FFD Food & Drink from Ireland 2015

ov f r e r In c l isl om 50 ud an t su e d he pp s o f e li Ir e n t i e r s la r e nd

A SUPPLEMENT TO

2015-16 Edition

FOOD & DRINK FROM IRELAND

BUTTER CHOCOLATE BALSAMICS SMOKED SALMON CHEESE SPICES PRESERVES CRAFT SPIRITS ICE CREAM BEER BREAKFAST CEREALS TEA IN A S S OC I AT I ON W I T H

To learn more about Ireland’s speciality food and drink producers, speak to Bord Bia – Irish Food Board

Growing the success of Irish food & drink

For more information contact: Gillian Swaine +44 20 7307 3555 Gillian.swaine@bordbia.ie

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Bord Bia – Irish Food Board 201 Great Portland Street London, W1W 5AB

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

www.bordbia.ie

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

WELCOME

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elcome to the 2015-16 Guide to Food & Drink from Ireland, brought to you by the team at Fine Food Digest magazine.

Find a supplier...

It’s our first look at products from the whole island of Ireland since 2013, and ties in with the launch by event organiser Fresh Montgomery of a dedicated Speciality & Fine Food Fair Ireland section in September’s Food & Hospitality Ireland trade show at Citywest in Dublin (see page 5).

In fact, this year’s guide is sponsored jointly by the new show and

by Bord Bia, the Irish food board, which continues to do a great job promoting the best of Irish food & drink in the UK and internationally.

As well as reaching FFD’s regular monthly readership of around 5,500 fine food businesses throughout the UK – delis, farm shops, food halls, and the specialist producers who supply them – this 2015-16 guide is being mailed to around 2,000 retailers and caterers across the island of Ireland.

Like Fresh Montgomery and Bord Bia, we’re keen to help local, regional and speciality producers throughout the British Isles connect with more retail buyers – particularly in independent stores.

It all adds diversity to the range offered by independents at a time when their supermarket competitors are rationalising their ranges.and helps ensure a healthy and sustainable market for small producers.

As regular UK readers will know, FFD is published by the UK’s Guild of Fine Food. As well as representing over 1,200 independent retailers and suppliers of fine food & drink, the Guild organises the annual Great Taste awards – a scheme which has seen an almost disproportionate level of success for producers in the north and south of Ireland in recent years.

And, as you will read on page 5, the Guild has partnered with Fresh Montgomery to include a Great Taste Pavilion in the first • SPECIALITY & FINE FOOD Speciality & Fine Food Fair Ireland FAIR IRELAND PREVIEW – again connecting Irish retailers and chefs with the very best – PAGE 5 products from all corners of the British Isles (and a few from even • Analysis: inside the irish further afield). speciality food market You’ll also find many Great – PAGE 6 Taste winners in the pages of this guide. With more than 50 • A-Z of suppliers producers featured, it’s not quite – STARTS ON PAGE 9 an A-Z of Irish food – but not far off, stretching from Abernethy butter to White’s porridge oats, and taking in cheeses and chocolates, cider and spice mixes, beer, bread and much more along the way.

Look out for innovative lines like Vera Miklas’s modelling chocolates, aimed at the burgeoning home-baking and food kits market, alongside Irish classics like smoked salmon from Ewings, Quinlans and the Burren Smokehouse – the last of those a Top 50 Foods winner in Great Taste 2013.

It’s a solid representation of the high-end foods for which the Irish are famed – and remember you can meet many of these producers in person at Speciality & Fine Food Fair Ireland.

ABERNETHY BUTTER BARONSCOURT WILD GAME BEEACTIVE BROIGHTER GOLD

Inside

Mick Whitworth Editor, Fine Food Digest

A S UPPLEMENT TO

EDITORIAL editorial@gff.co.uk Editor: Mick Whitworth Deputy editor: Michael Lane Art director: Mark Windsor Contributors: Hilary Armstrong, Arabella Mileham, Lynda Searby

ADVERTISING advertise@gff.co.uk Sales manager: Sally Coley Advertisement sales: Becky Stacey, Ruth Debnam Published by Great Taste Publications Ltd and the Guild of Fine Food Ltd

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Fine Food Digest is published 11 times a year and is available on subscription for £45pa inclusive of post and packing.

GENERAL ENQUIRIES Tel: 00 44 (0)1747 825200 Fax: 00 44 (0)1747 824065 info@gff.co.uk www.gff.co.uk Guild of Fine Food, Guild House, 23b Kingsmead Business Park, Gillingham, SP8 5FB UK

Printed by: Blackmore, Dorset, UK © Great Taste Publications Ltd and The Guild of Fine Food Ltd 2015. Reproduction of whole or part of this magazine without the publisher’s prior permission is prohibited.

The opinions expressed in articles and advertisements are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher. The publisher cannot accept responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs or illustrations.

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BURREN BALSAMICS BURREN SMOKEHOUSE BUTLERS CHOCOLATES CARRIGALINE FARMHOUSE CHEESE

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CASHEL FARMHOUSE CHEESEMAKERS CLOUGHBANE FARM SHOP CONNEMARA SMOKEHOUSE COOLEENEY FARM DANETTE’S MAGIC

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DART MOUNTAIN CHEESE DITTY’s BAKERY DONEGAL RAPESEED OIL ERIN GROVE PRESERVES EWINGS SEAFOODS

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EVA PARIS FLAHAVAN’S FLOSSIE’s FUDGE GALWAY HOOKER BREWERY GLASTRY FARM

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GREEN SAFFRON HORGAN’s delicatessen supplies hughes craft distillers IMPROPER BuTTER IRWIN’S bakery keen nutrition

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KILbeggan organic foods the lismore food company LONG MEadow cider maria lucia bakes nusli

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óhartagáin handcrafted our daily bread pandora bell passion preserved peppup pizzado

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quinlan’s seymours of cork

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RADEMon ESTATE DISTILLERY SPICE DEVILS St Tola Goat’s CHeese SUKI TEA

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TAMNAGH FOODS THE LITTLE MILK CO toons bridge dairy

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VERA MIKLAS west cork pies white’s OATS

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Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

preview: SPECIALITY & FINE FOOD FAIR IRELAND

Specialities on show It’s the biggest and best-known high-end food show in the UK. Now the Speciality & Fine Food Fair has come to Ireland – with a firm focus on Great Taste.

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uyers from delis, farm shop and food halls in Great Britain pencil one date into their diaries without fail at the start of every year.

The Speciality & Fine Food Fair, staged at London’s Olympia in early September, has long been the chief annual gathering for buyers and sellers of regional and speciality food and drink.

This year, for the first time, show organiser Fresh Montgomery is taking the brand across the water to Dublin, building a Speciality & Fine Food Fair Ireland ‘show within a show’ into mid-September’s Food & Hospitality Ireland exhibition (formerly SHOP), at Citywest from September 16-17.

“In our third year of running Food & Hospitality Ireland, we planned to grow the food offering at the event, and tap into Ireland’s much admired reputation for quality artisan produce,” explains Toby Wand, MD of Fresh Montgomery.

“But reflecting on this, it’s clear we already have an amazing highend food event in out portfolio – Speciality & Fine Food Fair – so we set about introducing some of the magic of Speciality to Ireland.”

It may be a while before SFFF Ireland can match the 700 or so exhibitors that nowadays set out their stalls at Olympia, but Fresh Montgomery is taking the Irish market seriously.

Not only has it co-sponsored this FFD guide to Irish speciality food & drink, which has been mailed to 2,000 Irish retailers and caterers to highlight the Citywest event – but it has partnered with FFD’s publisher, the Guild of Fine Food, to put a Great Taste Pavilion at the heart of the new show.

The Guild, the trade body for the UK speciality market, is welcoming two dozen Great Taste awardwinning companies to the pavilion, blending top quality food & drink from the Republic with one-, twoand three-star Great Taste winners from Northern Ireland and mainland Great Britain.

“Year on year, the participation of producers from both Ireland and Northern Ireland in Great Taste has grown significantly, and we have numerous outstanding three-star winners,” said Guild managing director John Farrand.

“Ireland is now firmly established

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Two shows under one roof Visitors to the first Speciality & Fine Food Fair Ireland can also take in the wider Food & Hospitality Ireland show.

Alongside dozens more exhibitors, special features of FHI include The Profit Shop, run jointly by the Convenience Stores & Newsagents Association and the Associated Craft Butchers of Ireland.

A fully functional, interactive shop built on the show floor will highlight how retailers can maximise the profitability of their shop through the latest products, services and technologies along with effective design and signage.

Other attractions include the Spotlight Stage, featuring demos from Restaurants Association of Ireland chefs and a number of keynote speakers.

as a fine food destination, and we’re looking forward to connecting our Great Taste winners with serious buyers from Ireland and the UK.” Those taking part in the Great Taste Pavilion include Glastry Farm Ice Cream, Suki Tea and the Burren Smokehouse, which will be familiar to buyers throughout the island of Ireland. But alongside them will be less well-known names, such as Reading-based Tenuta Marmorelle, which imports specialities from Puglia, Italy, including the two-star winning Zero extra virgin olive oil.

Outside the Great Taste area, Irish companies naturally dominate the Speciality & Fine Food Fair exhibitor list. They include the Cork-based Chocolate Shop, which claims to offer Ireland’s biggest biggest range of quality chocolates from around the world. Its owner, Niall Daly, is already an established exhibitor at Food & Hospitality Ireland, which he says has become an essential part of his calendar.

But he adds: “This year, we‘re looking forward to the new addition to the show – the Speciality & Fine Food Fair Ireland – which we know from the London show is a marvellous focus for premium fine food and for information exchange.”

What’s on show at Citywest?

