A new generation at Ballymaloe Foods relishes a challenge

Rosaleen Hyde from EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist Ballymaloe Foods talks about a family business became a global brand.

This year 24 Irish finalists have been named for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Awards which take place in November. Currently in its 27th year in Ireland, the programme works to recognise, promote, and build a supportive community around Ireland’s high-growth entrepreneurs and is considered one of the strongest programmes globally. 

Since its inception, the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Ireland community has grown to a tight-knit network of more than 600 alumni who harness each other’s wealth of experience, with three quarters (75%) conducting business with one another. Together, the EOY alumni community generates revenues of €25bn, and employs more than 250,000 people across the island of Ireland.

In the past 10 months the finalists have engaged in a strategic growth programme which includes a week-long CEO Retreat in South Africa.

Ambition is the best sauce

Among the finalists this year is Ballymaloe Foods, the Cork-based family business behind the popular relish.

Ambition and innovation remain at the core of the family business which is now into its third generation.

While its flagship relish remains a popular staple of not only Irish but kitchens and fridges all over the world, Ballymaloe Foods has expanded its range to include pasta sauces, dressings, roasting sauces, beetroot and much more. For example, it recently launched a new sauce ‘Mayolish’ which combines two favourites: Ballymaloe Relish and Ballymaloe Mayo.

Ballymaloe’s origins extend back to the 1930s when Ivan Allen was growing tomatoes in his glasshouses in Shanagarry Co Cork. From the fresh produce his wife Myrtle would create a delicious tomato relish and preserving them to be enjoyed throughout the year. A restaurant at Ballymaloe House followed where local produce was to be celebrated and enjoyed, leading to Myrtle becoming the first female chef in Ireland to be awarded a Michelin Star.

Myrtle and Ivan’s daughter Yasmin had a keen eye for business and she realised that her mother’s relish could be a strong seller on supermarket shelves. Operating out of a portacabin in her back garden she delivered jars of the relish in a beat-up old Lada to shops around Ireland.

That determination resulted in what is now a much-loved Irish food brand that is also gaining ground all over the world. Yasmin is still involved in the day to day running of the business alongside her daughter Maxine, general manager, and her siblings Rosaleen and Sean.

Generation game

Myrtle and Ivan had six children, 22 grandchildren and 39 grandchildren and, as well as the family spreading, the Ballymaloe businesses that have emerged include not only Ballymaloe Foods but also a hotel at the family home Ballymaloe House as well as the eponymous cookery school, the Ballymaloe Grainstore venue and a shop and café.

Rosaleen, in an interview with ThinkBusiness, explained: “My grandfather bought the land and the farm and it was an old, crumbling down house and he said to my grandmother: ‘Why don’t we try and keep a roof on this place and live in it’. He was a little ahead of his time and had set up glasshouses and grew tomatoes at a time when most Irish people weren’t familiar with tomatoes; they were half scared of them at the time, truth be told. They had some really good harvests and my grandmother needed to find some way of preserving the tomatoes and came up with a recipe for a relish.

“And then, when she came up with an idea for starting a restaurant and he said: “Well you’re not going to go to Cork city to rent a building, you can do it here.” And so she started the restaurant.

“My mother Yasmin could see that people were loving the relish and asking could they bring a jar home with them and that’s when she had the idea to make a business out of the relish.”

Rosaleen said her grandparents were Quakers and infused the characteristic work ethic, kindness, humility and care for employees into how the businesses were formed and how they are run today. “You can ask a lot of your employees and ask them to drive along with you and grow your business. But you have to be kind no matter what. People need to be able to come to work in a place that is safe and happy.

“Every day there are challenges but we are a team at the end of the day.”

Necessity and the mother

Rosaleen’s mother Yasmin began Ballymaloe Foods in 1990 initially as a way of paying the bills, operating out of a portacabin in the back garden. Today the business produces its relishes and sauces from state-of-the-art premises in Little Island, Co Cork.

