Success on and off the pitch

TRADITION has always been an important ingredient in the quality food business and sporting career of Una O’Dwyer.

It is central to her award-winning Fine Foods business in Cashel which she has developed around an old family recipe for quality sausage.

And it also helped her become one of Tipperary’s all-time great camogie players, winning five All-Ireland senior medals.

Through her mother Marian, she is connected to the Walsh family of Tuberadora, one of the legendary GAA families.

Una’s great grandfather, Johnny Walsh, was one of the best backs in Ireland in his day, and her great granduncle, Denis, a talented wing forward, won five All-Ireland senior hurling medals each a century or so ago.

An honours graduate in food sciences and technology from University College Cork, it was always accepted that Una would become involved with the food industry.

Indeed, she knew all about making sausages and burgers before she ever went to UCC.

Her father Martin’s butcher shop in Cashel was where she worked at weekends and during the summer holidays, learning the trade and enjoying the buzz of meeting customers.

“All I wanted to do was bone out carcasses and show off my butchery skills even at the tender age of eight,” she said.

When she graduated from UCC in 2003, with an honours degree in food science and technology, her ambition was to develop a successful business of her own.

With her education in food science, her background in butchery and her entrepreneurial drive to be different with product development, she felt she had the requisite skills to do so.

The traditional sausage her father had developed was very popular and noted for its taste and quality.

Una believed there was a considerable market outside of Cashel for the product and for developing it further with different flavours. She set about her task: “I based myself in the back of the butcher shop. This allowed me to develop innovative products and test the feasibility of the business.”

After months of market research, product testing and tastings, she set up Cashel Fine Foods to produce artisan sausages and puddings for the wholesale and retail trade: “The response to the product range was phenomenal — my biggest issue in the early years was meeting customer demand.”

Una went on to research the feasibility of building a specialised production unit beside the abattoir out at the home place in Deansgrove, about a mile out from town.

“That’s where we are now. Here we would focus solely on making high-quality sausages and puddings.

“With innovation at the core of what we do, our product range is constantly changing and expanding,” she said.

Una now employs six people, supplies retail outlets and butcher shops in Munster and parts of Leinster and hopes to expand further with her product range.

She takes pride in only using 100% Irish pork and carefully sources natural ingredients while working to, and maintaining, the highest possible operational standards in creating the products.

“I did not change the basic traditional sausage that we always had nor would I change it,” she said, explaining that she adds flavours to give consumers variety and choice.

Name recognition for her business was never a problem because of her status as a celebrated Tipperary camogie player.

She played in eight successive All-Ireland senior finals, winning five, once as captain, and being chosen for the player of the match award in another. Una won an All Star Award and was chosen as Texaco Player of the Year in 2004, a year after she won a Lynchpin award, which was a predecessor to the All Stars.

She won her first All-Ireland senior club medal with Cashel in 2007 and captained the team to victory in 2009.

Una also has an All-Ireland intermediate medal won with Tipperary and helped UCC to win the Ashbourne Cup on two occasions.

“I was very lucky to come on the scene when I did. They were great times,” she said, recalling that golden era for Tipperary camogie.

In more recent times, her honours were achieved in the Great Taste Awards, winning gold for her black pudding, sundried tomato and basil, black pudding and thyme sausages, as well as silver for her smoked bacon and cheese sausage.

“We have also gone into making fresh sausage rolls as a quality product and we are working on different novel ideas,” she said.

Una O’Dwyer is looking to the future of her business with confidence, a commitment to quality and a firm belief in tradition.

She is also doing so with the entrepreneurial spirit she showed behind the counter of her father’s butcher’s shop as a teenager, and with the focused determination she displayed as an All Star Tipperary camogie player.

* www.cashelfinefoods.ie