Who's Who: Alexandra Eisler, Kensington Marmalade Company Co-owner

Name: Alexandra Eisler

Age: 45

Occupation: Jam-maker, co-owner (with her husband Tim) of Kensington Marmalade Company, microfilm photographer at the UC Berkeley library

Briefly describe your history in the Bay Area. My family has been here I think seven generations. My great–grandmother, grandmother, mother and I went to Cal. I grew up in Santa Rosa and went to high school in Virginia and came back to go to college. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. We’re so fortunate to live in such a beautiful place. Having lived in England and on the East Coast for a while — Washington, D.C. is amazing — but there’s no place like home.

What’s the story behind Kensington Marmalade Company? I’ve been in the food industry for 18 or 19 years. My mom catered and had a cheesecake business, Mrs. Mitchell’s Cheesecake. I’ve always had a finger in the food industry. I did catering in and after college. I worked in the photo lab with a photographer a few years but found that I was always being pulled towards something more and more creative. I found a job working for another Cal grad for Thai Kitchen. I was the fourth employee working from the ground up. It was really down and dirty, funky and fun. I learned so much — how to go from a small to a medium to a large business. I did everything you can imagine in the food industry.

Then, the constant travel — I was traveling to Asia doing product development — it’s really hard to have a family, and I got married right when I started at Thai Kitchen. I saw a posting for a job at the British Consulate in San Francisco looking for a food and beverage analyst here in the United States. That job was so fabulous. I loved it. I took buyers to the UK on buying trips … We would visit beer and cheese companies.

It sounds like you were meant to have your own business, with all of these different experiences in the food industry. At the consulate, I really focused on beer, cheese and jam. They’re all different distribution channels, different manufacturing methods, and it was really shelf-stable groceries that I came back to — that’s what I know.

I was visiting a jam-maker — I was about six months pregnant — and I was at a company called Kitchen Garden Preserves. The woman who owned it was a mom who had two small kids at home. … She was making beetroot relish, shredded beet and horseradish. I was telling her how I grew raspberries and sold them to Chez Panisse. She looked at me and said, “It’s a slippery slope and you’re sliding down it.”

Did she mean you’re going to end up… Owning your own business. Because you see the value in where does this come from, where does it originate. And for me it starts in the soil. If there’s good people growing the fruit that you’re using, then the product can’t help but be spectacular. For me it just sort of worked out that this is where I am. This is where my passion lies.

What do you do for fun? Right now we have baby chickens. They’re five weeks old. I had no idea how fun that would be. We started with four and then lost one to a hawk.