Exhibitors at the new Speciality & Fine Food Fair Ireland include: Aunt Linda’s Teas Ballyhoura Mountain Mushrooms Bonnie Yau’s Food Products Cashel Blue Corleggy Cheese Cotswold Fayre

Full Fill Co Glastry Farm Ice-Cream Invest NI Kanut Ltd t/a Bayern Beers Kestrel Foods

www.foodhospitality.ie

In a nutshell: What? Speciality & Fine Food Fair Ireland is part of the two-day Food & Hospitality Ireland event When? September 16-17 2015 Where? Dublin’s Citywest Hotel, Conference & Event Centre is located off junction 3a of the N7 Dual Carriageway, 20 minutes from both Dublin International Airport and the city centre. www.foodhospitality.ie @FHIexhibition

Limerick City Enterprise Board Local Enterprise Office Clare Long Meadow Cider Nutri-Snax Nutritics Red Dog Artisan Foods Rosie & Jim Gourmet Chicken Products Satellite & TV Services t/a Aertec Skoff Pies Solaris Botanicals Suki Teahouse Taste Kerry Tenuta Marmorelle The Burren Smokehouse The Chocolate Shop The Purple Pantry The Real Pork Crackling Company Tideford Organic Foods Tipperary Food Producers Network West Cork Pies Yellow Door

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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Analysis: inside the irish market

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f you’re seeking evidence that Ireland’s speciality market is recovering from the country’s brutal financial crisis, which began in 2008 and only eased in late 2013, just look at the volume of new entrants.

“Back in 2012, the number of small food companies was around 400,” says Eileen Bentley, entrepreneurship manager at Bord Bia, the Irish food board. “Now it is about 750 and growing.

“It has led to a really vibrant feel in the sector and at the same time there has been a very strong push and demand for local food at the consumer level.”

Bentley is not expecting a slowdown any time soon. The overall Irish food & drink sector defied the recession by growing 42% in the period, and Bord Bia’s consumer survey, PERIscope, showed the Republic’s appetite for locally produce is now second only to that of France.

This surge is in part due to farmers and producers looking for new revenue streams through diversification, in part the growing demand from consumers. But the Irish Government’s vision in promoting and supporting food and drink firms has also been an important factor.

“It’s been the most resilient sector in Ireland and has continued to grow and get huge support from the Government,” says Michelle Butler, general manager of Bord Bia. This support has been practical, from working directly with smaller producers to running training workshops on best practice. “There has been a huge focus from Bord Bia in attracting entrepreneurs and channelling that entrepreneurial flair into food and drink,” says Butler.

“As a result, UK buyers are seeing Irish producers coming out with more innovation.”

The UK, she explains, is still the first port of call for Irish producers outside their home market, and accounts for around 40% of Irish food and drinks exports, worth around €4.2bn. Although it is hard to gauge how much of this goes into fine food stores, a recent report cited by Bentley estimates €400-600m was sold into the UK speciality market (based on the output of small producers turning over €3m or less).

There’s never been a better time for Irish artisan, premium and specialist producers to approach the UK, Butler suggests. There’s “huge interest” among UK trade buyers in sourcing the quality products with a real point of difference while, at the same time, innovation has been coming to the fore in Ireland – witness many of the products featured in this Guide.

“Producers have studied the UK market closely and really identified the gaps, and they’ve worked hard to find a point of difference,” she says.

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artisaNS and Innovators

Ireland took a hard knock from its five-year recession, but its food sector proved resilient. Now, aided by a weak Euro, its speciality producers are targeting the UK afresh, as ARABELLA MILEHAM hears from Irish food board Bord Bia.

As examples, Butler points out brands like Chilly Moo (a healthy frozen yoghurt for kids), SynerChi Kombucha, Blast & Wilde herb butters and Highbank Orchard, which produces an organic orchard syrup (“Ireland’s answer to maple syrup”) as well as cider and gin made with its own produce.

In the Republic, with its very different retail make-up (fewer specialist delis and farm shops, for example, to sustain artisan producers) multiples are taking an increasingly large share of speciality food and drink sales.

But when it comes to exporting to the UK, it is independents who

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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the uk is still the first port of call for irish producers outside their home market, and accounts for around 40% of food & drink exports

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are the target. And events such as the new Speciality & Fine Food Fair Ireland in Dublin, and Marketplace – a mega international ‘meet-thebuyer’ event organised by Bord Bia for Irish food producers – have proved a great opportunity for smaller companies to present something different to the speciality sector.

“Small producers launching new products tend to get a better hearing from speciality retailers,” Butler says. “They’re are actively looking for new products and will list something innovative because they want to keep things fresh, and keep shoppers excited.

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Irish retail market changes shape as multiples take firmer grip on speciality sales

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“The challenges in the top four retailers in the UK have made it difficult for suppliers to actually get in front of a buyer. And there has also been range consolidation, so the multiples are risk averse when it comes to buying innovative products.”

Supplying smaller, single-site retailers means Irish producers can roll out products gradually and gain traction in a far more controlled way, while the shorter lead times mean independents can make quicker decisions and support brands better. At the same time, these trading relationships don’t suffer from the short-termism of supermarket business.

“A lot of suppliers have spent time building strong relationships with [independent] retailers and, because there isn’t that churn of buyers, they are longer-term,” Butler notes.

However, the relatively fragmented nature of the UK speciality market does bring other considerations.

“Although producers may have more customers, and there are more opportunities, it’s about getting enough of those listings and keeping the momentum going,” Butler points out.

“Irish producers have a good reputation in the UK, and the proximity to market helps. But it can be an expensive stretch of water to cross – there is a challenge of A supplement to Fine Food Digest

logistics and getting products to the market, especially to smaller independent food shops and delis, where returns can be a lot lower.

So it’s about managing stock levels, and the fact that you don’t have economies of scale.”

Another challenge is managing customers across the Irish Sea after they have been secured. “Once you have a listing, you need to support it – it’s crucial,” Butler asserts.

“Products won’t sell themselves, so you have to invest in sampling or marketing support.”

Irish producers are increasingly working together to try to minimise their export costs, pooling resources and know-how through wider producer groups such as Irish Cheese Direct, which represents seven farmhouse cheese-makers from around Ireland.

“When there are only one or two people in the company they obviously want to focus on what they are good at – production and innovating new products,” says Butler.

“So smaller producers are coming together to leverage their numbers, appointing one account manager who can liaise with potential customers for them all, and maybe an accountant to deal with that side of things.”

This not only benefits the producers, but also independent retail buyers who only have to deal with one person to source a

selection of products.

This approach has been “gathering momentum” over the past two years. Cork now has an established producer network, while another such group from the west coast of Ireland is set to launch in 2015.

Bord Bia supports co-operatives such as these through a professional fellowship project, appointing a Masters student to work with the group for 12 months to help them build contacts and grow their businesses.

And there is one other factor that could help these producers gain traction in the UK: the decline of the euro, which is making exports more viable for Irish producers who may have been priced out before.

“The huge upset of the weakening euro is giving competitiveness to Irish producers,” Butler says, “so they are able to offer good quality products at a more competitive price.”

Provided Irish suppliers aren’t buying raw materials in pounds Sterling, it’s also a win for them, with a chance to clock up more contracts in the UK. So it’s is a good time to look at Ireland for a number of reasons, adds Butler – with a bonus that products from the Republic are, for the time being at least, more competitive than at any time in recent years. www.bordbia.ie

he explosion in the number of smaller, artisan producers in Ireland since 2012 has coincided with a change to the domestic retail landscape, according to Bord Bia’s Eileen Bentley.

“Before 2012, the majority [of local products] were sold through the smaller, independent retail sector, but alongside the rise in consumer demand for local food is the expectation that consumers can get these at their national retailer, including Dunnes, Tesco and SuperValu,” Bentley says.

“As a result, a lot of the multiples will have a huge emphasis on local food on their shelves.”

This emphasis is backed by practical initiatives. For example SuperValu runs the Food Academy Programme in collaboration with Bord Bia and the Local Enterprise Office Network, which works with start-ups to help them get products on shelves locally and then nationally.

Having a greater footprint and allowing producers the opportunity to grow in a controlled way has resulted in a higher percentage of artisan products on shelf, Bentley points out – but there have been implications for smaller shops.

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MANY INDEPENDENT STORES HAVE DECIDED TO GO FOR A PARTICULAR SECTION OF THE MARKET TO ENSURE THEY’RE OFFERING SOMETHING YOU CAN’T BUY IN THE SUPERMARKET

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“The independent market has been very challenged, especially during the tough time of the recession,” she admits, pointing to the rise of the discounters and the accompanying price wars.

“But it has led to a degree of reinvention, and many independent stores have decided to go for a particular section of the market to ensure they’re offering something you can’t buy in the local supermarket.”

This has required more openness between shop and producer to minimise crossover with supermarket ranges and ensure smaller stores can still offer something different.

“Notwithstanding the challenges, many have managed to grow their business by moving into online and ecommerce,” says Bentley.

“They are also reinventing themselves in other ways, running pop-up shops for example,” she adds.

“It has demonstrated the agility and creativity within the sector.”

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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Why Horgan’s Delicatessen Supplies is the Secret Ingredient Horgan’s New York Style Pastrami

Horgan’s Honey Baked Ham (boneless)

Recipe for our own brand meats comes from Michael Horgan who is the third generation of a butchering family founded by his grandfather in Mitchelstown, Co Cork Ireland All meats locally sourced from quality Irish farms

Horgan’s Honey Baked Ham

“Finders of Fine Foods”

Horgan’s Delicatessen Supplies Mitchelstown Co Cork, Ireland Tel: +353 (0)25 41200 www.horgans.com

f o s r e c u Prod m a e r C e c I y r u x Lu

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Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

A-Z GUIDE TO SUPPLIERS

mADE IN IRELAND North and south, there’s an ever-growing range of Irish specialities challenging for space in premium independent stores. Here, FFD writers HILARY ARMSTRONG, MICHAEL LANE, LYNDA SEARBY and MICK WHITWORTH uncover more than 50 producers showing the breadth of products on offer.

Broighter Gold www.broightergold.co.uk

It doesn’t get butter than this

The number of Northern Irish rapeseed oil brands has proliferated in recent years, but growing a single variety of oilseed on soil unique to its farm has enabled Broighter Gold to maintain a point of difference.

“This makes our rapeseed oil milder, cleaner in taste and not as nutty, and it has a very rich golden colour,” says founder Leona Kane.

Since launching its original cold pressed oil almost a decade ago, Broighter Gold has branched out into infused oils, with black truffle and black truffle & wild porcini mushroom two of its newest creations.

The oils are stocked by independents throughout Northern Ireland and the Republic, including Avoca and Brown Thomas, and will be on sale in La Grande Epicerie in Paris this Christmas.

Abernethy Butter

www.abernethybuttercompany.com

When we wrote about Abertheny Butter in 2013’s Food and Drink from Ireland supplement it seemed things couldn’t get any better for Will and Allison Abertheny.

