Cornaby's Specialty Foods

Cornaby's started with too many raspberries. David Cornaby came back to Utah after about 40 years in technology and bought his family's farm in Utah County. He planted raspberries, which raised the question of what to do with the surplus. The answer became Cornaby's Specialty Foods, which now makes more than 100 products at a manufacturing plant in Payson.

The farm had been in the family since settlers arrived in the 1800s, though its crops could not be irrigated until the Strawberry Water Users' Highline Canal was built in the early 1900s. Roy T. Taylor left the land to his four children. His daughter Lucy and her husband, Reed Cornaby, farmed her 10 acres and the parcel next to it.

The family had a head start on the food science. David's sister Janet had taught food courses at Brigham Young University for more than 12 years, and she and their father had co-owned a small food starch company. In 2007 the three of them made Cornaby's official.

That starch company led to E-Z Gel and its sibling, Thick Gel. E-Z Gel comes from a specific variety of corn, and the shape of its granules lets it thicken a liquid instantly, hot or cold, without cooking. The company says sauces made with it can be frozen or canned without thinning or separating, and it credits the formula with 25 years of development.

Jam in a Jiffy applies the same idea to fruit. Stir one pouch into two pounds of soft fruit, and in five minutes you have six cups of jam with no stove involved. It keeps three weeks in the refrigerator or 18 months in the freezer. The label says it was designed for everyone from the most experienced chef "to the most inexperienced teenager," which may be the most honest target market on the grocery shelf.

Everything comes out of the plant on American Way in Payson, where Cornaby's also packs food for other companies. A state directory of Utah co-packers lists its services, from canning and jarring to stick packs and pouches, so some of what the plant makes leaves under somebody else's label. The company's own jams, it says, carry twice the fruit and half the sugar of traditional jam.

The company now sells online and in thousands of stores, and its history page is dedicated to Reed and Lucy, who have since died. It all began with raspberries, on land the family could not water until a canal reached it.