Good cooks needed to bring potential to boil

Ireland should have genuine ambition to elevate its standing in the global food and beverage industry at a variety of levels.

Good cooks needed  to bring  potential to boil

By adopting a strategy that thinks bottom-up and top-down, the country can capture international markets and a greater share of high spending tourists who value world class food and drink standards.

Last week, my wife took me to Lismore and we dined in the O’Brien Chop House in the town. This establishment precisely defines the bottom-up approach. Its standard of service and food preparation can be easily ranked alongside first class restaurants in London, Paris or New York, but its roots in to local enterprise are equally impressive.

Fish is sourced along the south coast, the meat is prepared by a local butcher, while fruit and vegetables are chosen from suppliers across Munster. Its coffee is packed by a small company based in Fermoy. This type of enterprise creates a mini ecosystem that connects consumers with a chain of quality product and services. Imagine if you could replicate that in numerous towns around Ireland where this type of restaurant does not exist. It would electrify supplier bases while creating a network of outlets that act as food and drink ambassadors for the country.

Top-down development is the second pillar to be used in making our food and drink industries even greater.

Irish whiskey, to me, is one of the prime growth prospects in the nation’s food and beverage sector.

Global whiskey sales are booming due to developing market expansion. Scotch dominates whisky sales with annual shipments of over 90m cases and a market share of 60%. Irish whiskey has just a 3.5% share and volumes of 5m.

With companies like Pernod Ricard (owners of Irish Distillers) adding their global marketing punch to Jameson, Irish whiskey has the potential to grow annually at double digit rates for many years.

This explains the recent investment in Midleton and should boost demand for grain and local services as expansion gets underway.

Dairy and meat are the other two pieces of the top down agenda that must play their part in this adventure.

Milk production can rise by over 50% by 2020 and that alone will stimulate spending on plant, equipment and logistics to manage higher volume. Beef, too, has plenty of potential as grass fed systems are more cost effective and more consumer appealing than the intensive grain feed lots that dominate other parts of the world. Boosting these two stalwarts of agriculture are core elements in designing a engine of growth.

These bottom up and top down dynamics need strong leadership at political and policymaking levels if the optimum results are to be harnessed.

The infrastructure is there on our roads and at our ports and airports to handle rising volume production going out (food and drink) and coming in (tourists).

Key elements in stimulating the decisions needed to exploit the potential are:

* Investment decisions at farm and factory levels to install the needed capacity;

* A new push to support the creation of world class restaurants across tourism sensitive towns and villages throughout the State, and;

* The support of banks and investors for initiatives that range from small enterprise start-ups to global standard factories.

The ingredients are now in place to make Ireland a much more relevant hotspot on the world’s map for food and beverages. It needs some good cooks, in the form of politicians with vision and businesspeople with ambition, to bring everything to the boil.

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