Northern Ireland’s only handmade butter makers had become hot property on the UK food scene, attracting praise from chefs such as Heston Blumenthal and Marcus Wareing and securing a listing with Fortnum & Mason.

Two years on, the business is still on a roll. The husband and wife duo was runner-up in the BBC Food and Farming Awards’ best food producer category – the first time a Northern Ireland food producer has been in the final – and has been selected as one of 50 “food stars” from across the UK

by Defra.

The couple, who were single-handedly churning and packing several hundred rolls of butter every day, now employ three members of staff to cope with the growth in demand that has ensued. They have also expanded into bigger premises, enabling them to ramp up production to one and a half tonnes of butter per month, which equates to 700 rolls per day.

“We supply over 150 shops and restaurants across the UK and Ireland and these figures are still growing,” says Allison.

The producer has also developed several new products, including handsmoked butter, dulse & sea-salt butter and smoked bone marrow butter.

“We have deliberately chosen unusual flavours to give our customers something different to the usual flavoured butters that they find on supermarket shelves,” explains Allison.

But they are still making the butter by hand, using cream sourced from a local farm in the Lagan Valley in Co Antrim. All that is added is a pinch of salt.

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Baronscourt Wild Game

www.barons-court.com

In the culinary world, Baronscourt Estate is best known for its wild venison. Since 1920, Japanese Sika deer have roamed wild on the estate, which nestles in the foothills of the Sperrin mountains in Co Tyrone.

Baronscourt’s Sika thrive on the estate’s natural flora and fauna, feeding on myrtle bog, ryegrass and saplings and naturally free of additives or growth promoters. This yields a lean and succulent meat, said to have the lowest calories and cholesterol levels of any red meat.

The estate’s wild venison is also a sustainable source of meat: an annual deer count is arranged by trained stalkers who assess the population and its general health. Selective culling balances the breeding population.

The one downside to this wild game is its seasonality – it is only available between October and March.

BeeActiv

www.beeactiv.ie www.ivyhoney.com

Founded in August 2014 by two beekeepers, Beeactiv produces premium Irish honey and bee products that harness “the natural healing power of plants”. Dr Michael Geary tends to his bees in the Golden Vale area of Tipperary while Conan McDonnell’s beehives are in the village of Adare, Co Limerick.

Both experienced chemists, Geary and McDonnell are keen explorers of the science behind herbal plants and the potential therapeutic benefits of bee pollen and propolis.

The pair’s raw ivy honey – produced by bees foraging on ivy flowers in the autumn – is said to remedy coughs while its Irish Blossom honey is a well-suited to everyday eating, particularly at breakfast.

BeeActiv is also working on an Irish honey lozenge, which will be the first of its kind in the country.

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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A-Z GUIDE TO SUPPLIERS Carrigaline Farmhouse Cheese www.carrigalinecheese.com

Burren Balsamics www.burrenbalsamics.com

What started as a charity fundraiser has turned into a growing artisan food business for Susie Hamilton Stubber and Susan Robinson.

Burren Balsamics, which makes a range of fruit-infused vinegars, was born after the long-time friends decided to sell some flavoured balsamics to raise money for cancer care charity Marie Curie.

That was during Christmas 2013, and the feedback from family and friends was so positive that within months the pair – both experienced caterers – had joined the growing ranks of Northern Ireland’s kitchen table entrepreneurs.

Based at Ballynahinch in Co Down, Burren Balsamics uses only natural whole fruits to flavour a four-strong range – strawberry, Bramley apple, blueberry and blackcurrant – supplied in 250ml bottles and in gift packs.

In spring 2015 the small firm linked up with West Sussex-based Sara Young to market the vinegars in South East England – its first ‘export’ venture.

The O’Farrell family produces waxed semi-hard cows’ milk cheese at the ancestral farm on the East Cork coast.

Since 1987, Pat and Ann O’Farrell have pursued the perfection of just one unique recipe – a cheese with small, evenly spaced air holes, a pale yellow hue and a lingering creamy, flinty flavour.

Since the creation of the signature Carrigaline Farmhouse Cheese, O’Farrell has also added five variations: beech-wood smoked, garlic & herb, cranberry, blueberry and dillisk seaweed cheeses.

Each stage of the cheese-making process is carried out by hand, even the wax coating of each cheese, and no artificial additives or preservatives are used.

Today, Carrigaline Farmhouse Cheese can be found in Irish stores nationwide and in select outlets across America, Germany, Italy, UK, United Arab Emirates and France.

The O’Farrell’s eldest son Padraig has now joined the business to build on the success of the past 28 years.

The ‘ART AND CRAFT’ oF SMOKING S

us at ee & iality Spec od Fair o F Fine land Ire

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Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

Butlers Chocolates www.butlerschocolates.com

Butlers Chocolates has taken inspiration from the dessert trolley for its latest assortment, Butlers dessert menu, launched earlier this year.

The eight chocolates in the collection are inspired by famous puddings: café mocha, red velvet, sticky toffee, crème brûlée, orange bombe, lemon parfait, hazelnut brownie and raspberry panna cotta.

Luxury boxed assortments might be the mainstay of this Dublin chocolatier’s business, but it also does a healthy trade in filled and solid chocolate bars, toffees, fudges and hot chocolate. Then there is the Butlers Chocolate Café concept which has seen the opening of 18 cafés in the Republic of Ireland since 1998.

BURREN SMOKEHOUSE www.burrensmokehouse.ie

The Burren Smokehouse in pretty Lisdoonvarna is an essential stop on the Burren Food Trail, a gastro-tourism initiative that brings hungry tourists to the wild landscape of The Burren on Ireland’s west coast.

The high salinity and humidity of the air in this Atlantic setting contributes to the taste and the texture of the smokehouse’s organic salmon, according to its Swedish co-founder Birgitta Curtin. But that’s just one factor that makes the 26-year-old business stand out from the pack.

Burren Smokehouse does things the traditional way, following a recipe and patented cold-smoking process developed by Curtin’s husband and business partner Peter in 1989. “We see it as an art and a craft, as opposed to mass production”, she says.

However, it was their not-so-traditional seaweed-marinated smoked salmon that made it into the Top 50 Foods at Great Taste 2013. Their hot-smoked salmon and honey-infused cold-smoked salmon picked up three stars apiece that year too.

The umami-packed, seaweed-flecked Top 50 winner ticks the “local food” box twice over, uniting as it does seaweed hand-harvested off the Clare coast with organic salmon from the same waters.

Birgitta Curtin, chair of Slow Food Clare, hopes for similar success from this year’s new recipes, including honey, whiskey & fennel and a Scandi-influenced beetroot cure.

Burren Smokehouse’s leading line is its unadorned oak-smoked salmon.

This is made chiefly with Irish organic farmed salmon, although it also smokes around 300 wild fish each year. The product is on-shelf at Fortnum & Mason, whose own-brand smoked salmon is produced by the Curtins, as well as Harrods and Selfridges in London, Dean & DeLuca in New York and KaDeWe in Berlin.

The Curtins’ visitor centre brings in some 30,000 international tourists a year, helping the salmon find its way to France (a huge market for the smokehouse), the US and increasingly the UK. Much is sold through private mail order and as corporate gifts. The latter are seen as huge areas of opportunity but the Curtins’ goal now is to tackle the “challenging”matter of distribution and grow a network of smaller delis and other independents in the UK. Burren’s big projects for 2015 will prepare the ground for this, with a new and improved website, plus a rebranding designed to “bring the packaging up another notch”.

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Kennedy Bacon is a family run company located in Omagh, County Tyrone providing high quality dry cured bacon at a keen price. The Kennedy family have been farming in the scenic hills of Glenhordial since the 1940’s with years of experience rearing and fattening of pigs.

The Kennedy Bacon has no water added and the bacon tastes as it should, savoury, yummy and moreish. It really is bacon at its best!

Email: info@kennedybacon.co.uk · Tel: 07818605689 @AndroiMarian /kennedydrycuredbacon www.kennedybacon.co.uk

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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Irish Artisan Hand Made Ready to Eat Savouries

Pork Pies, Scotch Eggs, Pasties, Pate, Terrines & Savoury Tarts. Ready to eat or ready to re-heat.

Vegetarian & Gluten Free options available. All products, genuinely hand-made in small batches from the best Irish free-range ingredients.

For more information call 087 359 3905 or email info@westcorkpies.com www.westcorkpies.com

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Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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A supplement to Fine Food Digest

A-Z GUIDE TO SUPPLIERS Connemara Smokehouse www.smokehouse.ie

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us at ee & iality c Spe od Fair o F Fine land Ire

Cashel Farmhouse Cheesemakers www.cashelblue.com

Cashel Blue is the original subtle Irish blue, created in 1984 by the Grubbs of Tipperary. This twice Great Taste three-star award-winner is matured for a minimum of two months on the Grubb family’s 200 acre farm before being exported to cheese counters around the world.

Other cheeses by Cashel Farmhouse Cheesemakers include 2015 French super-gold winner Crozier Blue and its blue cheese spread, Cashel Cream Cheese.

In 2014, Cashel Farmhouse Cheesemakers forged a more direct route to the UK speciality food market via cheese producer co-operative Irish Cheese Direct, whose members include The Little Milk Company, Milleens, St Tola, Carrigaline, Wicklow Farmhouse Cheese and Carrigbyrne.

The arrangement gives UK retailers the option of ordering a mixed selection of Irish farmhouse cheese within a 12-day turnaround.

Distribution is organised via Faulkners.

Located on the edge of Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way in Ballyconneely, Galway, the Connemara Smokehouse produces an array of smoked seafoods, including traditional kippers, smoked mackerel, wild smoked salmon and wild smoked tuna.

All of its fish is caught in an environmentally friendly way, lightly cured and smoked to the Roberts family’s unique recipes.

Owned and run by the Roberts since 1979, the smokehouse is one of the oldest in the west of Ireland and has a number of Great Taste awards and an international Coq d’Or award to its name.

The Roberts family personally manages every aspect of the business from obtaining the best quality Irish salmon and line-caught tuna, to handpreparing each fish with only natural ingredients.

Not just a chip OFF the old BLOCK Cooleeney Farm www.cooleeney.com

The Irish market was full of hard block cheeses in the ’80s, so Cooleeney Farm founder Breda Maher decided to make a soft camembert-style instead.

