Meet New York Winner Sweet Deliverance

Posted on Friday, October 28th, 2011 in Preserves by Sam Rosekrans

Kelly Geary opened Brooklyn’s Sweet Deliverance four years ago with an innovative business model to accommodate working moms who wanted to feed their children healthy meals. Preserving is just a side project that came about as a result of having leftover produce. She hopes to create a ripple effect with her healthy eating initiative to inspire others to change their diets to highlight what’s fresh and local.

As a loyal member of her local CSA (Community Support Agriculture) program, Kelly gets all her base ingredients for her weekly menus from fresh produce in the area. In one of the most urban centers of the country, Kelly is delighted to introduce a little something from the farm, not to mention a healthier way of eating. Catering to the masses of people who often have no time to shop and prepare home-cooked meals, Sweet Deliverance hand-delivers a week’s worth of food every Monday to its subscribers. After nearly five years of being in business her audience is evolving: “Originally, it was mostly older, Upper East-side people, but now the clientele has gotten much younger.”

Kelly began making preserves on incidental grounds. Every week, Sweet Deliverance crafts a menu based on the variety of fruits and vegetables being shipped in. Kelly noticed that their menus were not accommodating the large amount of fruit available, so in order to avoid wasting, she began canning the produce. At the end of the season, she would give canned apples, for example, to loyal clients as gifts. Slowly, jams and chutneys became incorporated more and more into the weekly menus until they became signature Sweet Deliverance items.

Last year’s award winning preserves product—Sweet Deliverance’s Ground Cherry Jam—was first showcased at the nonprofit Just Food’s Let Us Eat Local event, and immediately flagged for its outstanding taste. Paired best with a ricotta crostini bite, the jam is rather expensive to make, costing $28 for fruit per jar. Because of this, Sweet Deliverance cannot afford to make too many jars annually. This year, Kelly entered Real Concord Grape Jam. She is looking forward to being a part of this year’s first annual Roadshow in New York City.