WoW Bites!: ‘People say they taste my jams and are brought back to their childhood’

Andrea Pederson’s love language is food.

Once a teacher, who spent nearly four decades working with adults with disabilities in volunteer life, Andrea has found food to be the perfect way to connect people, from meals for sharing to teaching cookery skills.

She is the founder of Andrea’s Kitchen, an award-winning artisan food business specialising in traditional jams and pickles, based in her family home beside Ardnahinch Beach, Shanagarry.

Andrea and her husband Tobias are, in her words, natural-born wanderers. Andrea is originally from Frankfurt, , and Tobias from East Grinstead, England, via an Anglo-Danish lineage.

From a covid-era necessity to share the glut of a bumper season beetroot and fruit harvest, in 2024, Andrea scooped a silver Blas na hÉireann food award for her fourth-generation pickled beetroot. In April, she graduated from Supervalu’s Food Academy programme.

With a growing reputation for making delicious jams, along with recent accolades and achieve- ments, demand for the fruits of Andrea’s Kitchen is growing.

If you thought commercial kitchens were all stainless steel, bereft of personality, charm, and warmth, think again. ‘Made with Heart’ is the slogan on her pots of jam, and so it is that these homemade preserves are made right in the heart of Andrea’s home – literally from her kitchen to yours - the very definition of handmade.

But how did this pair of wanderers arrive in East Cork?

Andrea studied teaching for children with additional needs in Bristol, met Tobias, and moved into a “volunteer life-sharing community” where volunteers live and work with adults with special needs.

“We lived our life in a big family,” explains Andrea. “Some communities have organic farms and gardens, even colleges where we teach. I would teach basic life skills, and because we always had a farm and gardens, there were gluts that we needed to do something with. I didn’t grow up with a love of cooking, but through this work found I really loved preserving, baking and cooking everything from scratch.”

While Andrea cooked, taught and co-ordinated the house they shared as part of these communities, Tobias satisfied his ion for farming and biodiversity by working on farms and in gardens.

The pair were blessed with four children, two girls and two boys, but often the 24/7 pressures of the community left little time for Andrea to embrace being a mum to her children in the way she wanted.

“We were always on duty,” she says.

They moved around various communities in the UK, as well as a three-year stint in Andrea’s native .

“We have always been wanderers,” says Andrea.

“Tobias suggested , and I reluctantly agreed. The community there had everything from fruit and veg, cheese and butter making, a bakery. In that regard, it was the best place we ever lived. I was a homemaker then, but I got all the gluts of vegetables and fruits and would process it.”

But Andrea couldn’t settle, so, where to next?

“Tobias mentioned a school field trip to Ireland he attended, and loved it, so we moved to County Kildare in 1997.”

The couple continued to raise their family as part of volunteer life-sharing communities, teaching, cooking, turning gluts into delicious preserves, up until 2019.

“My second daughter was living in Cork and was getting married in Ballycotton. We went to visit them, and they showed us around, taking us to Ballycotton cliffs, and we both felt it reminded us of north Cornwall where we had met.”

By January the following year, Andrea and Tobias had sold up in Kildare and bought a house they fell in love with beside the sea in Ardnahinch.

“We immediately planted edible hedges in the front garden with a few fruit trees, and we grew carrots and beetroots in raised beds in the back garden,” says Andrea. “Tobias has always been interested in being self-sufficient, but I never liked gardening, so I wanted to just start small.”

The pandemic erupted soon after they moved down, but for Andrea the timing was perfect.

“I needed time to decompress. The beach is literally just across the road, and I absolutely found my love for gardening. I enjoyed seeing a cucumber form or a bean grow - it was magic for me.”

That year, Andrea had a bumper crop of gooseberries, red, white and blackcurrants and beetroot.

“We had so much produce! I was making jams and pickling beetroot to a fourth-generation Danish recipe from Tobias’s side of the family,” explains Andrea. “I had started sea swimming with a group and would bring them jars of jam and pickled beetroot. I had so much and didn’t know what to do with it. They loved it and said I should consider selling it.”

In 2023, a recipient of one of Andrea’s jars of pickled beetroot took her aside and said there must be something wrong with the beetroot.

“I was worried. When I asked why, they said they would sit on the sofa with a jar and a fork, and the next thing, the jar would be empty!

