Three generations of pastry cooks on the wine route.

Christine Ferber’s jams come from Niedermorschwihr, a small village on the Alsace wine route in the Haut-Rhin. The business behind them is a family shop. In 1959, the gastronomy magazine Les Nouvelles Gastronomiques reported in March 2026, Maurice and Marguerite Ferber took over a pâtisserie there called Au Relais des Trois Épis; French Wikipedia says Maurice Ferber set up La Maison Ferber that year in a seventeenth-century building. It also says the family had been pastry cooks for three generations before Christine, and that her great-grandfather had come to Alsace from Germany in 1870.

Christine Ferber trained as a pastry cook away from home. French Wikipedia says she was apprenticed at 15 in Brussels, spending three years learning pâtisserie and chocolate-making, and then worked in Paris with the pastry chef Lucien Peltier. In 1979 she won the Coupe de France des pâtissiers, a national competition for pastry cooks, according to both French and English Wikipedia.

She came back to Alsace in 1980, and that is when the jams began. French Wikipedia says she started making them to sell in her parents’ shop. The shop itself kept growing: Les Nouvelles Gastronomiques lists seven activities under one roof since 1980, from bread, pastries, confectionery, chocolate and ice cream to a grocery and a catering service. Jam, though, is what made the Ferber name known outside the village.

Copper pans, small batches and a Paris admirer.

The method is small-scale. Les Nouvelles Gastronomiques describes jams cooked in small batches in copper pans and filled by hand, with Christine Ferber filling the jars herself, and reports that about 80% of the fruit comes from Alsace. Christine Ferber makes more than 200 varieties of jam a year and sells around 200,000 jars annually, the French broadcaster RFI reported in December 2017, as cited by English Wikipedia; the range runs from traditional and regional flavours to combinations such as celery, pineapple and rosemary. RFI also reported exports to Spain, Germany, Japan and Singapore, including sales through the Isetan department store in Tokyo.

Her best-known admirer is Pierre Hermé. Le Monde reported in December 2017 that the Paris pastry chef says she “sells the best jams in the world” and stocks them in his Paris shop. The most visible collaboration is the Ispahan jam, named after Hermé’s raspberry, lychee and rose combination. Pierre Hermé Paris describes it as a two-layer jam, one layer of lychee flavoured with rose and one of raspberry, made to a recipe by Pierre Hermé and prepared in Alsace by Christine Ferber using fresh fruit only. Other chefs order her preserves too: Les Nouvelles Gastronomiques names Alain Ducasse, Hélène Darroze and Olivier Nasti, and French Wikipedia adds the Troisgros restaurant, the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris and The Connaught in London.

She is known in France as the “fée des confitures”, the jam fairy, a nickname used by French Wikipedia and in press coverage; French Wikipedia says that locally she is also called “Reine Christine.” The books have carried her name further. French Wikipedia lists Mes confitures (2002) and Le Larousse des confitures (2009) among her titles, and Michigan State University Press published English editions, Mes Confitures: The Jams and Jellies of Christine Ferber in 2002 and Mes Tartes in 2003. In April 2013 The New York Times profiled her under the headline “From Alsace, Sweet Love for the World.”

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make jam, preserves or sweet spreads, and they come from France, Belgium, the United States, Britain and Italy: Christine Ferber, Lucien Georgelin, Materne, Sarabeth’s, Mrs Bridges, Thursday Cottage and Nutella. Jam and spread brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small kitchens that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a village shop to a supermarket shelf.

A jam or spread brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single recipe than by a jar, a label and the breakfast table it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its kitchens or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its jars are actually filled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its jars and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Still a family business, still in the village.

Maison Ferber has stayed in the family. Since 2011 Christine Ferber has co-owned the business with her brother Bruno and her sister Betty, English Wikipedia says, citing RFI. Les Nouvelles Gastronomiques describes the division of work in 2026: Bruno Ferber runs the catering side, and his wife, Anne-Catherine Ferber, handles management and sales. The magazine counts about 1,400 products across the shop’s activities. Jam is a large share of the business but not all of it: RFI reported in 2017 that jams and pastries each brought in roughly 35% of revenue.

When Les Nouvelles Gastronomiques profiled the house in March 2026, it ran the piece under the headline “Maison Ferber, 60 ans de savoir-faire à Niedermorschwihr,” sixty years of know-how in the village. The jams are still made in Niedermorschwihr. In 2015 the family opened a new workshop of about 1,300 square metres at the entrance to the village, Les Nouvelles Gastronomiques reported, and English Wikipedia, citing Le Monde, says the building won an architecture prize, the Prix AMO, in 2018. Recognition for Christine Ferber herself has come from the food press and from the state. The Guide Champérard named her pastry chef of the year in 1998, and in January 2018 she was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur, Le Figaro reported.

For a design guide, Christine Ferber shows how a maker’s own name, tied to one village, can carry a craft product around the world. Compare Tiptree, the Essex family jam maker, and Bonne Maman, the French jam brand at the other end of the scale. For this guide we use a cherry red, a copper and an apricot with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Christine Ferber’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.