Sam Bompas and Harry Parr go back a long way. According to Sam, they first met in the “rejects” orchestra at Eton when they were 13 years old. Describing themselves as ‘jellymongers’, they set up Bompas and Parr in 2007, initially as something fun to do at the weekends.

At the time Harry was in his final year of an architectural degree and Sam was working for a financial marketing firm. It all started when Harry invited a few friends over for a dinner party. After days of cooking a curry, meticulously infusing all the flavours, it was the jelly dessert that stole the show. The reaction was “wooow, what a jelly” and the rest, as they say, is history.

Sam and Harry don’t mess about when they have an idea. Following the success of the dinner party they set about making a plan. Within a week they’d agreed the name, opened a company bank account, set up the website and designed the logo.

The following weekend, they pitched their idea to the traders’ committee at Borough Market, with a view to opening a stall. With the rush of a new idea they went in with an optimistic “Hey! We’ve set up a jelly company”, only to be met with a blunt rejection.

Not giving up, they went off on a “whole jelly adventure”, pitching up to places and giving jelly away for free. Eventually they caught the eye of Sunday Times food columnist Lydia Slater. From there came their big break. Lydia wrote in her article that they could do jellies in any shape and format. With the gauntlet firmly laid down they were asked to recreate Warwick Castle, actual size, out of jelly. You don’t need to be a structural engineer to figure out that was never going to happen, but, seizing the opportunity, Sam and Harry proposed an alternative idea that they eventually went for.

It ended up being a 12-course Victorian breakfast involving 1,000 pieces of cutlery and 3 professional kitchens for 20 guests. It’s a pretty remarkable thing to pull off, especially considering the first time they visited the venue they couldn’t figure out how to turn on the oven. On meeting Sam and Harry you soon realise they’re not the type to be easily phased.

For some it might seem foolhardy, but according to Sam, the secret is in the precision-like organisation. Everything was planned to the finest detail. They did architectural diagrams for every one of the 12 courses and mapped out every footstep for each and every waiter, including cheat sheets telling them where they had to go. Nothing was left to chance. After weeks of sleepless nights for Sam and Harry, the event was a huge success.

With increased confidence, Sam and Harry embarked on an even more ambitious project. A Jelly Banquet, held at UCL during the London Festival of Architecture. The evening involved a troop of jelly dancers strutting their stuff around an altar of 1,000 specially commissioned jellies. Many were made as a result of a design competition involving over a 100 of the world’s top architects, including Rogers and Foster. “The night went from serious jelly art show to a lot of jelly silliness and jelly wrestling. We’ve got a brilliant picture of Heston Blumenthal looking really worried that he was going to get dragged in”, says Sam.

What underlines all the fun is months of planning and a huge amount of perseverance. Before work, they would do early morning door drops at architects’ offices and spend their lunch hours on the phone. It was when the event eventually went online and all 2,000 tickets sold out, they knew it was time to quit their day jobs.

According to Sam, that’s when the jellies took off. They’re now working all over the world. This year alone they’ve done installations for San Francisco’s MOMA and the Melbourne Food Festival. They’ve even been on the Martha Stewart show, not to mention Blue Peter.

In the space of a few years, Sam and Harry have achieved something remarkable. They’ve taken a kids’ party treat and made it fashionable again. Even Mark Ronson had a Bompas and Parr jelly as the centrepiece for his 30th birthday party. All the hype and column inches in the press have seen jelly sales in the UK go up 10% last year. Pretty remarkable considering it’s two guys in a small industrial unit (their ‘laboratory’) in South London. They’ve done more for jelly sales in the past few years than the big manufacturers have managed in a generation. What’s even more ironic is there’s no real reason for doing it according to Sam, “apart from the sheer joy”.

Jelly is still the cornerstone of what they do. It’s what they’re famous for, but recently they’ve started looking beyond it into new foodie frontiers. In Willy Wonka style they created the ‘Artisan Chewing Gum Factory’. People were asked to make their own chewing gum from a choice of 40,000 flavours, including beer, curry and, for the more discerning amongst us, white truffle. Then came ‘Alcoholic Architecture’, a walk through a cloud of G&T. And, perhaps the most spectacular, a Robert Adams listed building in Central London filled with 4 tonnes of punch, enough for 25,000 people. The punch bowl took 6 months of planning and was so large the engineers Arup had to make sure the building wouldn’t collapse under the weight of alcohol.

To deliver all this takes a huge amount of planning and research. It’s a big part of what they do. Turning the unimaginable into something real takes serious know-how. Nothing is left to chance. They're incredibly resourceful, collaborating with a range of experts including Dr Ben Seymour a neuroscientist at the Wellcome Institute and, perhaps most worryingly, Dr Andrea Sella, a chemical explosives expert at University College London.

They’re constantly tracking down people, figuring out who the experts are, offering to buy them coffee, asking them what questions they should be asking. You get a sense from these guys that anything is possible. “Some things work, some things don’t. It doesn’t matter”, says Sam. They seem to have an easy acceptance that life’s chaotic and just get on with it. “There’s always a way to do something.”

That’s what’s so impressive about Bompas and Parr. They have the audacity to dream up amazing ideas, the curiosity to figure out how to do it and the pragmatism to make it happen. With that combination, it makes almost anything seems possible.

www.jellymongers.co.uk