Preserved with love
• Scottsdale’s Ib Frydendall has recently sold his preserves business, and is enjoying his retirement.
By Daisy Baker
August 12, 2020
Scottsdale’s Ib Frydendall knew early on he wanted to travel the world and cook.
With this in mind, the day he left school his mum put him on board a big cargo ship in Scandinavia which was bound for Middle-Eastern Africa, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia as a cabin boy and a kitchen helper.
Mr Frydendall went back for a second trip on the same ship, this time as a cook’s mate.
“When I got home from that it took 24 hours and Mum had lined me up with the head chef of the biggest restaurant in Copenhagen and I became chef’s apprentice,” he said.
“I stuck to that for four years and finally took my exams. I’ve been in that industry ever since.
“Once I finished my apprenticeship I went to Greenland and became head chef at the hospital under the lead of the American Airforce. I had a contract with them for a year.”
When the contract was up, Mr Frydendall returned to Denmark before embarking on a trip on a cargo ship as the head chef, as they sailed from Europe to the Panama Canal all the way up to San Francisco and Los Angeles, right up to Vancouver.
He said cooking on cargo ships is similar in many ways to cooking on land, with one exception.
“It’s all alright as long as you’ve got a safety security rail on the stove around the pots so when the ship goes on too much of an angle and they start to go forwards and back on the stove they don’t move too much,” he said.
“We used to have to rope them down.”
He then became a steward in the Scandinavian Airline system, before getting his own restaurant a few year later.
He later was appointed head chef on a passenger liner ship travelling between Denmark and England.
It was here he met his wife Sonja.
“She migrated to Australia when she was 12 and she went home to see the country she had left plus the family and then we met,” Mr Frydendall recalled.
“One day she said she had to go home because her dad wasn’t well. I decided to go too.
“That was one continent I hadn’t seen so I thought I might as well. I liked her very much and I was following her.”
After landing in Launceston they were picked up by Sonja’s brother who lived in Scottsdale at the time, so it was Mr Frydendall’s first stop in Tasmania before Bridport.
He said he liked the North-East from the first moment.
“I think it’s a beautiful place. We’ve got the water over there and mountains out there.”
He and Sonja have lived in Brisbane, Hobart, Underwood, Bridport and Scottsdale, which they now call home.
Since relocating to the North-East, Mr Frydendall has continued working in hospitality, running several cafes and a successful jam, relish and sauce business.
The preserves business kicked off slowly in the mid-2000s when he had Seaside takeaway in Bridport.
“I had a girl employed there who was quite keen on showing me how to make jam and relish,” Mr Frydendall said.
“We slowly started. Then we got Café on King.
“Our best friend who created Johnno’s tomato Sauces in the 1990s he sold his business so then I realised ‘now I can go public with my products’ so from around 2009/2010 we started going public with in and today we’ve got well over 100 outlets in the state we distribute to. I have it distributed around the world.”
The range now includes raspberry, strawberry, blackberry and apricot jam, orange marmalade, chutney, beetroot and zucchini relish and sweet mustard pickle, pasta sauce, tomato sauce, smoky barbecue sauce and Worcestershire sauce.
In recent years he has refined the time-consuming process, in which a batch would take around three hours, producing 120 jars.
He’s been making 600 jars on average per week but that still couldn’t match the consumer demand.
Despite his love for the business, the labour-intensive nature of the job was becoming increasingly difficult in his old age so he recently handed over the reins of the business and retired.
While he has now retired from preserve making, he has his work cut out for him with home renovations and work in the garden.
With strawberry, raspberry, rhubarb, chillies and Tasmanian Native Pepper bushes growing in the garden, he will continue making jams and relish for himself.