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ELAINE LAVERY AND best friend Hannah O’Reilly want to change the way you think about butter.
“People see butter as something they put on their bread, but it is a great carrier of flavours,” Lavery said.
In barely more than a year, the pair, who met while studying business and commerce at UCD, have gone from tinkering in the kitchen to a fast-growing food enterprise with over 50 stockists and a weekly turnover in the thousands of euro.
The idea for their product, Improper Butter, came during Lavery’s post-college stint working as a chalet chef in France.
“I didn’t have any qualifications to cook but it was what I loved,” she told TheJournal.ie.
To maximise her time on the ski slopes, Lavery started pre-preparing flavoured butters she could add to meat or vegetable dishes when she had to whip something up quickly for guests.
After returning home, she combined her culinary nous with O’Reilly’s business brain to form their company, which started selling handmade, flavoured butters at local markets.
At the start it was very much trial and error; the big food companies have huge product-development budgets – as a small company you don’t have that finance behind you. Plus we didn’t have the expertise.”
From 20 to 2000 sales a week
But through a small Enterprise Ireland grant the two 25-year-olds were able to get some advice from food technologists about increasing the scale of their production and the brand’s reach.
The next breakthrough came with the Food Academy scheme, a programme put together by Bord Bia, SuperValu and the Local Enterprise Office network.
The scheme connects startup food producers with experts in marketing, business building and distribution to help budding entrepreneurs grow their operations – as well as providing guaranteed shelf space from the supermarket chain.
From one outlet in Blackrock, the pair have expanded their reach into about 30 SuperValu-branded and affiliated stores, as well as specialist shops across Dublin and across 10 counties.
A year ago the company was selling only about 20 sticks of its butter a week – but now, Lavery said, that figure is more like 2000.
They also made it onto the Dragons Den TV show, where they struck a deal with dragons Ramona Nicholas and Eamonn Quinn – in return for an initial 30% stake in their business.
What now?
“The next stage will be more of the consultation process and growing as a business,” Lavery said.
Because we have been able to supply a number of stores quite quickly with this programme we want to add new product lines, which will just be about me playing around in the kitchen and trying recipes, going back to scratch, and then doing some market research.”
The company sources butter from Irish producers then adds its own herbs and flavourings, and in the future Lavery said they wanted to look at how they could use technology to improve production.
Graduation Day
Today the pair’s business was among 30 to graduate into the next stage of the food-enterprise scheme – the Food Academy Advance program.
They will join food startups from around the country in further ramping up their operations with more than 8 in 10 of the operations planning to hire staff to grow over the next year.
Some of the other businesses to make the grade include DeRoiste Puddings, from Co Cork, Patels Authentic Spices, from Dublin, and Wild About Foods, from Co Wexford.
Over 260 startup food businesses have been through the Food Academy program so far.
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A shortage!?! Lettuce pray!
It’s ridiculous that Ireland can’t supply herself with salad and vegetables. The country has great land and weather for such produce. We should be easily self sufficient . We should be able to supply Europe too! The likes of Tesco Ireland should only sell home grown produce.
The weather is not right , 12 months of the year . We depend on Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere produce based on seasonality to supplement what we can produce.
@Niall O’Reilly:Try growing lettuce during wintertime in Ireland.
@Brian MacCarthaigh: No problem, its growing in the Botanical gardens in Dublin outside right now. Even easier in a tunnel.
@Colm Vambeck:- Correct. There are a lot of farmers in North County Dublin / Meath areas that grow lettuce through out the year. Then Keelings by the Airport have Gigantic greenhouses that grow peppers, lettuces, berries and all other types of veg you would think wouldn’t be plausible to grow in Ireland. They actually have an excellent Farm Shop at their entrance on the St. Margerets Road. (Finglas to Swords )
@The Viking:
Price……
There will always be a market for homegrown greenhouse vegetables and some people will pay a premium for them but the vast majority will buy the cheapest available.
Best of luck to the Keeling’s in their shop by the way.
Nonsense. We can grow everything in Ireland. You just need a greenhouse or a plastic tunnel. In Iceland they are self sufficient in tomatoes and cucumbers and my neighbor here in Brittany has 100 oranges on his orange tree in a climate often colder than Ireland!
Have you heard of a green house.?No problem at all under glass.
@Richard Paul: In a wee greenhouse (6 x 10) in the south of the country, we have all salad ingredients for our house all year around. We are still eating the spuds, carrots, parsnips and more from the wee veg plot. Hadn’t bought a spud in 5 years.
@ Paul Somers; Fair Play to you If it is practical for you to do that . But certain produce can not be grown in Ireland, in the quantities needed to satisfy the demand for them.
Sorry who buys more than one in one go?!
@Paul: People buying for a family.
@Paul:
Harvey the rabbit??
@Paul:
That new chain of shops, Chopped?
Be interesting to see what they substitute lettuce with now.
Restaurants, Pubs, Cafe’s
A number of local establishments purchase salad ingredients in Aldi / Lidi as the cost is sometimes below ‘Musgrave’s’ price point.
This is a great day for salad dodgers
Just have a bloody salad without lettuce. A salad with sausages and rashers and eggs and pudding. A salad with no salad.
Managed to buy some from a shady character on Moore street . Bit pricey though, €5 for a half dozen lettuce leaves and €7.50 for a reasonably sized courgette.
I’d say the Kinahans and the Hutches are repurposing the grow houses as we speak ….
RIP to all the poor slippy slugs
lettuce spray…
So busy giving out to super valu the farmers forgot about the poor oll lettuce
I blame vegetarians for eating all our side salads for their main courses.
Went to Supervalue, Tesco’s and Aldi looking for courgettes. Lidl is the only place you can get them.
Swear to God, I was blaming bloody operation transformation !
Woa muah gawd, cannot cope, like whats a B.L.T. without the L. :(
And I’m a vegan so no B either. :((
Didn’t take long for someone to announce they were vegan did it
Simply weather related.
Do we not grow it here?
Iceberg hopefully… its the marmite of lettii
@Hugh Gallagher: At least Jamie Oliver had the right idea with Iceburg lettuce…put them in a clay trap and blast them with No.7 shot. It’s a veg designed for supermarkets and catering due to lasting longer than most people who eat it.
Leaf it out will ye!
Ah..sure I can see it now “garda raid grow house..”(surely it’s herbal and illegal) ..garda looks sad and says “nah tis only lettuce..feck it”
Nothing of nutritional value in lettuce anyway
have your say