MARKET TO BUSINESS
Your food business
can begin at home,
but if you want to
go into commercial
production, there
are several options,
writes Sandra
O’Connell
W
hen it comes to setting
up and running a food
business, there’s more
than one recipe to follow.
The simplest way in is to get cooking
at home.
“As soon as you make your first loaf
of bread and sell it, you are a food
start-up,” says Oonagh Monahan, a
food business mentor and author of
Money For Jam, a guide to starting
your own food business. “The simplest
thing to do is approach a shop, ask to
leave your produce in and see what happens. So many people have great ideas
for food products, but they say to me,
‘But what happens if a really big order
comes in and I can’t manage it?’ Well,
in that case, happy days, you’re in business,” she says.
Items such as home baking and jams
are classed as “low-risk” and can
therefore be made at home, as long as
environmental health officers are
happy it’s clean and the batches aren’t
too big.
Once you move into areas such as
confectionery or salads with dressings,
you move into a higher-risk classification. To develop these recipes and begin commercial production, check out
the growing trend in community kitchens that you can rent by the hour. This
is was what Eileen and Ray McClure of
Farranfore, Co Kerry, went looking for
last year when Ray was developing Killarney Toffee.
“We wanted to find a commercial
kitchen we could rent by the hour to try
it out. It’s a concept Ray, who is American, was familiar with,” says Eileen.
“But we couldn’t find one here.”
Having conducted research with
stallholders at farmers’ markets in the
Kerry region, she found other artisan
food businesses were in need of the
same facility. So, with grant aid from
the Leader fund of ¤150,000, she
opened Kitchen Incubators Kerry, a
6,000 sq ft custom-fitted space with
three commercial kitchens, a demo
kitchen, and training and meeting
space, rentable from ¤15 an hour.
The next step up for many will be to
28 |THE IRISH TIMES | March 26, 2014
Growing your business
beyond your kitchen
take a subsidised food grade unit at an
enterprise centre on a longer-term basis. In these, for a monthly licence fee of
around ¤400, inclusive of rates and
waste management, food start-ups can
avail of business mentoring and administrative back-up, with no deposit or
lease required.
Among the best-known of these is
the SPADE Enterprise Centre in North
King St, Dublin, which has kitchen incubators ranging in size from 400 to
1,500 sq ft.
If all you have is an idea for a food
product, but not the skills to produce it,
the services of a food technologist can
help. Wendy Roberts of Creative Food
Technology in Limerick provides a
range of services from creating a recipe
from a concept to helping people who
have started out at home tweak their
recipes in order to scale up.
She can source ingredients, extend
shelf life, establish nutritional values
for labelling, help you figure out how to
ramp up production and even ensure
you don’t have to get involved in cooking at all.
This is because, in some cases, once
you have perfected your recipes, the
most efficient route will be to contract
out production. It’s the route that
well-known soup brand Cully & Sully
took to great effect.
“I’d encourage the contract manufacturing route,” says Roberts. “Food manufacturing is expensive to get into, and
with contract manufacturing all you
Eileen McClure of Kitchen
Incubators Kerry, which rents
commercial kitchens to artisan food
businesses. PHOTOGRAPH: KERRY KENNELLY
have to pay for is the packaging and the
actual production.”
Contracting out also frees you up to
do what you are best at.
“Often you’ll have a really good product or recipe, but realise that what you
are actually best at is branding and marketing,” says food consultant Ja mes
Burke. “In any case, if you are successful there will come a point when you
can no longer do everything, which is
why it makes sense to look at outsourced partners.”