After taking a cheese course in 1984 at University College Cork, Maher went into production in 1986 using milk from her family’s own herd of pedigree Friesians, which graze the Tipperary pastures.

Today, Cooleeney Farm makes both hard and soft cows’ milk cheeses as well as flavoured varieties and goats’ milk cheeses using milk supplied by a local farmer. Each one of its 12 varieties is hand-made and matured by a team of cheese-makers on the farm.

The company’s latest cheeses include Ruby, a soft cheese washed in red ale from The White Gypsy brewery, which has an earthy aroma, velvety texture and a distinct malt flavour.

It has also developed two smoked cheeses: a smoked Tipperary brie and the semi-hard crumbly Smoked Tipperary Orchard.

Danette’s Magic www.danettesfeast.com

Having closed the doors to her awardwinning Co Carlow restaurant Danette’s Feast years ago, Danette Milne has returned to the food world with a range of small-batch sauces, dressings and dips.

Among her creations is Moroccan Gold hummus, featuring Milne’s own homemade blend of spices and her red onion marmalade. The California native also makes cashew nut pesto, sundried tomato & olive tapenade, wild Atlantic smoked mackerel paté and black pepper sauce, made with Nori seaweed and smoked bacon.

She is now working on a number of chutneys and relishes.

Cloughbane Farm Shop www.cloughbanefarm.com

Co Tyrone’s Cloughbane Farm Shop has been making traditional pies and other home-cooked food since it was established in 2004 and the last decade has seen it rack up some 13 Great Taste awards for its products.

Run by the Robinson family, the Northern Irish business has grown from the farmhouse kitchen into a BRC-approved cookroom on site to cater for demand from other retailers. All of its pies – including award winners like chicken, ham & leek, savoury mince and steak, onion & mushroom – are made from scratch to recipes passed down to Lorna Robinson through generations.

Having recently undergone a major rebrand, Cloghbane offers its products in striking red packaging that incorporates its traditional farming ethos with its creative and contemporary approach.

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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A-Z GUIDE TO SUPPLIERS Dart Mountain Cheese

www.dartmountaincheese.com

Northern Ireland’s first Alpinestyle cheese is one several cheeses produced by Dart Mountain, based in the rugged Sperrin Mountains in Co Derry.

The pasteurised semi-hard Kilcreen is made to an Emmenthal recipe in small batches by American Julie Hickey on a rural estate she owns with husband Kevin.

Dart Mountain is also one of several Northern Irish cheese-makers to make blue cheese – the semi-soft Sperrin Blue – and also produces the ash coated, semi-hard Dart Mountain Dusk.

A sister business of the Hickey’s granola and chutney producing Tamnagh Foods (see page 27), Dart Mountain has two more cheeses in the pipeline: the ale-washed Banagher Bold and the seven-month-aged Tirkeeran.

Erin Grove Preserves www.eringrove.co.uk

Jayne Paget founded Erin Grove Preserves in 2001 out of a desire to recreate traditional, homemade preserves, chutneys and marmalades, many from recipes handed down through the generations.

There are no artificial colours, preservatives or setting agents in the Enniskillen producer’s products.

The newest additions are four ‘fruits for cheese’: chilli & lime for blue or mature cheese; sour cherry & cracked black pepper for camembert, soft cheese or venison; fig & thyme for mild or soft cheese; and redcurrant, rosemary & juniper berry for cheese, paté or game.

Erin Grove’s products are currently sold through speciality food shops, farmers’ markets and craft fairs.

Donegal Rapeseed Oil www.donegalrapeseedoil.com

It is said there are no harsher critics than locals, but it seems Donegal Rapeseed Oil has succeeded in winning over the people of north west Ireland, who have named the oil “the taste of Donegal”.

The producer attributes the oil’s nutty flavour to the wild Atlantic air and the local soil along the Finn and Foyle rivers, where the seed is grown. The oil is also triple filtered for taste.

Besides its flagship classic rapeseed oil, Donegal Rapeseed Oil has introduced garlic, lemon and chilli flavoured oils, and a honey & mustard dressing.

Ewings Seafoods www.ewingseafoods.com

Ewings Fishmongers on Shankhill Road has become a Belfast institution, supplying the restaurant and hotel trade with fresh fish and seafood and smoking fresh salmon on its premises for the last 100 years.

In that time, little has changed other than relocating the smokery to a purpose-built factory behind the fish shop.

“All we’ve done is bring the 19th century into the 20th century without taking away the passion, knowledge and traditional methods,” says Crawford Ewing. Great grandson of the store’s founder, Crawford is one of the current owners alongside brother Warren and father Walter (pictured), who still works in the business.

“Salmon sides are still hand cut and boned in the same way our family have done for generations, and we still source the fragrant mix of beech and oak wood chips for a traditional full flavour,” adds Crawford.

Ditty’s Bakery www.dittysbakery.com

Ditty’s is a family bakery owned and run by master baker and 2011 UK Baker of the Year Robert Ditty.

Working from two sites in Co Derry, the bakery is renowned for its breads, including traditional Irish lines such as wheaten and brown soda as well as soda farls and potato cakes.

It also produces a broad range of biscuits, pastries, breads and savoury foods, not to mention its internationally reputed oatcakes.

Ditty’s Smoked Oatcakes have recently been selected by Marks & Spencer as part of a range celebrating “forgotten” British Foods.

Denise’s Delicious Gluten Free Bakery www.delicious.ie Despite being one of Ireland’s largest gluten-free bakeries, Denise’s in Cork still makes all of its gluten-, wheat- and dairy-free lines by hand.

Presented in vintage style packaging, its range takes in everything from whole chocolate fudge cakes and coffee gateau to individually wrapped on-the-go treats like chocolate brownies, chocolate tiffin, flapjack and coconut macaroons. www.delicious.ie

serving belfast for four generations 14

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

GENUINE IRISH SMOKED SALMON

IN: ABLE L I A V A , 500g , 200g

100g d& es slice and sid ced unsli

FROM TIDE TO TABLE

The Quinlan family are renowned for their Wild, Organic and Superior Smoked Salmon, Fresh Seafood shops and Seafood restaurants.

With over 60 years’ experience smoking salmon and three Quinlan brothers at the helm, the philosophy of using artisan skills, age-old recipes and the finest fresh ingredients yielded two gold stars for their Wild Smoked Irish Salmon and Organic Smoked Salmon at Great Taste 2014.

Using genuine Wild Irish Salmon that have been caught by sustainable methods, the Wild Salmon are slowly smoked over oak chippings for over 24 hours to release the full flavour to deliver an outstanding tasting Smoked Salmon.

Our Organic Salmon comes from isolated sea farms ensuring that these fish swim at least 14,000 miles over their lifetime resulting in a clean tasting and firm fleshed fish; these are also smoked in the traditional manner.

The Organic Salmon is also available with an Irish Atlantic Sea Salt and Dill Cure.

Put simply, Smoking Salmon is the passion of the Quinlan family.

There is no minimum order and orders are dispatched in insulated boxes for next day delivery. There is no middleman as you are purchasing direct from the smoker and all products are available throughout Ireland and the UK. Call Liam Quinlan: 00353 66 9473131 | liam@kerryfish.com

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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us at ee & iality c Spe od Fair o F Fine land Ire

Galway Hooker Brewery

named after a traditional style of Co Galway fishing boat, moved to a new “state of the art” brewery last year, and has increased its range to include a stout, an amber lager and an India Pale Ale, as well its flagship Galway Hooker Irish pale ale.

Its beers have have won many awards including a gold medal at the Blas na hEireann / Irish Foods Awards in 2014.

www.galwayhooker.ie

Independent artisan brewer Galway Hooker, based in the west of Ireland, says it was the first Irish brewery to launch a pale ale – now the most common style of craft beer in the country.

The company,

PALE ALE THAT launched a fleet of CRAFT BREWs Eva Paris

www.evaparis.co.uk

Tracey Jeffery, director of Eva Paris, first fell in love with French patisserie during a working holiday in France and, in 2012, she returned to the Dordogne to work with a master patissier and learn the art of making macarons.

From her base in Killinchy, Co Down, Jeffery makes her own gluten-free macarons using fruit and locally sourced ingredients. She has already secured a Great Taste one-star award for her raspberry flavour and two stars for the pistachio variety.

2015 has seen Jeffery lengthen her macarons’ shelf life to six weeks as she seeks retail listings.

She will soon be launching dairy-free macarons in some of her flavours and is developing savoury versions, which can be eaten with dessert wines or Champagne.

Flahavan’s

www.flahavans.co.uk

Flahavan’s has been milling oats at the family mill in Kilmacthomas, Co Waterford, for over 200 years. Now in its seventh generation, the Flahavan family sources oats from the rich farmlands in the south east of Ireland and twice mills every oat for a creamy texture and taste.

Their range includes Irish organic porridge oats, Irish porridge oats, Irish quick oats and Irish organic jumbo oats.

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Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

Glastry FARM www.glastryfarm.com

Ten years ago, when Will Taylor began the process of diversification at Glastry Farm, his family’s dairy operation on the Ards Peninsula in County Down, he conducted extensive research into the ice cream market that has stood the test of time.

“It demonstrated very clearly that customers were interested in produce with provenance and were prepared to pay a premium – a very small premium! – for that sort of product,” says Taylor.

That initial research proved equally prescient on the subject of healthy eating, with Taylor seeing demand for “sorbets, sorbets and more sorbets”.

Glastry Farm now produces five water ices for foodservice – lemon, raspberry, blackcurrant, Champagne and apple schnapps – and a pear sorbet in retail packaging, “I think that trend will continue,” he says, predicting that sorbet sales will grow faster than those of his better established ice creams.

For now, however, vanilla ice cream (what else?) remains Glastry Farm‘s best-seller, with yellowman honeycomb in second place. Yellowman, for the uninitiated, is a chewy honeycomb sweet, traditionally sold at the Ould Lammas Fair in Ballycastle every August.

This year Glastry Farm is introducing its yellowman flavour in a 120ml tub with a spoon in the lid. “For delis and good food shops, the ‘take and go’ type product is expanding quite tremendously,” says Taylor.

This is big news for the business, because getting whole yellowman chunks evenly distributed in every pots has involved a £30,000 investment in machinery. “Other manufacturers put the stuff into the pasteuriser, so really you get a flavour of honeycomb but no chunks. We felt we would be cheating our customers if we had one product that had chunks in it and another that had none.”

