s latest venture.
Tom Sykes: I have to be honest, there are lots of things I don’t understand about the launch of American Riviera Orchard. For starters, it seems really strange to me to do a big social media campaign, like the one we’ve been sold over the past few days, but not have any product actually available for the punters to buy. There is not even a functioning website. When you go to the ARO website it just gets you to enter your email address for updates.
Tim Teeman: Sure, it’s not user-friendly, but I can think of nothing more camp than making a launch of strawberry jam and mysterious homewares as hush-hush and mysterious as a Taylor Swift album release. It also sticks it to the media (that Meghan and Prince Harry can’t abide), who are currently, futilely trying to get hold of this jam, jars of which are presently reserved for the hands and mouths of selected friends and influencers. Isn’t it genius marketing? Create a product, create a buzz around the product, make everyone curious, and keep it out of the hands of your media tormentors for as long as possible.
Tom: For me, it’s slightly baffling; a soft launch for a brand which doesn’t have any products—huh? The other thing is, jam is actually pretty far from being a healthy product. It has a lovely, homely appeal, but watching jam being made has the same effect as watching sausages being made; you realize, with horror, that it’s literally 50 percent sugar and the fruit is boiled for so long that it must retain very little in the way of natural vitamins.
I mean, we don’t buy jam or keep it in the cupboard because it’s just a one-way ticket to tooth rot and weight gain. I just don’t see how buying substantial amounts of jam in any way fits the healthy lifestyle that most people are really into these days.
Jam’s heyday was the Victorian era when soft fruit production began to be industrialized in the English countryside; as one jam-making aristocrat who I was speaking to this week about jam, Lord Anthony Ardee, told me, there is nothing new about jam.
Tim: Sure, but jam is beloved for all the reasons you place as the case-against-it. Jam is proudly retro, never uncool, and always sweet and comforting—a pantry perennial utterly impervious to food fads and trends. Jam just stays the course. It has blessedly nothing to do with wellness, or health—as so much does these days. It’s just a little sweet, sugary puddle of happy.
Apart from Bonne Maman, my local deli has no fancy jam on the shelves. So, if Meghan is planning a bigger rollout than select influencers, there may be a niche market to target too. Early in the day or late at night, or on a rainy afternoon, there is nothing like toast and jam, or jam and cream if you’re swanking it up with an afternoon tea. The only question: raspberry or strawberry? And what about marmalade? Lemon curd? Anyway, isn’t Meghan keying into a posh person trend for jam-making in the homeland?
Tom: Yes, and not just posh! Anyone who has ever moved to the country will at some stage have decided that making jam, marmalade, chutneys or pickles would be fun. And it can be. But when people start talking about making jam at a rural dinner party, it is time to leave. It is only interesting if you have never done it before. Pretty soon, jam making becomes an annual drudge, carried out largely to avoid being wracked with guilt about all the rotting fruit in the garden. When you drop round to your 80-year old mother-in-law and see 300 pots of jam in the larder, the scales fall from your eyes.
I imagine it’s also an astonishingly hard business to actually make any money from. Even if you sell a jar of jam for $10, it seems like a finite amount of people are gonna be interested in buying a pot, and it’s probably gonna sit in the refrigerator for many months. Also, you can buy delicious jam for $5 because all jam is the same: boiled sugar and fruit.
Taken altogether, that’s why I think that actually American Riviera Orchard is not going to be selling jam, that is not the business plan. This is really just a branding exercise isn’t it? And let’s be honest it has worked: American Riviera Orchard has been on the tip of all our tongues this weekend.
Tim: I think Meghan’s been canny with this launch, as it also reminds the Brits, especially those who remain fans of her and Harry, that she’s still tapped into some Brit passions. And Americans, who have some pretty pallid mass market jellies, now have a jam product that bridges the Atlantic. Also, whatever she is or isn’t ultimately selling, the launch of the brand sticks it to Harry and Meghan’s critics who whine about them freeloading and not making their own money. And King Charles got into royal-branded jam long before Meghan. So, they can’t be snide about her, without being snide about him.
As for the brand name, it’s a bit of a tongue-contorting puzzle. But, as an acronym, ‘ARO’ has a nice smooth roll to it, and also sounds even zippier if an Aussie says it. A third market tied up!
“This isn’t about the non-lucrative business-making jam. It’s about the much more financially rewarding process of making content for Netflix.”
— Tom Sykes
Tom: I was speaking to the British publicity entrepreneur Mark Borkowski this week and he agrees with me that actually, this is not about selling jam at all. As he pointed out, the idea of Meghan slaving over a jam pan is farcical. What it’s really about, he said, is building curiosity about the ARO brand ahead of any launch.
I have one other theory which is that the jam pots sent to the pals this week are actually a third wall-busting, meta part of her forthcoming show on Netflix, which reportedly recently began filming.
I think it is possible that the show—which, and I quote from the Sussex website here, “will celebrate the joys of cooking & gardening, entertaining, and friendship”—has a segment where Meghan picks fruit from her garden, cooks it and sends it to her buddies as a token of friendship. My suspicion is that is what we are seeing here. This isn’t about the non-lucrative business-making jam. It’s about the much more financially rewarding process of making content for Netflix.
Tim: To me, Meghan and Harry seem to be trying to recraft their brand away from the grievance-based narratives of his memoir and Netflix’s Harry & Meghan. Good works and retro-cool homemaking seem an ideal mix. Of course, as controversy tends to follow them wherever they are, they run the risk of that rebrand always under threat from current events in the royal family, or the controversy du jour. Harry and Meghan seem to be confidently saying: “We’ll do things our own way, thanks!” If the jam is just a PR gimmick, so be it. If it’s an actual product, Meghan may have picked a winner. We will find out when—if—we ever taste the stuff.
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