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They say when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. In Pablo Lugones’ case, life gave him blackberries, so he made jam.
About a decade ago, Lugones was working as a buyer for a food distribution company and requested a small sample from a frozen berry supplier. What arrived while he was away on a business trip, though, was a delivery of many pounds of blackberries.
“My sole purpose in life when I came back was to figure out what to do with all these berries,” he said. Not willing to let good food go to waste, Lugones decided to look up some recipes and tutorials on how to make jam.
“I enjoyed the process,” he said. “It was almost a chemistry experiment of sorts, where you had your list of steps and if you followed the steps you would end up with jam and if something went wrong, you wouldn’t.”
It turns out, making jam was, in fact, his jam.
He began checking out local farmers markets to see what was in season, experimenting with flavors and giving away his preserves to family and friends, who enthusiastically suggested he keep going.
In 2016, he and his wife, Gina, a creative thinker with a background in marketing, launched Small Batch Jam Co as a side hustle to help finance their son’s college education, initially selling jars at local fairs and online. Now, their son has graduated and that side hustle is their full-time career.
In addition to their wholesale and online sales, Pablo and Gina Lugones have their own shop in their hometown of Pacifica and, in early September, opened their newest retail location, a room within Little Green A Plant Bar in downtown Redwood City (a previous storefront, in Eugene, Oregon, where their son went to college, shuttered this summer).
Small Batch Jam Co cooks up a galaxy of flavors – more than 100 – from classics such as raspberry to specialty concoctions such as rosemary prosecco clementine, quince rosewater, apricot ginger habanero and honey orange fig. In addition to jams, the company also offers syrups, fruit butters and more. Jams cost $9-$11 for a 6.5 oz jar, and syrups run $12 for an 8.4 oz bottle.
The company’s bestseller – which is also Lugones’ personal favorite – is the pink guava jam, which he recommends pairing with cheese and which reminds him of his childhood growing up in Miami as the son of Cuban immigrants, where guava paste was a comfort food staple. For an ice cream topping or peanut butter sandwich, he’s partial to the boysenberry.
He’s found that many folks have nostalgia for flavors they remember from childhood that aren’t widely available from supermarkets.
“I’m constantly poking people’s brains, ‘What flavor do you remember your grandma making?'” he said. And he’s always happy to get ideas straight from customers. The strawberry Champagne jam, for example, came about after a customer mentioned she’d loved the flavor when she lived in London years ago.
In addition to the diverse flavor options, “what makes a good jam is, like many things, ingredients,” Lugones said. Small Batch Jam Co uses just fruit, organic cane sugar, citrus-based pectin and citric acid, which allows for a two-year shelf life without any added preservatives. Many Americans today usually only encounter the mass-marketed jams offered by major manufacturers, he said, which are limited in their flavors and tend to be high in sugar to keep costs down.
“Regardless of your sweetener of choice, your sweetener will always be your cheapest ingredient,” he said. The more added sugar in the batch, “you’re getting further and further away from the flavor of the fruit. You’re just tasting sugar at that point, but that’s an easy way to bulk up your volume.”
His customers often tell him, “‘Hey, I can really taste the fruit in your product!’ It’s not overly sweet, and that’s what I think sets a good jam apart,” he said.
Attractive packaging, he knew from his years in the food industry, also makes a difference. Small Batch Jam Co’s labels feature a raven, which is a bird special to the Lugones family. Pablo and Gina Lugones met while living in Baltimore, hometown of “The Raven” author Edgar Allan Poe, and their son was born there. After they moved back to Gina’s hometown of Pacifica, they were happy to find, that like Baltimore, it was also home to many of the clever corvids.
In addition to the 35-40 products on the shelves at any given time, the newly opened Redwood City space is full of raven-themed art and decor, and even a bust of Poe, and Lugones hopes to eventually install a custom raven-themed stained-glass skylight made by a local artist.
Little Green, with its quirky, nature-loving, sometimes-spooky vibes, seems to be an aesthetic fit for Small Batch Jam Co. The owners have been his customers for years, selling his products as well as sometimes using them in Little Green’s coffee bar offerings. By renting out a space within the large store and using the same checkout counter and customer service (but with a separate point-of-sales system), it’s a win-win for the businesses.
“It’s provided a model with a very low overhead for me that allows me to market this location, as well as to then funnel some of my followers to come here that may not have known about their coffee and plant shop, so it’s mutually beneficial,” he said. Lugones is hoping that in the future, he may offer product demos and cooking classes in the shop.
Small Batch Jam Co has owned a warehouse in Pacifica’s Eureka Square shopping center since 2022. The retail shop opened in the Rockaway Beach district late 2024, which Lugones called “a nonstop success,” largely thanks to loyal locals who’ve been fans since the early days.
“We’ve had huge support from the local Pacifica community that’s been supportive since we decided to come to market in 2016,” he said. “It’s been that core group of locals supporting us that makes any transient tourist traffic that comes through Rockaway the icing on the cake.”
The Pacifica shop is also used as a testing grounds of sorts, where Lugones tries out microbatches of new flavors. Fans can also find Small Batch Jam Co products at Pacifica’s Lovey’s Tea Shoppe, Pedro Point Sirens and Oceana Market.
For the past few years, Small Batch Jam Co has also partnered with Filoli, selling products at the historic estate and coming up with flavors incorporating the botanical abundance grown there (for example, rose petals). Lugones said he looks forward to continuing that partnership.
He said his products make a great addition to all sorts of recipes, from cocktails to fruit sodas to vinaigrettes to glazes (and, of course, baked goods of all kinds). He makes up to four batches of product a day, five days a week, and said both he and Gina enjoy the creative challenge running the company provides.
“I do take enjoyment out of the fact that, for the last nine-plus years I’ve been making jam, I’m no more bored doing it than the first day that I started,” he said, noting that the previous day he made orange chai jam and cabernet sauvignon grape jam. On the day of this interview, he planned to make a pear persimmon butter.
“Every day is a new jam flavor for me, which keeps it very fresh and new,” he said.
Small Batch Jam Co, 450 Dondee Way, Suite 3, Pacifica; within Little Green, 1101 Main St., Redwood City. Pacifica hours: Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Redwood City hours: Monday from 8 a.m. to noon, Tuesday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Instagram: @smallbatchjamco.
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