Meet the former teacher who is looking to spread joy with her healthy jam brand Fearne & Rosie

The founder of jam brand Fearne & Rosie was previously a school teacher and has always loved working with children.

“I’ve always wanted to work with children and make a positive impact,” Ms Kettlewell said.

One of her favourite parts of teaching was physical education lessons and teaching children where their food comes from.

“Seeing children learn and being enthused by learning, that’s the bit that I have enjoyed the most,” she added.

It was while she was teaching that Ms Kettlewell noticed that while legislation had been introduced to provide healthier school meals to children following a campaign by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, action hadn’t been taken on breakfast clubs and after school clubs.

She said: “I could see as a nationwide issue that children were coming into school and they were going into breakfast clubs and often being sugar-loaded first thing in the morning with high sugar spreads.”

That was when the idea for Fearne & Rosie first came to Ms Kettlewell. She knew how much sugar went into jams because her husband Andrew runs Raydale Preserves, based in the Yorkshire Dales.

When her children were born, Ms Kettlewell became “quite obsessed” with what they were eating.

She added: “That’s when I felt like there weren’t readily available healthier food options for children.

“If you’ve got the time to be making everything from scratch, that’s fantastic, but everybody is busy and I wanted to provide a healthier choice that was readily available for parents to access.”

Ms Kettlewell launched Fearne & Rosie in 2019. It uses 40 to 50 per cent less sugar than traditional jams. “Most jam in UK retailers has more than 60 grammes of sugar per hundred grammes so they’re more than 60 per cent sugar,” she said. “By switching from standard to Fearne & Rosie, it saves a family of four around 800 sugar cubes in a year.”

Initially, she expected to sell to 10 farm shops but the product found itself in 30 within a month.

The jams were also picked up by Waitrose and Morrisons just before the pandemic hit and last year Fearne & Rosie was also listed by Ocado. As business began to take off, she had to make the difficult decision of leaving her teaching job behind in January 2021.

Ms Kettlewell said: “I took a sabbatical initially because I didn’t want to say goodbye and I wanted to carry on being a teacher.

“Then after a few months of sabbatical I just knew I couldn’t do all of the things. I felt like with Fearne & Rosie, there’s an opportunity to make a bigger impact.

“We can impact more children via Fearne & Rosie than I could do staying in the classroom. That’s why I decided to focus my time on that.”

Fearne & Rosie is named after Ms Kettlewell’s daughters but what about her youngest, George?

“I think I’ve got a window of time before he notices,” she laughed. “He’s only really little so I’ll have to come up with something.”

While her husband runs Raydale Preserves, which also makes Fearne & Rosie’s jam, the two businesses are separate and will remain so.

She said: “Raydale is a wonderful business. It supplies some really good local independents, farm shops, delis, Wensleydale creamery.

“But I always thought Fearne & Rosie would be a supermarket product. Parents are really busy people and where parents do their food shop is generally the supermarket.”

Fearne & Rosie is also looking to attract investment into the business and being separate to Raydale enables the business to differentiate itself.

While all of its products are currently made by Raydale, Fearne & Rosie is looking at moving to a different manufacturer this year.

Ms Kettlewell said: “We’re starting to take in bigger orders and Raydale is small. It will be good for us as a business to have a different manufacturing partner as well.

“We’ll still work in the UK and I’m actually trying really hard to keep it in Yorkshire but it will definitely still be UK manufacturing.

“We’ll always do small batches at Raydale because Wensleydale is where the business is from and I’m keen to support the local area.”

Ms Kettlewell also appeared on BBC TV show Dragons’ Den last year. An experience she describes as “absolutely terrifying” but one that was ultimately positive.

“I was really lucky because I was in the room for two hours and we only got positive comments about the product,” she said.

It also helped her carry out an appraisal of her own business with due diligence, a key part of the process of getting onto the programme.

“I now feel very confident in knowing all the areas of the business,” she said. “I don’t think I would have necessarily known all the tiny little bits of it if I hadn’t gone on the show.”

The business is currently in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign, which is due to end this week, to help it expand. Fearne & Rosie hit its target within 24 hours of going live.

Giles Brook, a founding partner of the Bear snacks company, is one of several well-known backers.

But with Fearne & Rosie, Ms Kettlewell wants to balance profit with purpose. The business has already partnered with food charity FareShare.

Fearne & Rosie is also B Corp pending. The certification measures a company’s impact on the world.

Fearne & Rosie has got “really ambitious plans for growth”, Ms Kettlewell says.

“Our financial forecast is £5m in the next three years,” she added. “Ultimately, I want Fearne & Rosie to be the family favourite brand.”

Ms Kettlewell admits to missing teaching “a lot” and is always looking for an opportunity to go back to a school setting with her products.

But with Fearne & Rosie she feels that she can have an even bigger impact improving children’s diets.

Curriculum vitae

Title: Founder of Fearne & Rosie

Date of birth: November 6, the day after Bonfire Night. We celebrate with fireworks and always have since I was little. Great day for a birthday I think.

Lives: North Yorkshire

Favourite holiday destination: North Wales

Last book read: Drop The Pink Elephant by Bill McFarlan

Favourite film: About Time

Favourite song: B*Witched – C’est La Vie. I mean really, can you name a better song?

Car driven: We drive a 4x4 Land Rover as it really is hilly where we live

Most proud of: My children Fearne, Rosie... and of course George.