“That was when I decided to enter my pickled beetroot into Blas na hÉireann. Obviously, it was liked by the judges too, because it won silver.”

It was Andrea’s mother-in-law, Janet, who taught her how to make the award-winning beetroot.

“When I first came to Cornwall, I saw Janet and I said to myself, that’s my island mother – meaning, in England she was my mother away from my mother. Straight away we had such a wonderful connection; she was a wonderful woman.

“Janet taught me cooking and baking; it was her that gave me that love for all these things.”

Janet ed away 13 years ago, but Andrea says her presence is never far away.

“I feel her on my shoulder every so often, and then I say to her: Janet, thank you for introducing me to this love of food. When I heard I was a Blas na hÉireann finalist, I was quite clear with myself that I had to get an award – to get the award for Janet. She was the one who made the beetroot pickle when we were in Cornwall, and I had just taken it on from there. Winning the silver really was something special.

“The pickled beetroot will always be my hero product!”

Andrea also perfected a range of fruit jams, and it was with these that she entered into Supervalu Food Academy this year.

“I knew how to make jams, but I didn’t know enough about the other side of a food business,” says Andrea.

The Food Academy provides budding food entrepreneurs with skills in food safety, marketing and branding, mentoring, financial management, pitching techniques, and the opportunity to get onto supermarket shelves of a major retailer.

“I make jams that I want people to enjoy, so I took a lot of time doing taste tests with different flavours and ratios of fruit and sugar to find the ones people like best,” explains Andrea.

“I started off with 14 different flavours, but now there are six in the range: redcurrant, blackcurrant, gooseberry, raspberry, strawberry, and rhubarb. I don’t like to mix flavours with my jams – just pure fruit. People tell me that’s what they want, not rhubarb with ginger or whatever.”

Andrea’s Kitchen preserves can be found in Midleton, Cobh, Grange, Carrigaline, and Youghal Supervalu stores. She is also finding shelf space with great independent retailers such as Farm Shop in Douglas and Marina Market, Kilkenny Cafés, Quay Co-Op in Cork city, Organico in Bantry, and independent shops around Midleton.

“I’m being approached by people wanting to stock me rather than having to go to them. It makes me think I must have something that is tasty.”

Jams are a very competitive market, so Andrea must indeed be doing something right.

“My Local Enterprise Office, Cork South, has been really ive of me and my business. They are so proud that they have put it out all over the place that I’ve done the Food Academy! I’m never aware of these things,” says Andrea.

“I have high expectations of me, so I’m always thinking I should be way better than I am. But I am enjoying the success I’ve been having.”

The proof, of course, is always in the tasting. For Andrea, those long-standing traits of finding pleasure in feeding people delicious things get a mighty boost in the reactions to her jams.

“People are always telling me that they taste my jams – the gooseberry, rhubarb, or blackcurrant – and are transported back to their childhood standing beside their grandmother or aunt in their kitchen.

“One person who tasted my blackcurrant jam stood with tears in his eyes and said ‘Andrea, I am back in my childhood’. You couldn’t give me better . For me, it’s not just the taste, it’s the memories it brings up for people, and that is so amazing to achieve that. I wasn’t aware of it when I started, but now it makes me so happy that people really get this emotional response to tasting my jams. Food is so emotional.”

‘Made with Heart’ is the slogan on every pot of jam and pickle, so maybe there is truth in the adage that food made with heart – with love – really does taste better.

“Tobias once said to me when he watched me make my preserves, it’s like a meditation; that my whole essence is in that jam. Maybe he is right; maybe that is what people get. That it’s not just a raspberry jam, but the essence of me is in there through the love I put into making every pot.”

From teacher, to cook, to mother, to preserver; place to place and country to country, the journey to Andrea’s Kitchen has wound its way through time and place until coming to rest beside the ocean in East Cork.

“My life has been all kinds of different bits, but they’ve all somehow led to where I’m now. My love of all these things, they’ve been growing over time and developing.

“Food Academy has opened a few more doors to us, but if you have the love and ion to do something, do it, otherwise you’ll never know if you could

“When we moved here, we had no idea what we were going to do. But I don’t believe in chance. I really believe things will happen that are supposed to happen, and we create our path by what we put out there.

“Life is a journey. Enjoy the ride!”