Also new in the retail range this year, having made the grade on the foodservice side – Glastry Farm’s “well defined progress path“ for new products – are two new flavours: chocolate & salted caramel and white chocolate & wild berry.

Currently Glastry Farm has all-Ireland distribution through Hendersons Food Service, B.D. Foods and La Rousse Foods, but minimal presence in mainland UK. “We’ve seen the first stage in our development as being a strong regional player,” explains Taylor. “That has now moved on to being a strong Irish player. Obviously the next stage in the game is to break into the UK market.”

The work over the coming year is to get distribution and sales staff in place before taking on the UK in 2016.

All this is good news for the regional food fans highlighted by that original market research. Glastry Farm’s Irish flavours – yellowman, Bramley apple schnapps sorbet, Irish whiskey and Belfast Black – should have no trouble crossing borders, so more may well follow.

Flossie’s Fudge www.flossiesfudge.com

Everything that comes out of the doors at Flossie’s Fudge is produced with “real food”. It doesn’t use condensed or evaporated milk, oils or sugar syrups, just fresh dairy products and natural cane sugar.

There are no flavourings or essences. It uses freeze-dried raspberries in its white chocolate & raspberry fudge, real orange zest in the dark chocolate & orange flavour and its coffee & walnut variety is made with real coffee and walnuts.

In 2014, Flossie’s joined an elite band of Northern Irish businesses by winning a three-star Great Taste award for its lightly malted fudge.

Among its latest creations are a Mexican Mole fudge – containing dried fruit, almonds, spices and a kick of chilli – and Irish Sugar Kelp which is both sweet and salty thanks to the chewy bits of honeyed seaweed in it.

Flossie’s Fudge comes in 200g boxes and on fudge boards, which contain a selection of fudges ideal as a sharing dessert at dinner parties and other special events.

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

A-Z GUIDE TO SUPPLIERS

POTATO VODKA IS SURPRISing ‘FIRST’ FOR IRELAND Hughes Craft Distiller www.hughescraftdistillery.com

Given Ireland’s heritage, you might assume that the island would be awash with distillers producing potato-based spirits.

Not so, according to Hughes Craft Distillery, which this summer became the first Irish distiller to produce potato vodka.

“We were looking for a new product to complement our fruit-based liqueurs and discovered that no-one was doing a really good vodka,” explained Barbara Hughes, owner of the Co Antrim distillery. “Distilling potatoes draws on the obvious historic connection,” The vodka is produced from potatoes harvested late in the season, resulting in a “rich and flavourful vodka with a creamy, buttery texture that is smooth enough to enjoy straight”.

Like the producer’s quintuple-distilled real fruit craft liqueurs, the vodka is marketed under the RubyBlue label, and Hughes anticipates similar exporting success.

“We are an export-focused business,” she said. “Our liqueurs are sold in England, Scotland, Australia, Luxembourg and Turkey.”

Improper Butter www.improperbutter.com

Improper Butter is a brand of flavoured butters, combining grass-fed Irish creamery butter with a variety of herbs and ingredients.

Garlic, chilli & basil, sunblushed tomato & basil and real garlic have all been created for “sizzling, slathering, spreading and stirring” with meat, fish, potatoes, pasta and bread.

University friends Elaine Lavery and Hannah O’Reilly founded the company and began selling the butter – devised during Lavery’s gap year as a ski chalet chef – in farmers’ markets in the summer of 2013. It is now available in gourmet food shops across Ireland.

Irwin’s Bakery www.irwinsbakery.com

Irwin’s Bakery has been flying the flag for traditional Irish breads for over 100 years.

To give those in Great Britain a real taste of Ireland, it enlisted the support of the country’s first celebrity chef, Paul Rankin, to create a range of traditional breads.

Starting off with just four lines, the Rankin Selection has since swelled to 12 products, from brown soda bread, stoneground wheaten and buttermilk soda bread, to potato slims, fruit soda bread, barmbrack and Rankin fruit loaf.

Keen Nutrition www.keennutbutter.com

Horgan’s Delicatessen Supplies www.horgans.com

Horgan’s Delicatessen Supplies has been a leading supplier and distributor of speciality and chilled foods in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland since 1977.

As a result of its own-branded award-winning cooked pork and beef, the Horgan’s name is “synonymous with premium quality meats”. The firm also has an extensive catalogue of more than 1,000 fine food items, including farmhouse and Continental cheeses, speciality cooked and fermented meats, paté, salami, antipasto and fresh pasta.

At its 3,500 sq m headquarters in Co Cork, Horgan’s also has three temperature- and humidity-controlled cheese-maturing rooms for its suppliers and its customers as well as offering cheese cutting, waxing and packing services.

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Green Saffron www.greensaffron.com

Using spices sourced from founder Arun Kapil’s family in Moradabad, India, Green Saffron creates spice blends, chutneys and sauces it describes as “building blocks for meals inspired by every world cuisine” .

The Cork company’s sauces, which include korma, jalfrezi and tikka curry, are said to have “turned Ireland onto curries at home like no-one else”.

Unusually for a nut butter producer, there isn’t a peanut in sight at Keen Nutrition. Instead, its range includes almond coconut, hazelnut cinnamon, macadamia white chocolate, pecan maple and, most recently, cashew.

Keen pitches its products, which contain no added salt, sugar or oil, as healthy alternatives to peanut butter and chocolate spreads.

Aimee Beimers launched the venture in her home kitchen in 2012, initially focusing on almond butters.

Today, the company produces 15 types, employs 12 people and operates from a factory in Bangor, Co Down.

Nearly 220 stores across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland now sell Keen nut butter and the brand has recently expanded into the UK after signing distribution deals with Diverse Fine Foods and Greencity Wholefoods.

The butters are currently available in 29 independent retailers in England, including Delilah Fine Foods, the Royal National Theatre Café and Caracoli.

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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Award Winning Pies & Ready Meals including

Savoury Mince Pie

Chicken, Ham & Leek Pie

Turkey & Stuffing Pie

Chicken & Broccoli Bake

For full product & price list contact us today!

Call: 028 8775 8246 or email info@cloughbanefarm.com www. cloughbanefarm.com | 160 Tanderagee Road, Pomeroy, Co. Tyrone, BT70 3HS

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Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

A-Z GUIDE TO SUPPLIERS Miss McKeown’s Emporium of Fine Tea

Kilbeggan Organic Foods

Established in 2013, Miss McKeown’s is a relative newcomer to the speciality scene.

The Bangor start-up has set out to create a tea brand that “embodies Victorian class and sophistication” with its vintage style packaging and selection of full-flavoured black teas, subtle white and green teas and fruit and herbal blends.

Its range of traditional café blends is enriched with quirkier offerings such as Pear Champagne (Chinese white and green teas with hints of pear and strawberry), and Quartermain’s Study – described as being “redolent of peat fires, old books and leather armchairs, with a fiery ginger finish”.

Building on the success of its organic porridge oats, Kilbeggan Organic Foods has introduced a range of handmade cookies baked with them.

Pat Lalor has been farming organically since 1999 at Ballard Organic Farm, a fifth generation family farm located in Kilbeggan, Co Westmeath.

In 2011, the farm began producing its own organic porridge oats, achieving international acclaim for their exceptionally creamy texture.

Its latest venture, handmade oat cookies, are made from Irish ingredients and hand-baked in west Cork by an artisan biscuit maker. They contain Irish certified organic oats, and are additive-free.

There are four flavours – original oat, hazelnut, dulce de leche and chocolate chip – available in a 200g pack, as a 55g jumbo individually wrapped cookie and as 2x20g individually wrapped cookies.

Kilbeggan Organic Foods supplies fine food stores throughout Ireland and has recently begun exporting to the USA.

www.missmckeowns.com

Nusli

www.nusli.com

Every so often, a truly innovative product comes along. Nüsli, which scooped Best New Product at this year’s Irish Food Awards, is one such line.

The brainchild of investment banker turned food entrepreneur Dermot Hanley, Nüsli combines yoghurt, whole grains, fruit pieces, almonds, hazelnuts and apple juice in a single-serve eat-on-the-go format.

Based on an old Swiss alpine recipe called Bircher muesli, it is pitched as a nutritionally balanced breakfast or snacking option for busy people who care what they eat. Because it is sweetened with apple juice, it contains half the sugar of a typical fruit yoghurt or cereal bar.

According to Hanley, what makes Nüsli really different is that the grains don’t go soggy despite being mixed with the yoghurt.

“We worked for over two years to develop a recipe and natural process that allows grains to be mixed with yoghurt and juice, and maintain a smooth texture combined with a nutty crunch,” he says.

Production is outsourced to enable the company to respond to demand. This ability to supply in volume has already helped Nüsli in Ireland, where it has national listings in Spar, Eurospar, Centra and Supervalu, and should stand it in good stead for its impending UK launch.

Long Meadow Cider

www.kilbegganorganicfoods.com

Maria Lucia Bakes www.marialuciabakes.com

Maria Lucia Bakes’ granola made its first foray on the farmers’ market circuit in November 2013 and has been on a growth trajectory ever since.

Today, the gluten-, wheat- and dairy-free granola is supplied to over 200 health stores, supermarkets, farm shops and cafés in Ireland and the Dublin business is starting to dip a toe in export waters too.

“We are selling to Norway now, and hope to export to the UK, France and Middle East before long,” says owner Maria Betts.

She no longer bakes the granola in her home kitchen as in the early days – production is outsourced to a BRC Grade A accredited gluten-free factory, with the capacity to produce 9,000kg per week. But the granola is still made in the same way: by hand-baking jumbo oats, toasted nuts and seeds and fruit infused with treacle, honey and vanilla.

There are three varieties: cashew, almond & cinnamon, apricot & walnut with a hint of treacle, and cranberry, coconut & chia seed. This year will see the launch of a new granola containing no sugar, sweeteners or dried fruit.

www.longmeadowcider.com

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Co Armagh’s Long Meadow Cider is on the expansion trail after launching a 6% ABV oak-aged dry cider in 500ml bottles.

This is the third artisan cider produced by the McKeever family, who have been growing apples on the family farm near Portadown for three generations.

Father and son team Pat and Peter McKeever describe their output as true artisan craft ciders, made only from apples grown on the farm without artificial ingredients.

