Egged on by Easter sales boost
Making a go of a chocolate business takes hard work, luck and the ability to make the most of the sales boosts you get from events like Easter.
That’s according to Ian Graham, founder of Bandon-based company Milseán who finds that sales always go way up at this time of year.
“People still go off chocolate and sweets for Lent which means that sales drop off, but they go back up at Easter,” he says.
Taking advantage of this boost, he is preparing for the launch of three new products which will go into SuperValu stores in west Cork later this month.
“This a new range we are calling Bite Me and has orange, mocca and lemon and blueberry flavoured chocolate slabs,’’ he reveals.
Set up as a tiny operation in Bandon 10 years ago, the company is now in an expansion phase as a result of securing a listing with both SuperValu and Centra in recent years.
“We are now selling in 120 Centras and 72 SuperValu stores - mostly in Munster but also in Dublin, Galway and Wexford,’’ says Mr Graham.
In 2007, a chance meeting with a confectionery chef who wanted to start a chocolate business, provided Mr Graham with a timely opportunity to make a switch from running a planning consultancy business which wasn’t doing well in the recession.
“As research, we bought 30 bars – looked at wrapping, the ingredients and the production process,’’ says Mr Graham, explaining that he and his business partner decided there was a gap in the market for good quality chocolate bars.
They started on the farmers’ markets circuit, selling pastries and graduated to chocolate bars.
Selecting the chocolate for their products because of its taste and quality, they later realised it was from a single origin, a type of chocolate which was on its way to becoming very popular.
Proving just how useful the Internet is, they found the name of their company through a web search, although they didn’t know at the time that Milseán needed the fada which Google hadn’t given them.
Providing chocolate samples to his bank manager, Mr Graham managed to get a loan of €5,000 to get the business started.
Several years of hard work followed.
They built up a product range and sold to a few local stores before setting up a café and chocolate shop in Limerick.
This didn’t work out, and Mr Graham, working on his own, was about to give up chocolate making altogether when some good luck came his way.
In mid 2014, a marketing company rang and invited him to bring Milseán products to fill a vacant space at a Cork-Kerry Food Forum.
“I was at the stand when an unidentified man came and asked questions about the chocolate and asked me about the cost of getting a new cardboard stand,’’ he says.
The questioner turned out to be a confectionery buyer from Musgrave who liked Milseán chocolate and wanted to stock it.
Mr Graham took part in the SuperValu Food Academy which helped with branding, packaging and marketing.
In early 2015, he started supplying 20 SuperValu stores in the Cork area with a range of chocolate products.
As the number of stores grew he secured some grant aid from the West Cork Local Enterprise Office to develop a small new food production unit and took on one employee.
Now, the Milseán range includes four chocolate bars and a hot chocolate drink.
“The best seller used to be a 44%-Venezuelan chocolate bar, now it’s 80%-Ugandan,’’ says Mr Graham, who has won several UK Great Taste Awards and Blas na hÉireann titles.
He took on a third staff member last year and plans to add a fourth later this year.
He is hoping to see the new Bite Me Milseán chocolate range go into more SuperValu and Centra stores around the country.
“We are also aiming to grow the total number of stores we supply to 400 by the end of the year and see an opportunity to sell to more stores in Dublin,’’ says Mr Graham.
Company: Milseán
Location: Bandon, Co Cork
Founder: Ian Graham
Staff: 3
Product: Chocolate bars, drinks and slabs
Website: www.milseán.ie
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