This piece was featured first on Oct 30 for One Good Thing, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Alexis Madrigal about his take on Bay Area art, culture & nature. Subscribe today.
Lemme tell you a little story. We once got a jar of cayenne salt from the company Innajam. And it was my favorite salt that I’ve ever had. It was perfect, adding a bit of saltiness, a tiny bit of spice, and a bit of earthiness, too. We literally sprinkled it on everything for a whole year, probably.
But … Innajam did not always make cayenne salt, and we ran out and there was not a resupply to be had. I was sad and saltless.
Then, I ran into the founder of Innajam, Dafna, and her partner, Jesse. I told them how much my kids, in particular, loved their cayenne salt. And magically, to us, at least, jars of cayenne salt appeared on our porch some months later.
Little did I know that behind the scenes, they had gone to great lengths to make the salt, in part because processing huge amounts of cayenne aerosolizes the capsaicin in the chiles. I could not believe that they willingly endured that just to make some kids happy.
But that’s the kind of small business that Innajam has been. For 15 years, they’ve been making jams out of seasonal produce and you probably recognize the name from the specialty grocer near you. They’ve always charted their own path. My good friend Robin Sloan often reflected that a solid measure of local political measures might be the Innajam test: would a particular law aid this small business or would it make their life more difficult? Because Innajam employed people doing food manufacturing right in Emeryville. They supported local farms all around. And they sold in local markets, too.
Innajam is a kind of bellwether, that is to say, for a whole series of interwoven economic and cultural circuits.
So, it is with GREAT sadness that I report to you that Innajam is hanging up the jam pots. Dafna and Jesse decided to call it quits. They are selling the last last last of their supplies, and, from what I hear, they are gonna move somewhere warm and sunny and chill out for a while.
Get that jalapeño jam or the quince one or the black mission fig. Get the ginger shrub. Get a jar of the Bay Area: memories and botanicals both living in that fruit and the way Innajam made it taste.
The good news is that they were not forced out by collapsing finances. It is good that these jams and shrubs and salts have been a part of my life for 15 years. It is good that this little company existed. And it is good that these good people got to make the decision to do something new on their own terms.
Rather than being upset, I’ve decided that a good thing can also be a sad thing.
Alexis Madrigal, Co-Host, Forum
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