Jonathan Stumpf - bacon jam promoter

Jonathan Stumpf is a born salesman. As soon as I ask about the new product he's marketing, something dubbed "bacon jam," he launches into the pitch. "America's fascination with bacon is going ballistic," he says. "It's this retro appeal." He lists some foods I could spread bacon jam on to make them more bacony, and when I suggest others, he senses I'm on the hook.

"The question you should be asking me, Brett, is 'What can I not put bacon jam on?,'" Stumpf says. It's that downfield juke that all good salespeople can pull off. "Umm.. bacon?," I lamely offer, completely losing control of the interview.

Bacon jam is 70 percent bacon, cooked and "rendered down" over four hours. The resulting product is spreadable bacon. "It has the consistency of chutney," Stumpf tells me.

Before finding this calling, Stumpf was working towards a career in online media. After he got his master's in journalism from the University of Montana, he landed in Seattle with his girlfriend and started sending out applications. "Inititally I was hanging all my hopes on these applications," Stumpf says. Those applications just didn't generate interest.

When he started at UM in 2006, Stumpf immediately gravitated toward all things online. He hoped to find a niche there and avoid the troubled waters of the print world. It was an informed move, and he'd be laughing all the way to bank if publications could figure out how to make online advertising generate enough revenue.

As it is, Stumpf is hedging the bacon jam business with an unpaid internship at the Cascade Land Conservancy. He's their new web/marketing guy. Though he likes living in Seattle, and thinks that the Land Conservancy is doing good work, he's frustrated. "I couldn't have set up a worse disaster for myself," says Stumpf.

He seems too quick to take the blame for being underemployed in this tough climate. While in school, he interned with New West, a Missoula-based new media outlet, took MBA-level classes in marketing and entrepreneurship, and finished a multimedia project centered on the Arctic grayling and the controversy over listing it as a protected species.

But until he makes something else happen, he's giving the bacon jam all he's got. Stumpf is working with Skillet Street Food, the makers of bacon jam, to find a USDA-approved kitchen that will mass produce it.

"It'll be interesting when we get to the nutritional facts stage," he says. Then again, everybody loves bacon, and what could you not spread it on?

You can order bacon jam here.