She has sold more than 800,000 copies of her Simply Delicious cookery books. She has appeared on eight of her own television series. She runs an internationally acclaimed cookery school where students pay more than £4,000 (€5,079) for 12 weeks' tuition. Exactly six months ago The Darina Allen Food Company launched a range of high-quality ice-creams which is already making inroads on a market worth £150 million.
After many years of resisting it, Darina Allen has finally succumbed to commercial pressures to market her greatest asset - her name. But not, she insists, just to make money, but in order to do her part to promote quality Irish ingredients and food and to highlight what she firmly believes is the nightmarish manipulation of the food chain by global companies. She may not be able to single-handedly stop the "global food rot" - as she describes it - of genetically modified ingredients, but just six months after the creamy tubs of chocolate, vanilla, praline and honeycomb ice-cream have hit the shops, supermarket managers are paying her the greatest compliment when they report that her tubs of ice-cream "are flying out of the freezers".
Sales are expected to reach £1 million in year one, taking up to 10 per cent of the premium ice-cream market, dominated by the likes of Hagen Daz, Ben & Jerry and HB's Carte D'Or brand. The Darina Allen brand name may espouse quality and integrity, but the ice-cream has also been carefully positioned, price-wise.
The 750 ml tubs of chocolate, vanilla, praline and honeycomb have been designed to create a new middle market or "family luxury" range between the lower-priced HB Carte D'Or at about £2.20 for a litre's worth, and the 500 ml size tubs of Hagen Daz/Ben & Jerry at £3.89, says Mr Roddy Rohan of Genesis, the marketing company responsible for product development. They will set the stage for other new dessert products that come on stream later this year, he says, and over the longer term, the prepared meals Ms Allen is currently researching.
The strategy is working. Supermarkets are reporting huge sales since the ice-cream was launched in September and are scrambling to keep up with demand. More than 2,500 cases are being shipped each week, says Mr Rohan, and distribution and greater penetration is expected this summer, he says, with the launch of individual 250 ml cups and new flavours. The Darina Allen Food Company, the name of which appears on every tub of the new ice-cream, along with its prominent photo of Ms Allen and her signature, is the front company for Matrix Foods which she heads and which in turn licences Silver Pail Dairies in nearby Fermoy, Co Cork, to make the ice-cream. The financial backing for the company has been provided by her husband's cousin, Mr Bert Allen of Slaney Meats, whose other investments also extend to his major interest in the Bewley's Hotel at Newlands Cross on the Naas Road.
Darina Allen literally became a household name when her first television series, Simply Delicious, appeared on RTE in 1989. The book of the series sold out immediately and has been reprinted 13 times, selling over more than 200,000 copies alone. In all, in excess of 800,000 Simply Delicious cookbooks have been sold and two more, she says, are in the pipeline.
The phenomenal success of the books and television series has spilled over to The Ballymaloe Cookery School which is now, but wasn't always, a significant money spinner for Tim and Darina Allen. "When we started the school I really didn't know if it would work. But farming was extremely difficult and we knew we had to do something to keep a roof over our heads." From just eight students in 1983, the twice-a-year residential courses now take in 46 students who each pay more than £4,000 for 12 weeks in Ballymaloe. As many as another 70 attend each of the one-and two-day courses which run throughout the year.
It is reckoned that the school, which is heavily booked, has an annual turnover of nearly £750,000 and employs six full-time tutors, as well as Darina and Tim Allen who also give classes. Altogether 30 people are employed in the school, the accommodation units, administration offices, the gardens and most recently in the new cafe and shop. One of the great successes of Ballymaloe is the co-operative dimension the extended Allen family has brought to the various Ballymaloe companies - the farm, restaurants, shops and cafes, the cookery school and now the manufacturing company.
"We are all financially independent of each other," says Ms Allen. This is very important. "And anyway we're all extremely busy and no one has time to envy someone else for having a bigger car or nicer bracelet or something more than someone else has." She is modest about her personal success. High up in her "simply" decorated loft office at the cookery school she laughs at the suggestion that she must be a millionaire, the Irish equivalent of the other great doyenne of telegenic cooks, the BBC's Delia Smith.
"I can absolutely tell you that is not true. Nor do I want to be. I don't have a huge income or vast amounts of money. We've borrowed from the bank, worked like hell, paid it back, borrowed some more and on and on it goes. I get nice royalties each year from the books, but we have no houses in faraway places or yachts. All my money goes back into the business. The gardens and my shell house are my luxury, because they don't make money."
While increasingly interested in the commercial aspects of the new business - the marketing, distribution and production end, she says she is not particularly good at it - yet. "I suppose I do need to become more that way. We haven't had any five-year plans or anything like that. Things have just sort of evolved here. One thing happens and then the next just become obvious."
What she will not compromise about is the growing and preparing of quality food - and what is more natural and wholesome than the Irish dairy products Ireland produces, she asks. It certainly gave her the impetus to launch the first product range.
"If we want the kind of quality food I'm talking about, we need to pay more for it. Most of our food problems are caused by pushing everything beyond its natural limits - especially animals and plants. Too many manufacturers are trying to get higher yields in order to sell cheaper foods, and this is what has caused the likes of BSE and now the issue of genetically modified foods."
She has publicly vowed that none of the Darina Allen Food Company products will ever include any genetically modified ingredients. The greatest danger is that there is no proper labelling of the ingredients. That and the power the companies that promote them have over the seed production and the farmers who grow the modified crops.
"Genetically modifying our food ingredients is the biggest single experiment on humankind that has ever happened and I think it's completely outrageous that these companies can do it. I figure this will be the most, single important stand I ever take. Once these genes are introduced, they can't be removed. Once it is in the human gene chain and once it gets into the environment, you can't recall it. We must make sure this can't go wrong."
If Darina Allen has her way, the rest of us will think this way too eventually.