Long Meadow’s medium cider is described as a “real thirst quencher with a sharp, refreshing taste,” while its Blossom Burst is “soft, smooth and a s u t ee mellow” in & iality taste, making Spec od Fair Fo e it ideal for n i F nd Irela drinking with a meal. Both are a golden colour, lightly carbonated and available in 500ml bottles with an ABV of 4.5%.

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

The Lismore Food Company

www.thelismorefoodcompany.com

Head chef Beth-Ann Smith and brothers Owen and Ken Madden have combined their collective culinary experience to launch The Lismore Food Company.

The new venture is located on Lismore’s main street in The Summerhouse, home to the brothers’ family baking business for almost two centuries.

Their ethos is creating premium Irish food products while showcasing the country’s best ingredients. The first fruit of the collaboration is a collection of five biscuits in orange and gold foil packaging. Some are traditional, such as all-butter Irish shortbread, while others, such as dark chocolate with cardamom, offer a modern twist. What they all have in common is the use of Irish butter.

Now the company plans to launch a range of savoury biscuits that celebrate Irish ingredients including cheese, Atlantic sea salt and wild seaweed.

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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A-Z GUIDE TO SUPPLIERS Our Daily Bread

www.ourdailywheatenbread.com

Our Daily Bread is a young artisan bakery in Belfast, specialising in Irish wheaten bread. The fresh wheaten it sells locally has won a Great Taste awards in both 2013 and 2014.

The bakery has also created two Bake It Yourself mixes: one for its wheaten bread, made from the same locally sourced award winning ingredients, and a soda bread mix. All they require is water and an oven as the loaf can be baked in the tinfoil the ingredients come in.

Our Daily Bread’s baby wheaten loaves have also led to the birth of wheaten toasts, thinly sliced bread that has been baked for a second time. The toasts have a nutty but not overpowering flavour making them ideal as an accompaniment for cheese, paté and dips.

All of the bakery’s products are virtually fat-free and have no additives or preservatives.

Passion Preserved

Pizzado

A herb jelly combining Armagh Bramley apples with mint is one of the latest launches from Passion Preserved, a small-batch chutney and relish maker based in Ballinderry, Co Antrim.

Intended for serving with lamb, the new jelly uses herbs raised by founder Claire Kelly in her own garden, where she grows many of her own ingredients in extensive polytunnels.

Other lines include US-style Sunshine Relish, Indian Inspired Tomatoes, sweet & spicy cucumber, Kasundi (a spicy Indian chutney) and aubergine & garlic chutney.

Karen Boyd put two decades of experience in the pizza industry to good use when she developed Pizzado – a frozen make-at-home pizza kit.

Each pack contains ingredients to make two 9” cheese & tomato pizzas, with ingredients including Irish-made mozzarella and a simple tomato and herb sauce.

Launched two years ago, the small firm has so far straddled the independent and multiples on its home territory, selling to pubs, delis and farm shops as well as to Tesco. “We hope to be supplying UK retailers early in 2016,” Boyd says.

www.passionpreserved.co.uk

ÓhArtagáin Handcrafted www.ohartagain.com

Ireland is the heartland of soda bread and ÓhArtagáin Handcrafted’s focus is to bake it using the best indigenous ingredients. This means whole wheat flour, including bran and germ, oats (both rolled and steel-cut), buttermilk, free range eggs, rapeseed oil and porter from Wicklow and sea salt from the north-west coast.

Everything is done by hand and in small batches at this specialist soda bread bakery in Ballyboden, south Dublin. The range consists of five fresh breads: whole wheat, oat & toasted wheat germ, poppy seed & rapeseed oil, toasted sesame seed & sea salt and dried fruit & porter. There is also a ‘bake at home’ range for export.

The bakery currently supplies foodservice venues in Dublin and independent retailers in both Dublin and Brussels.

www.pizzado.com

Peppup

www.peppupsauce.co.uk

Summer 2015 saw upmarket Booths Supermarkets in northern England become the first British stockist of Peppup, a range of artisan-made roasted pepper and tomato table sauces.

Richly flavoured, they were created

by Luca Montorio, who was raised in Turin at the heart of Italy’s tomato and pepper growing region.

His Co Down business, set up in 2013, makes three products: a classic pepper & tomato ketchup, a mild chilli version and a reduced sugar and salt variety.

“What sets our sauces apart is a rich flavour that comes from roasted peppers,” says Montorio. “I’ve kept ingredients to a minimum to ensure the flavour of the peppers is paramount.”

Pandora Bell www.pandorabell.com

Boutique confectionary brand Pandora Bell – maker of “sweet treats for discerning foodies” – has been hauling in the awards almost since the day it was started by Nicole Dunphy five years ago.

Initially targeting Ireland’s independent delis and fine food shops with a range of nougats, lollipops and salted caramels, Pandora Bell was swiftly named Newcomer of the Year by the influential Bridgetown Guide (now renamed McKennas’ Guides).

Dunphy, who trained at the Valrhona chocolate academy in France and the Italian Culinary Institute, has won numerous accolades herself – she has even been a cover star on Aer Lingus’s inflight magazine this year – while her products have appeared in British Vogue and at a Vivienne Westwood fragrance launch.

Recent developments from the premium label include a range of flavoured caramels with Fleur de Sel that was launched across the Irish fine food market but exclusive to Harvey Nichols in the UK.

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Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

QUALITY is our goal W: NORI.IE | T: 0035391596923 | E: JAMES.CFV@GMAIL.COM

BALLON ME ATS PRO DUCERS O F T HE FINEST IRISH B EEF, L A M B & POR K

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www.galwayhooker.ie A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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a O G wa ver re rd 3 at s 3 Ta at st e

Níl aon rud chomh blasta le Putóg Dhubh Chloch na gCoillte

Spreading Goodness Crossogue Preserves, a Tipperary award-winning family run business, now in its 20th year, combines traditional cooking methods with the highest quality natural ingredients to make its preserves a little luxury, enjoyed by connoisseurs everywhere.

Crossogue Preserves has a wide range of 85 full flavoured creations including jams, marmalades, jellies, curds, chutneys, relishes and sugar free spreads..

www.clonakiltyblackpudding.ie

Gluten-free, no artificial colourings, flavourings or preservatives Tel: 00353 504 54416 | admin@crossoguepreserves.com @crossoguep | /crossoguepreserves

www.crossoguepreserves.com

www.clonakiltyblackpudding.ie

UNCOMPROMISING

HANDMADE IRISH

NOUGAT 00353 45404977/00353 876900453 info@mienas.ie

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Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

www.mienas.ie A supplement to Fine Food Digest

A-Z GUIDE TO SUPPLIERS

FROM TIDE TO TABLE IN CO KERRY QUINLAN’s

www.kerryfish.com

MOVING INTO RICH SOCIAL CIRCLES Seymours of Cork www.seymours.ie

Seymours of Cork is proudly traditionalist when it comes to shortbread: crumbly, pale golden, sugar-dusted and packed with good Irish butter. But that doesn’t mean the seven-year-old bakery can’t branch out.

This year, it launched its first chocolate biscuit line, called Social Circles, which founder Philip O’Connor admits took four years of development from recipe to packaging to name. “They’re not your typical chocolate biscuit,” he says.

Neither chocolate-covered, nor chocolate-dipped, these are rich biscuits in delicate dark chocolate shells scented with cardamom and vanilla. With their quirky 1920s-inspired branding they’re designed as a gift or as an ‘after-dinner’ biscuit.

“Retailers looking for something new in the biscuit category would find it hard to find anything more novel or unique,” says O’Connor, “especially now, with the exchange rate favourable for UK retailers to be purchasing products from the Eurozone.

“No other biscuit bakery in the UK is currently making a similar product. We are hoping it could open new doors for us.”

Seymours is unique in being Ireland’s only farm and biscuit bakery, a set-up that sees milk from the farm’s dairy herd supplied to the local creamery which in turn supplies butter to the bakery.

“We get the butter very fresh,” says O’Connor. “We collect it on a daily basis. It’s a very direct link to our farm which no other biscuit bakery has. We believe Ireland makes the best butter and I believe we can make the best shortbread from that.”

Striking a balance between tradition and innovation is, O’Connor believes, key to cracking the market across the Irish Sea. “The biscuit market in the UK is very competitive,” he says. “With so many long-standing and well established competitors, it’s difficult for distributors to look beyond what’s readily available to them.”

For now, business here is limited to a handful of shops supplied direct. “We’re doing maybe 10 times more trade to Germany and to France. It’s only in the last year that the exchange rate has swung back in favour of us to export to the UK.” Seymours’ Irish stockists include Avoca, Fallon & Byrne and Nolans, the majority in the Dublin and Cork area, but O’Connor believes his brand is ripe for selling to the British public. This year, its image is having a full makeover, involving new upright packaging (“to help the retailer with tighter space on shelves”) and a shift in emphasis in the branding from Cork to Ireland as the place of origin.

The entire range has been redesigned, most significantly the bestselling Original Shortbread, which goes from a simple round cut to a pretty, unmistakably Irish shamrock.

For now, O’Connor is taking advantage of keenly priced independent courier rates to ship overseas but the next step will be to team up with a specialist distributor “with local knowledge on the ground”, leaving him free to concentrate on production. “We’re still a very small bakery, so we’d have to do it step by step.”

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

“OK, so it has its failings,” sighs Liam Quinlan of his trusty smoking oven (“a 1962, ‘63 model”), “but the quality coming out of it is second to none”.

Kerryfish, the seafood business his father Michael set up in Caherciveen, Co Kerry, in 1960, takes pride in doing things “the old-fashioned way”. Their doughty oven, for example, takes between 18 and 24 hours to smoke Quinlan’s signature wild Irish oak-smoked salmon (a Great Taste two-star-winner in 2014) compared with a newer model’s seven or eight hours. “We don’t rush our product through the oven.”

The family – Michael and his three sons Liam, Ronan and Fintan – have been producing sustainably fished smoked wild salmon to the same timehonoured recipe for 55 years. It’s their star product to this day, and what one could call a ‘limited edition’ given the restricted, May-to-August fishing season and the quotas for wild Atlantic salmon.

Last year, the Quinlans introduced a passport system that gives a unique salmon number to each wild fish they smoke for full assurance. Their wild salmon does well both at home and overseas (particularly Germany, France and Holland) but the UK market is particularly buoyant right now, says Liam Quinlan.