“She was like ‘everyone likes this, so I’m going to make it.’ And she was right, it goes with lots of things. It’s a natural product with a long shelf life. She grew the product range from there. My sister Maxine joined the business 18 years ago and I joined eight years ago. We grew up with business and we’d help on the production lines during our school holidays, surrounded by jars, bottles and labels.”

As well as Yasmin still being very much involved in the business, especially ensuring the standard remains high, Maxine, Rosaleen and Sean have played a key role in setting the brand up for the future, especially in terms of innovation and internationalisation, focusing on developing the website and e-commerce capabilities.

Today Ballymaloe’s products are in pretty much all of the major retail chains in Ireland and the UK not to mention featuring in overseas markets that include eBelgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Greece as well as Australia, Singapore, Canada, UAE and the US.

The key to the future of Ballymaloe Foods, Rosaleen says, is maintaining trust with the customer. “There are many food brands that are part of bigger corporations. There are lots of pressures on family life and many homes have both parents working. So they need to know the food brands they buy are ones they can trust.

“We care deeply about our product, about nutrition and the quality of the ingredients. People need to know they can trust the ingredients they use to cook after coming home exhausted from a day’s work. We cook just like you do at home, it’s just our cookers are a bit bigger. We fill our jars hot so that moulds and yeasts can’t survive in hot temperatures. Our raw materials like tomatoes and vinegar have low pH where bacteria can’t survive. It’s a very simple approach that works.”

I put it to Rosaleen that Ballymaloe could be an international brand that could one day be as quintessentially Irish as Guinness. “We have a really solid brand presence in Ireland but it’s still news to people that we do pasta sauces and mayos, so it’s hard enough in our own market. So it’s tougher again if you don’t have that brand awareness in other countries.”

But the fact that Irish people are everywhere must make it a good calling card? “The one thing that gives us confidence is that everyone, everywhere, once they try it with a few different meals, they get completely hooked on it. It’s a great product that is natural and it is versatile and pairs well with most meal types.”

Rosaleen and her siblings see themselves as guardians of a family legacy. “At its core is trust. We’re very careful how we innovate with food because it is about people’s health. There is a way of producing relish that has existed for centuries. So we won’t deviate too much from that. Our focus is on quality and trust.

“Where we can innovate more is in areas like digitalisation and automation and of course sustainability in terms of energy and water usage.”

In many ways the story of Ballymaloe Foods and its sister brands is a story about sustainability. “It is something that my grandparents were really passionate about. When they started farming, started a restaurant, sustainability was always important. Everything came from the land and came from local producers. My mum was always focused on removing unnecessary layers of packaging and encouraged recycling wherever possible.

“When Bord Bia started Origin Green 10 years ago with targets for reducing energy we embraced it because we wanted something to measure against and we’ve a been a Gold Member ever since.”

Rosaleen said that being nominated for as a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award was a surprise for the family as they didn’t view themselves as entrepreneurial in the spirit of today’s software entrepreneurs, for example. But it is a story of endurance, brand building, trust and ultimately seizing the day; which is what entrepreneurship is all about.

“We’ve gained a lot from the fellowship of fellow entrepreneurs who are so generous with their time and knowledge. During the past year some really good friendships have been formed. It has really opened my eyes to other things that we could be doing and we’ve already started on the path of that.”

The future of the product, she says, is to maintain the trust in quality that Ballymaloe has established with its legions of loyal customers.

For Rosaleen and her siblings, the next generation’s acceptance of the baton from their mother can be best described as a “gentle transition.”

She said: “Our mum was kind of like ‘okay guys, over to you!’ And we were like: ‘No, no, you stay here and help us.’ We didn’t come into this thinking we know everything. If she doesn’t think something is a good idea, we listen to her.”

Looking to the future, she says the experience of being an EY Entrepreneur of the Year finalist is delivering real value in terms of knowledge: “It’s about continuously developing and seeing how we can improve as custodians of the business and how the business can improve and be run better every single day.”

Main image at top: Maxine and Rosaleen Hyde, Ballymaloe Foods

• Bank of Ireland is welcoming new customers every day – funding investments, working capital and expansions across multiple sectors. To learn more, click here

• Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:

• Spotify

• SoundCloud

• Apple