Marmalada owners, Alisdair Ross and Sally Duckworth from Wairarapa, won gold for the second year running at the "Marmalade Olympics" in the UK.

A Wairarapa couple are spreading the word that marmalade is not just for toast.

Marmalada​ owners, Alisdair​ Ross and Sally Duckworth create "marmalades with a twist" using ingredients such as, gin, rum, chocolate, coconut and cherry brandy, and urge consumers to use the product in different ways.

People either loved it or loathed it, and associated it with breakfast, Duckworth said.

Their products could be used in variety of ways, including with red and white meat, paired with cheese or stirred into gravy, sauce, yoghurt or icecream.

Read more: Couple wins gold at 'marmalade olympics'

Wellington restaurants had cooked with the marmalade and bars in the capital used it to make cocktails.

Nadia Lim's My Food Bag also ordered jars for its Christmas ham glaze.

"Marmalade with an interesting addition is not a new thing, we are just doing it in an innovative way, extending it beyond the traditional whisky and ginger," she said.

Duckworth spends about 100 hours in her commercial kitchen, perfecting a cocktail-inspired recipe, while Ross labelled the jars and filled them with the hot, sticky concoction.

The company recently hit the sweet spot at the "marmalade olympics" in the UK — and have the gold medals to prove it.

The quirky products won two gold medals and three bronze, at the Dalemain Marmalade Awards, which had 3000 global entrants.

Last year their kumquat with vanilla and grapefruit with mint and white rum marmalades were awarded gold medals.

They also won silver and gold medals at the same awards the previous year, for two prototype, tangelo-based marmalades.

"Only two other entrants got more gold than we did. We understand that we were the top entrant not just from New Zealand but from Australasia," Ross said.

The pair who work full time are trying to juggle the success of their business with busy careers.

Duckworth is a research consultant and wants to continue combining the two jobs she is passionate about, while Ross, a barrister in Wellington, would happily trade court for the kitchen if the opportunity presented itself.

There was still an untapped market in New Zealand and little competition.

Other companies were making chutneys and jams, whereas they solely focused on marmalade, and their products had more fruit and no pectin or preservatives.

They planned to enter the UK market next year, where they saw "great potential".

They also had interested parties contact them from Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and China.

"It's just a matter of breaking into those markets," Ross said.

The Marmalada brand was launched in 2014 to make the most of a microclimate favourable to citrus at their Langdale Homestead, built in 1884 near Tinui.

"We were inundated by citrus and just started playing around with marmalade and then one day I stumbled on the competition and decided to enter and use it as a benchmark," Ross said.

The eight hectare property has 400 fruit trees, supplemented with fruit from elsewhere in Wairarapa as well as Hawke's Bay and Gisborne.