“With the value of sterling at the moment, people buying from the UK are getting fantastic value – 30% better value for their buck.” As a result, customers are choosing to buy from Kerryfish as they upgrade from conventional farmed salmon to organic.

Ninety per cent of the wild salmon they sell online (at €25/250g) goes in a six-week window before Christmas, whereas the best-selling smoked organic salmon (they diversified into organic 15 years ago), including a new version cured with Irish Atlantic sea salt, is a “52 week product”. This year, the Quinlans have invested in revamping the kerryfish.com website and they are planning a big online campaign for the coming winter to gives seasonal sales an extra boost.

The Kerryfish mantra is “from tide to table”. The company has had its own trawlers since start-up, and in 2000 it started its own fishmongers. Then, in 2008, it took the mantra further again with the opening of restaurants under the Quinlans Seafood Bars name.

The company is currently developing a new insulated box that will enable it to ship its prime fresh fish and shellfish – turbot, brill, crab etc – overnight to restaurants and smaller customers throughout Europe via FedEx and UPS. “We’re trying to get the existing product to market quicker,” says Liam Quinlan. “We want to make people aware of the product and show them that quality doesn’t cost the earth.”

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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Food & drink that will make your customers go WOW! If you spy the Great Taste logo whilst sourcing new products, then consider this for a moment.

That little jar, packet, bottle or slice of greatness has been prodded, poked, sipped, and tasted by experts who cogitated & ruminated and decided it deserved a stamp of approval. Not only that these products are proven to sell faster.

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www.gff.co.uk | www.greattasteawards.co.uk |

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

@greattasteawards |

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A supplement to Fine Food Digest

A-Z GUIDE TO SUPPLIERS www.st-tola.ie

In production near the Co Clare village of Inagh since the early 1980s, St Tola is described by its owner as “one of only a small number of Irish cheese-makers that produce artisan cheese in the true sense”.

Siobhan Ni Ghairbhith (below) , who took over the goats’ cheese business from neighbours Meg and Derrick Gordon when they retired in 1999, says it is built on sustainable farming that is “as near to nature as possible”.

The characteristics of the multi-award-winning St Tola range – all made with milk from the family farm, and in small quantities – reflect the environment in which the cheeses are made, she says. “They’re fresh and creamy, with the flavours of natural herbs and undertones of peat from the land our herd of goats graze on, with hints of salt from the nearby Atlantic ocean.

“We use no additives or preservatives – just a minimum amount of salt – as we don’t want to compromise taste for extended shelf-life.”

The range includes the well-known St Tola Log (1kg), Crottin (120g), Original (120g), Divine Curd (1kg), Divine (120g) and Greek Style (1kg and 150g) and the St Tola Ash Log (500g and 250g), winner of several awards.

Rademon Estate Distillery www.shortcrossgin.com

Small-batch distillers are springing up across the British Isles, and David and Fiona Boyd-Armstrong were the first in Northern Ireland to join their ranks.

The couple set up production at Rademon Estate, Fiona’s grand family home near Crossgar, Co Down, and launched their Shortcross Gin in 2014.

Marketed as “a classical gin with a unique twist” it has already won a number of international awards, including silver medals at the San Francisco Spirits Awards and International Wine & Spirits Competition.

Rademon Estate Distillery describes Shortcross Gin as “highly aromatic with an exceptionally long and smooth finish”, with hints of floral meadows, wild berries and grassy notes.

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Spice Devils

www.spicedevils.com

Its base might be in Dublin but the inspiration for Spice Devils lies far off the coast of East Africa. The family firm freshly mills a range of Mauritianinfluenced dry spice blends that can be used in sauce-based dishes or as marinades and rubs for roasting and barbecuing meats, seafood, or vegetables.

Three mild blends – daube, kari and teeka – are available in 25g packs, with more varieties in the pipeline. Each comes with an easy-tofollow recipe and includes a separate sachet of hot chilli to cater for spicy food lovers.

Spice Devils was established

by Shakeel Jeeroburkan (pictured), a former member of the Mauritian police who has now settled in Ireland. He named the brand after his daughter, the “lovely little devil” Sofia.

FROM MARKET STALL TO PYRAMID SELLING SUKI TEA

us at ee & iality Spec od Fair o F Fine land Ire

S

St.Tola Goat’s Cheese

www.suki-tea.com

Suki Tea, the Belfast-based boutique tea brand, has had a busy first 10 years.

Since launching in 2005 from a stall in St George’s Market, where it still trades, it has become the UK’s only triple-certified tea business – organic, Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance – and is on target to sell 50 tonnes of speciality tea this year.

The past 12 months have been unusually busy for Oscar Woolley, who co-founded the business with Annie Rooney. Woolley has had his work cut out, getting into Marks & Spencer (an introduction facilitated by Suki’s new UK retail distributor, Buckley & Beale) and repackaging Suki’s pyramid range, all the while keeping on top of traceability for over 70 different ingredients.

“Quite a lot of work!” he admits with a laugh. He has, however, found time for one of the true pleasures of his job: developing new flavours. “That’s been the most exciting thing,” he says.

“There’s so much work going into making sure the black teas are constant, and that we’ve got a constant supply, that we hadn’t really looked at the core range. We realised we only had two fruit teas out of a range of 40.”

Suki has corrected this shortfall in style with the launch of four new fruit flavours: pink grapefruit, white tea nashi pear, orange blossom oolong and goji berry fruit punch.

If any of these achieve even half the success of the Apple Loves Mint blend, Woolley can be very pleased indeed. This refreshing, creative blend with its “nostalgic, sweetie taste” was a Great Taste three-star award winner in 2014 and even made the Top 50 out of 10,000 entries. “Because it was a Top 50 winner, people would add it to the range, and it just flew out,” Woolley says.

“It has now overtaken Red Berry which, for nearly 10 years, was consistently our best seller.”

He also has high hopes for Suki Tea’s pyramid range, a prototype of which launched last year to great success. Suki has put its six top lines – Breakfast Tea, Earl Grey Blue Flower, Green Tea Sencha, Chamomile, Nana Mint and the ‘jam in a cup’ Red Berry – into pyramids, with Apple Loves Mint to follow (“The rose petals are too big to fit in the bag; we’re just working on a smaller cut,” confides Woolley), all with ‘stunning’ packaging and point of sale material.

Suki Tea’s roots remain deeply planted in Belfast – it actually does have a tea plantation in Portaferry. But 80% of Suki Tea leaves Northern Ireland, thanks in part to its partnerships with Glasgow-based foodservice distributor Matthew Algie and with café chain Coffee #1.

Suki now sells to 2,500 cafés, including Patisserie Valerie. The challenge, as the business grows, is to understand the market, says Woolley. So while the business is rooted in the story of tea, the ritual, the experience, the flavour, and the origin, it is now at the level where logistics and 20-minute delivery windows are just as important.

“The competition is very strong,” says Woolley, adding confidently: “We meet that happily.”

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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ur ste e. ? e o t Ta ng us 09 Se Grea the ra king 64507 er in toc 387 oth rs in s : +35 e n d win reste r now e Inte ll Pet Ca

We spend our days chopping, stirring, marinading, so you don’t have to!

Try our new range of expertly made Indian sauces, free from any nasties, made with love in Ireland. Now available from the chill cabinet!

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Bringing a contemporary twist to traditional recipes, The Scullery creates a delectable range of handmade Christmas Puddings, Relishes, Barbeque Sauces, Pasta Sauces and Pickles. These sumptuous foods are gluten, preservative and additive free – what you see is what you get! While keenly priced there is no compromise on quality, just a wonderful homemade taste.

Unit 4c Stafford Street Business Park, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, Ireland · Telephone: +353 (0)86 1744 402 Email: florrie@thescullery.ie Web: www.thescullery.ie

Modelling Chocolate Made From the Finest Belgian Chocolate Modelling chocolate is by far one of the best and most delicious mediums to work with in the world of cake decorating.

Perfect for cake decorators, pastry chefs, cookery schools, workshops/classes and home bakers.

The company is at present looking for UK stockists. e: info@veramiklas.comm: +353 (0) 86 8540220 www.veramiklas.com

White Modelling Chocolate

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Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

A-Z GUIDE TO SUPPLIERS Tamnagh Foods www.tamnaghfoods.com

Artisan granola, relishes and cheese producer Tamnagh Foods went straight to the top when it won its first business in Britain at the end of 2014.

Based near Dungiven in rural Co Londonderry, it began supplying Harrods’ food hall with its handcrafted maple nut & fruit and honey nut & seeds granolas after meeting buyers from the Knightsbridge store in Belfast.

Tamnagh was formed in June 2010 by husband and wife team Kevin and Julie Hickey.

Julie had been involved in the food industry for 20 years, both as a chef and a restaurant owner. The granolas she developed use Northern Irish-sourced jumbo oats, gently toasted with nuts and seeds and then lightly sweetened with maple syrup and cranberries.

In June 2012 the company converted a disused farm shed into a food unit that incorporated a production kitchen for granolas, as well as production and maturing areas for its sister business Dart Mountain Cheese (see page 14).

The Little Milk Company www.thelittlemilkcompany.ie

A co-operative of 10 organic farmers in Ireland’s Munster and Leinster provinces, The Little Milk Company began as a way of adding value to their milk.

Now the co-op works with some of the country’s top cheese-makers to produce a selection of artisan products, including many award-winners.

Its “stand-out product”, it says, is the Great Taste award-winning rind-washed Brewer’s Gold. This semi-soft variety, made in Co Kilkenny by Knockdrinna Farmhouse’s Helen Finnegan, is washed with Copper Coast beer from craft brewer Dungarvan Brewing Co, giving it a strong, hoppy flavour.

Other cheeses made using organic milk from co-op’s members include three styles of cheddar (including raw-milk mature and vintage versions), and a creamy organic Irish brie.

Summer 2015 also sees the launch of a cream cheese topped with fresh basil or sweet red pepper relish, described as the perfect party dip or pasta stir-in and “equally delicious simply slathered on crusty bread”.

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

WHY freshness is everything in mOZZARELLA TOONS BRIDGE DAIRY www.therealoliveco.com

“Mozzarella,” suggests Toby Simmonds, founder of The Toons Bridge Dairy in Co.Cork, “is only mozzarella for five days. After that, it’s cheese.”

This wisdom was imparted to Simmonds by Franco Picciulo, a fourth generation mozzarella maker from Capua, now the head cheese-maker at Toons Bridge.

