A wartime recipe, told more than one way.

St. Dalfour makes fruit spreads in Marmande, a market town in the Lot-et-Garonne, in south-west France, which the company places about 90 kilometres from Bordeaux by motorway. Its French website calls the Marmande factory its only production site and says all of its jars are made there; the brand’s American website says the same, describing the spreads as made in Marmande, “near Bordeaux.” The company’s selling point is the recipe: it says its spreads are sweetened with fruit and concentrated fruit juice, above all grape must — the sweet juice of winemaking — instead of cane sugar, and that it uses no colourings or preservatives.

How that recipe began depends on which St. Dalfour text you read. A company text reproduced by a Lot-et-Garonne walking club on its sponsors’ page quotes M. Kistner, president of St. Dalfour France, as saying that during the Second World War, when sugar was rationed and dear, his grandmother, whose family owned vines, used grape juice in place of sugar in her jams, and that this was the origin of the St. Dalfour recipe.

The British website places the story in the First World War instead. There, a winemaker called Monsieur Dalfour passes a grape-must recipe down through his family and shares it with a neighbour, Madame Kistner, who names her spreads in his honour, calling him a saint for the recipe. The American website dates the method to the First World War, when French preserve-makers short of sugar used grape must, and says the family recipe has been handed down through three generations; its question-and-answer page speaks of a French heritage going back to 1903. We found no independent source for any of these versions, so we treat them all as the company’s own story.

From the Loire Valley to Marmande.

The company behind the brand has moved more than its Marmande story suggests. The British website dates the brand’s launch to 1984, and the French company text says St. Dalfour has belonged to the same owner since its founding that year. France’s official business register records two companies under the name. The first, St. Dalfour et Cie, was registered in 1982, with premises in the Loir-et-Cher, in the Loire Valley, and later in Cognac; it opened a fruit-processing site in Marmande in 2002 and was closed in 2010. The second, St. Dalfour SAS, was registered in December 1992, with a fruit-processing establishment in Marmande from the same date and a registered office in Paris.

The company’s own website of 2006, preserved by the Internet Archive, fits the Loire Valley part of that record. It said St. Dalfour ran its sales, marketing and production from a worldwide headquarters at “Château St Dalfour” in the Loire Valley, and it carried a welcome signed by Claude Kistner, president. The range then went well beyond preserves, to organic teas, prunes, vacuum-packed ready salads and cooking herbs. Today the French website says the brand is sold in more than 80 countries.

Britain came early, according to the British website. Its timeline says that in 1984 Norton Cooper, described as a lifelong friend of Mr Kistner, suggested that a spread made with grape must could sell as an alternative to jam, and that in 1988 he asked the Tate family to help bring it to the British market. The same timeline says the packaging won a design award in 1992, without naming the award; that the spreads reached independent health-food shops in 1993 and all the major British supermarkets by 1995; that two honeys followed in 2003; that seven flavours were added in 2008, taking the range to sixteen; and that the Marmande factory was expanded in 2016 to store frozen fruit.

Fruit spreads and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make jam and fruit spreads, and they come from Switzerland, Austria, Germany, the United States and France: Hero, Darbo, Zentis, Schwartau, Smucker’s, Andros and St. Dalfour. Jam brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname 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 in another continent.

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

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

A private company with Philadelphia ties.

St. Dalfour describes itself as a private family company and names no parent group. Its 2006 website named Claude Kistner as president; the French business register now lists John Cooper as président of St. Dalfour SAS, and records Norton Cooper as a director of the company from 2012 to December 2020.

In the United States the brand is tied to Charles Jacquin et Cie, the Philadelphia liqueur house founded in 1884. English Wikipedia describes Jacquin’s as the maker and importer of St. Dalfour, though without a citation; US import records compiled by the trade-data firm ImportGenius list Jacquin’s as a consignee of jam shipped by St. Dalfour SAS from Marmande, and American retail listings have sold the spreads under the name “Charles Jacquin-St. Dalfour.”

What the brand says about its jars is simpler. The American website calls them St. Dalfour’s signature glass jars and says the fruit is cooked in small batches in copper kettles by a master jam-maker in Marmande; these are the company’s own descriptions.

For a design guide, St. Dalfour shows a fruit-spread brand whose identity rests on a recipe story — grape must instead of sugar — told a little differently in each market, while the company says every jar comes from one factory in Marmande. Compare Bonne Maman, another French jam sold around the world, and Andros, the French fruit group that owns it. For this guide we use a deep fruit red, a grape purple and a honey gold on cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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