A family recipe and a few jars for local shops.

Sarabeth’s began with a single jam. The company says Sarabeth Levine started her business in 1981 making her family’s recipe for Orange Apricot Marmalade in her apartment in New York City, and the Specialty Food Association, which inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 2015, gives the same account: she and her husband, Bill Levine, founded Sarabeth’s Kitchen in 1981 when she began making the marmalade at home. The company describes the recipe as about 200 years old. In a 2013 profile on HuffPost, the journalist Karin Kamp wrote that the recipe came to Levine through her Aunt Ruth’s side of the family, and that friends urged her to sell it; she first sold jars at the opening of a Manhattan dessert café in the late 1970s. The company says the first jars went to local businesses.

The jam quickly gained a shop. According to the company’s history, in 1981 the Levines opened a tiny bakery-kitchen in Manhattan to make and sell her preserves alongside pastries, breads and muffins. A few tables and chairs were soon added, first for breakfast and then for lunch, and the shop became, in the company’s words, an instant success. That mix — a jam maker’s kitchen that also served breakfast — set the pattern for everything that followed.

The marmalade itself is still the centre of the story. Speaking to Fox News in 2016, Levine described it as made with fresh, hand-cut oranges and tiny pieces of orange peel, and said it was “not overly sweet.” The company calls her the jam maker behind the brand and says that her frequent appearances on QVC and television, along with magazine and newspaper coverage, made the Sarabeth name known well beyond New York.

Levine’s cooking brought her recognition beyond jam. The company and a 2016 Entrepreneur article both say she won the James Beard Foundation’s award for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 1996, and the Specialty Food Association names the same award on its Hall of Fame page.

Restaurants, a bakery and two cookbooks.

The single shop became a small group of restaurants. The company says Sarabeth’s East opened in 1983 and Sarabeth’s West in 1986, and that both added dinner to breakfast, lunch and brunch. In 1998 it opened Sarabeth’s Bakery in Chelsea Market, a wholesale and retail bakery with a café, which the company describes as a 4,400-square-foot space. Its largest New York restaurant, on Central Park South near the Plaza Hotel, followed in 2005, as did a restaurant in Key West, Florida, the company says.

The name also travelled abroad. In 2013 Kamp counted 11 restaurants, including one in Japan, and four cafés inside Lord & Taylor department stores. The Japanese Sarabeth’s website, which is run by WDI Group, lists five restaurants there, including Lumine Shinjuku and Omotesando in Tokyo, and sells the brand’s fruit spreads.

In New York the restaurant side has recently contracted. TheStreet reported in August 2026 that Sarabeth’s, whose restaurants it said are managed by RBM Restaurant Group, had closed its Park Avenue South restaurant, opened in February 2013, and its Greenwich Village restaurant, opened in November 2024, saying the economics of running them were no longer sustainable, and was keeping its Upper West Side and Central Park South restaurants.

Levine has also written two cookbooks, both published by Rizzoli: Sarabeth’s Bakery: From My Hands to Yours (2010), written with Rick Rodgers, and Sarabeth’s Good Morning Cookbook: Breakfast, Brunch, and Baking (2015).

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.

From a Bronx jam kitchen to Pennsylvania.

For decades the jam was made in New York. The company’s history says the spreads it sells as “Legendary Spreadable Fruit,” which began with a few jars from the Levines’ Manhattan apartment, came to be produced in a 15,000-square-foot factory in the Bronx, run by Sarabeth and Bill. The same factory, where the marmalade was jarred, appears in Kamp’s 2013 profile and in the 2016 Entrepreneur article; Kamp put output at about a million jars a year. In a 2005 interview with the kosher certifier OU Kosher, which supervises the line, the company said its fruit is cut by hand and slowly simmered in small batches without added pectin.

That has now changed. Sarabeth’s says on its website that after 45 years of making its preserves in New York, production has moved to Stone County Specialties in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, which makes and distributes Sarabeth’s products in the United States and exports them. The company says its spreads are sold in department stores, gourmet shops and specialty stores across the United States and in the Caribbean, Canada, Japan and South Korea, and its own online shop now trades as Sarabeth’s Preserves.

For a design guide, Sarabeth’s shows how a jam named after its maker can carry a whole hospitality brand, from the breakfast table to the restaurant menu. Compare Smucker’s, another American jam named after its makers, and Tiptree, whose Essex jam business also runs tearooms. For this guide we use marmalade orange, apricot gold and napkin cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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