Simmonds himself recognised the importance of freshness back in the early days of The Real Olive Co, the company he founded, aged 20, at Cork’s English Market in 1993 (and not to be confused with the English firm of the same name).

“It was taking at least a week for the mozzarella to come from Italy, then the following Saturday you were selling it on the market,” he recalls. “It was quite obvious if you had it a week later how much it had deteriorated.”

In 2009, inspired by the example of Jody Scheckter at Laverstoke Park, Simmonds decided to do it himself. He already had an “amazing distribution network” in place through The Real Olive Co (“The backbone of the business”) and he had a partner in the form of neighbouring farmer Johnny Lynch.

Production began in 2011, and while Lynch went his own way earlier this year – a blow to the business – Simmonds hopes to have his own herd of water buffalo established by next year.

The dairy currently produces some 800kg of buffalo mozzarella a week, out of a total weekly cheese production of 1000kg. It distributes up to three quarters of this itself (through The Real Olive Co) with the rest going through two distributors: La Rousse and Odaios Foods.

Most stays in Ireland, where it’s sold to restaurants (including Ballymaloe House) and independent stores such as McCambridge’s of Galway and Dublin’s Fallon & Byrne.

Mellis in Scotland and North Parade in Oxford are the dairy’s only two British customers while Simmonds establishes a courier route comparable with what he has in Ireland. In its home market, he says, the cheese is “essentially made to order” – produced and couriered on the same day to reach customers the following morning.

Not only is mozzarella “logistically challenging”, it’s also an art to produce the stuff. Toons Bridge Dairy’s is hand-stretched in 10-15kg batches. It calls for “extremely tuned-in people“ who can respond to changes in the milk, the weather, and so on. Similarly, it calls for tuned-in folk to sell it, as Simmonds has discovered from his experience with loose cheeses versus pre-retail packs. The latter “really slow down the sales”, he says. “When a shop or stall has a bowl of mozzarella in front of the customer, it’s a much more dynamic product.”

Toons Bridge makes mozzarella in 125g balls, smaller bocconcini and plaits, and has diversified into cows’ milk scamorza, burrata, fior di latte, caciocavallo and provolone since EU milk quotas were dropped. One of its cheese-makers is working with sheep’s milk, so it now makes about 20-25kg of pecorino each week as well, and the dairy has a new high-ceilinged maturing room for caciocavallo too.

Exciting projects for the dairy, but none more so than re-establishing its buffalo herd and spreading the word about Irish mozzarella.

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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Delicious, have-to-have, truly magical home-made sauces, dressings, dips, and hummus. Her best sellers include the incredible ‘Moroccan Gold’ hummus, Cashew Nut Pesto, Sundried Tomato and Olive Tapenade,Wild Atlantic Smoked Mackerel Paté (using Sally Barnes’ award-winning smoked mackerel) and a Double-Yumami Black Pepper Sauce (using Nori Seaweed and Free-Range Smoked Bacon)

CityCheese Cheese City ...with a touch of dutch...

...with a touch of dutch...

Producers of

Raw Cows Milk Cheese made with Raw Organic Milk

Taking your tastebuds to a higher level www.danettesfeast.com Danette’s Feast danettes.feast@gmail.com | +353 (0)56 444 1814

City Cheese is a small family business and we are the proud producers of a variety of Dutch Gouda style cheeses.

We pride ourselves that our cheese is made from raw organic grass fed milk by hand and matured on locally sourced larch timber shelves.

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WWW.BROIGHTERGOLD.CO.UK 28

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

CONTACT: MICHAEL O’DONNELL 00353 749731216 MICHAEL@ISLANDSEAFOODSLTD.IE

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

A-Z GUIDE TO SUPPLIERS West Cork Pies www.westcorkpies.com

S

West Cork has long been a stronghold of Irish artisan foods, but it’s a recent blow-in from the UK who is behind West Cork Pies.

Paul Philips started the business in 2012 after retiring to this beautiful corner of Ireland, and now believes he is the “probably the only manufacturer of pork pies and Scotch eggs in Ireland”.

While his products are British in nature, he uses only Irish reared and grown ingredients, including pork from his own free-range pigs, in his kitchen in Schull, Co Cork. All pastry is made in-house using free-range eggs.

“Where possible, we source our ingredients us at ee direct from the producer, ensuring the money & iality goes directly to them,” he says.

Spec od Fair o F His range also includes meat pies, patés, Fine land Ire terrines and savoury tarts, all sold cooked, chilled and ready to eat.

Having started selling at his local farmers’ market, he now operates at six markets, supplies over 40 retail outlets and has created 10 jobs. “And the business continues to grow,” he says, “based on the quality of my products.”

THis year’s MODEL

Selling oats to the scots?

It’s like coals to newcastle WHITE’S

www.whitesoats.co.uk

It’s a point of pride at White’s Oats’ Co that the Northern Ireland business can sell oats to Scotland.

Its jumbo oats perform very well in Caledonia, apparently, but the 175-yearold miller, based in Tandragee, Co Armagh, has plenty more to shout than this – and it’s starting to do so following a thorough rebrand.

“White’s has been around since 1841,” says brand manager Danielle McBride. “But there was so little of that coming through in our brand and our packaging.”

Since January 2015, however, White’s Time-Honoured Oats have been on the shelves with new-look packaging featuring ripe oats and rolling hills.

The message is clear: this is not just another trendy start-up getting in on the luxury breakfast market.

White’s is a miller, and always has been. It has an in-house agronomist, and is part of a co-operative of 30-plus farmers in Northern Ireland plus an organic growing group in Great Britain.

Last year the company announced a £2m investment across the business, from new machinery to marketing, and 29 new jobs in key departments.

But it is not too substantial to serve the speciality food market, and has an impressive track record in Great Taste, having won 41 awards over the years including nine in 2014.

The big rebrand was undertaken with a view to preparing White’s for the Great Britain market and the opportunities presented by the independent sector.

Its domestic bestsellers, such as Speedicook Porridge Oats launched in the 1940s, remain hugely important. But McBride says there’s more movement in the ‘ready to eats’ such as White’s Toasted Oats (a more mainstream line for the multiples) and new premium granola range: apple, cranberry & raspberry; hazelnut, almonds & honey; and triple chocolate. Developments are also afoot in those more convenient and portable formats that time-pressed consumers continue to demand.

But what’s really getting White’s excited right now is the health & wellbeing sector – an area independent retailers are particularly well-placed to serve.

“They understand the importance of value-added products, of good quality products that have heritage,” says McBride. “They can tell that story.”

The new ActivOat high protein and high fibre instant porridge oats are aimed squarely at the active lifestyle market and consumers looking for health benefits – “that extra nutritional boost”, as McBride puts it – from their food. Over the next 12 months, White’s will focus on the independent sector, working with new distributors to build the business. “We believe we have the right products for that sector and for that consumer,” says McBride. “We’re very excited about what the next 12-18 months will bring.”

Vera Miklas

www.veramiklas.com

Modelling chocolate is “one of the best and most delicious mediums to work with in the world of cake decorating”, according to Czech-born Vera O’Sullivan, whose Vera Miklas business is the first to produce this malleable ingredient in Ireland.

The recent start-up, based in Tipperary Town near the Glen of Aherlow in central Ireland, makes a range of handmade modelling chocolate and kits for children.

Only established in 2013, it collected a Great Taste award the following year for its white chocolate.

“Our modelling chocolate is like chocolate Play-Doh, made from the finest Belgian chocolate,” says O’Sullivan. “It tastes delicious and it’s easy to work with, as it’s malleable and keeps its shape well.

“It’s perfect for creating quirky and eyecatching decorations for cakes that need more stability and strength, like flowers, figures, characters and bows.”

The firm’s kits are said to be ideal for youngsters as a novelty gift or party activity, and include everything to make two 5cm chocolate animals – or several smaller ones.

Vera Miklas sells through specialist retailers, hotels, farm shops and garden centres and is currently looking for UK stockists.

A supplement to Fine Food Digest

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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PERFECTION IS NOT ATTAINABLE, BUT IF WE CHASE PERFECTION WE CAN CATCH EXCELLENCE.

SALT MOSS AGED

Traditional cheese handcrafted on the family farm

From our family farm in West Limerick, we produce a range of handcrafted, artisan, award winning cheeses, including: Cahill’s Original Irish Porter Cheddar, Cahill’s Irish Whiskey Cheddar with Kilbeggan, Cahill’s Ardagh Red Wine Cheddar.

A full range available at Kettyle’s own butcher counter in your local Tesco Enniskillen store “Please ask... If you not sure we will make it our business to make sure, we’re all more sure together”

The cornerstone of our business is that each cheese is individually made and handcrafted thus retaining the subtlety of flavour that is invariably absent from the mass produced product.

Dry cured “Bacon and Salt Beef” Professionals Marrow Melt

T: +353 6962365 E: info@cahillscheese.ie

www.kettyleirishfoods.com

www.cahillscheese.ie

Cheese retail: it’s all in the detail Training is essential to retail success and is proven to dramatically increase turnover as well as improve your customers’ shopping experience.

The Guild of Fine Food retail cheese training course aims to educate and enthuse those who make, buy and sell cheese. This one day course is ideal for delegates new to the industry and those wishing expand their knowledge .

The course will help you to: • Enhance your understanding of the cheese making process • Recognise the main families of cheeses • Understand the impact that terroir has on cheese • Learn how to select, display, sell and care for cheese • Comparatively taste over 40 types of cheese • Inspire customers with your knowledge, enthusiasm and passion for your cheese counter

This course will be held throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland from autumn 2015 – autumn 2016 For more details please visit www.gff.co.uk or contact jillysitch@gff.co.uk

LEARN

BE INSPIRED

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www.gff.co.uk | 30

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

@guildoffinefood A supplement to Fine Food Digest

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HAND COOKED CRISPS

www.odonnellscrisps.com

Don’t miss your chance to experience the latest in Irish food & drink, meet with colleagues and keep up to date with the latest trends

New to FHI this year is Speciality & Fine Food Fair Ireland – a unique opportunity to see the best of Irelands artisan producers. Featuring the Great Taste Pavilion – Irelands Great Taste Award winners in one place!

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Find out more and REGISTER TODAY at www.foodhospitality.ie

Food & Drink from Ireland 2015-16

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A supplement to Fine Food Digest