About

Daiki Fukuda started Swift Kingdom in the autumn of 2018 after a decade working in food distribution, mostly moving fruit from Saga and Nagasaki prefectures to supermarket chains. He knew the supply chain well enough to know which fruit never made it to shelves because it was the wrong size or the wrong shade, and he found that quietly maddening. The first batch of jam he made was a fig preserve using undersized figs from a farm in Saga that would otherwise have been composted. It was too sweet and the set was uneven, but a neighbour ate the whole jar in two days and asked for more.

The kitchen moved three times in the first two years. The current space, a converted storage room in Hakata-ku, Fukuoka, has been home since early 2020. The copper pot came from a retired confectioner in Yanagawa who was closing his shop. It holds exactly 4 kilograms of fruit, which is the batch size Swift Kingdom has stuck with ever since, because anything larger and the heat distribution gets uneven at the edges. Daiki keeps a notebook for every batch, recording the fruit source, the sugar ratio, the cooking time, and a short tasting note. There are now over 340 entries.