Growing your business beyond your kitchen

When 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 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 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 James 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.”