In June 2024, as the United Kingdom prepared for Trooping the Colour — the annual ceremony that serves as the official birthday celebration of the monarch and one of the most photographed royal events of the year — Meghan Markle released the first product from her new lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard: a jar of strawberry jam.
The timing was not, according to royal experts and entertainment industry observers, a coincidence.
It was, they argued, a calculated move to ensure that Meghan’s name appeared in news coverage alongside, or in place of, coverage of the Princess of Wales.
The strategy, if that is what it was, drew an immediate reaction from commentators on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Sun’s coverage of the launch noted the timing explicitly, while the Newsbreak analysis by Nicki Swift described Kate Middleton as having “masterfully upstaged” Meghan in response — turning the dynamic around by appearing at the event looking composed, radiant, and entirely unbothered by any competing narrative from California.
The royal family’s capacity to respond to off-schedule interventions with studied indifference is one of its more formidable institutional assets.
The American Riviera Orchard jam was not, by any standard measure, a significant commercial product launch.
It was a small-batch, celebrity-adjacent lifestyle item sent to a curated list of influencers and friends.
Its media value lay entirely in the attention it attracted, and the attention it attracted was driven largely by the question of why it was being launched at that particular moment.
The question answered itself, for those inclined to read the timing as deliberate, with uncomfortable clarity.
Royal Insider’s coverage of the episode contextualised it within the longer arc of the Meghan-Kate dynamic.
The rivalry between the two women — one framed as cold and institutional, the other as warm and modern, or vice versa depending on whose supporters you consulted — had been a consistent driver of media coverage since Meghan joined the Royal Family.
The coronation in May 2023 had been a particularly charged event in that narrative: Meghan did not attend, Harry appeared briefly and left quickly, and Kate’s presence and grace under the scrutiny of a global audience had generated coverage that was overwhelmingly, uncomplicatedly positive.
The jam launch, in the reading of those who saw it as a competitive move, was an attempt to reclaim some of that attention.
After the coronation, the public discourse about the two women had tilted noticeably in Kate’s favour.
Meghan’s Netflix lifestyle show was still in production.
Her other ventures were not generating the cultural traction that the Sussex brand had once reliably produced.
A product launch — however modest — was a way to create a news moment that kept Meghan’s name in the conversation alongside Kate’s, even if the contrast between the contexts was not one that necessarily flattered Meghan.
Those who know Meghan’s team and its approach to media strategy describe a sophisticated operation that thinks carefully about timing and placement.
The decision to release the jam before Trooping the Colour was not, according to sources familiar with the brand’s planning, accidental.
Every significant announcement from the Sussex operation is placed within a media calendar that accounts for what else is happening in the news cycle.
The royal calendar — Trooping, the State Opening of Parliament, Christmas, the anniversary of Diana’s death — is part of that calculation.
The Sun’s analysis of the pattern goes further, cataloguing a series of instances in which Sussex announcements or content releases appeared to land alongside major royal events involving the Wales family.
Some of these instances were clearly coincidental.
Others were less easy to dismiss as accident.
The pattern, taken as a whole, suggested to several royal correspondents an operation that was conducting a sustained, low-level media competition with the family it had left — not enough to be openly confrontational, but consistent enough to be noticed.
Kate Middleton‘s response to the jam launch, to the degree that there was one, was to simply proceed with Trooping the Colour and allow the event to speak for itself.
Photographs from the ceremony — Kate on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, surrounded by the royal family, in military-adjacent green, with her three children beside her — generated the kind of coverage that no lifestyle brand launch could meaningfully compete with.
The Princess of Wales on the balcony of Buckingham Palace is not a media story that can be drowned out by a jar of strawberry jam.
Meghan’s supporters pushed back on the timing-as-rivalry narrative, arguing that it reflected the media’s tendency to frame everything about the two women in competitive terms.
The launch of a lifestyle brand’s first product is a business decision, they pointed out, not a personal attack on the Princess of Wales.
The fact that it happened near a royal event was, in this reading, either coincidence or simply the result of operating in the same news cycle as the family Meghan had once been part of.
The question of intent is, ultimately, unanswerable from the outside.
Meghan and her team have not confirmed or denied that the Trooping timing was deliberate.
What is documented is the pattern: the launch, the timing, the reaction from royal experts, and the counter-narrative that Kate’s graceful dominance of the event provided.
Whether the jam launch was a competitive move or a coincidence, it produced the result that competitive moves often produce — the other side’s performance was evaluated in its light, and by that standard, Kate won.
American Riviera Orchard subsequently expanded its product line and attracted significant attention as a lifestyle brand with Meghan’s name and aesthetic behind it.
The jam itself, for all the column inches it generated, was always secondary to the brand-building exercise of which it was a part.
But the brand-building exercise cannot be entirely separated from the personal competition it was conducted against, or from the observation of royal watchers that Meghan’s re-emergence as a commercial presence was timed, at least partly, in relation to what Kate was doing.
The rivalry between Meghan Markle and Kate Middleton has been one of the defining media stories of the past decade, and like all such stories, it has been fed by both genuine tension and substantial media confection.
The jam launch episode sits somewhere between the two — a genuine business decision, likely made with an eye on the competitive landscape, that became symbolic of a rivalry that neither woman has officially acknowledged but that continues to shape how both are covered and understood.
In that sense, the jam did its job.
Whether that was the right job for it to do is another question entirely.
Kate Middleton, for her part, has never commented on the episode.
She attended Trooping the Colour, stood on the balcony, and waved at the crowds.
The photographs circled the globe.
And in California, the strawberry jam sat in its elegant jars and waited for the world to come around to it — which, by most measures, it eventually did, though on a timeline and scale that bore little comparison to the event it had been launched to compete with.
