A small business will soon have its own storefront in one northeast Missouri community.

Twenty-nine-year-old Jared Niemeyer is a Knox County native, a 2011 Kirksville High School graduate, a Hy-Vee Grocery employee, a Special Olympics athlete and a small business owner.

Jared Niemeyer has two words to describe the progress to date on the new home for Jared’s Jams. “Really great,” he said.

The business launched in 2014 to raise money to support Special Olympics is growing into a storefront site on the square in Edina.

One of the local vendors is Jared Niemeyer who makes his own jams, and he talked to us about that in Edina, Missouri. He has his own family recipes. Now Jared began making jams and jellies in 2014 to raise money for Special Olympics Missouri as his way of giving back to the organization that has done so much for him.

Immediately after Jared’s Jams was founded in 2014, Jared Niemeyer and his parents would harvest fruit from their backyard garden to prepare flavored jams and jellies.

The fruit would be heated on a stove in their Edina home before being bottled and sold at the weekly farmers market or at Special Olympics events.