Ballymaloe Foods boss sees business thrive

The Thrive Project is a six-month leadership programme developed to nurture the next generation of food and drinks companies in building scale and expanding reach. First established in 2016, the programme was created by Coca-Cola and Enterprise Ireland, in partnership with Dublin City University.

The seven entrepreneurs in the 2019 Thrive Project were provided with an opportunity to undertake strategy development and commercialisation sessions at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta and its London office.

“When the opportunity came up to get involved, I jumped at the chance,” Maxine Hyde, the general manager for Ballymaloe Foods since 2018, recalled.

“As one of seven companies participating in the programme, it gave me the unique opportunity to undertake strategy development and commercialisation sessions at Coca-Cola headquarters, and new product development with market experts in the company’s London office.”

Centred around leadership and innovation within Ireland’s food and drink industry, the programme aims to share best practices, experiences and insights over the course of the six-month programme, helping ambitious Irish companies to become global brands.

There were many insights and information given to us on both the trip to Atlanta and London, but, on reflection, I benefited the most from their approach to marketing, sustainability and culture.

The programme offered interaction with a number of the company’s key staff, including the Coca-Cola marketing director for Western Europe: “We learned about the importance of understanding our customers’ motivations and putting ourselves in their shoes, ensuring the brands we’re creating and the way we’re engaging with them is something that they need, and messaged in the right way to engage customers,” she added.

With the Thrive Project providing a platform for entrepreneurs in the food and drink sector to succeed in the global marketplace, the combination of Coca-Cola’s global market and consumer insights, together with Enterprise Ireland’s expertise in business development and financial planning, the seven graduating companies will have the skills and ideas at their disposal to propel them to the next stage of growth and success.

At a time when sustainability is central across the entire business sector, the Coca-Cola team outlined the measures employed to transform their packaging, in addition to insights and facts on the topic.

In the workshops around the Innocent brand, participants learned how a smaller company retained its ownculture, despite being owned by a multinational brand:

This was really interesting to me, as Ballymaloe Foods has come from beginnings of similarly strong values, and I could see both the importance of keeping our culture and how we could go about that as we grow.

In addition, meeting the many Irish people who have become successful and influential within Coca-Cola was inspiring to the Thrive participants: “The mentorship sessions we participated in throughout the programme were also a check on where we are at as a company, and helped give us some pointers to what we could do more or less of.”

The graduation of the class of 2019 brings to 30 the number of entrepreneurs mentored to date. The 2020 Thrive Project will commence in May with eight new companies participating in what will be the fifth year of the global leadership programme.

Maxine agrees that the Thrive Project opened her eyes to new business opportunities outside of Ireland, and to think strategically about realising ambitious growth plans.

“Advice from the global leadership team at Coca-Cola together with one-to-one coaching sessions have proven invaluable in helping us to ‘think big’ and to look for new opportunities to expand our product range.

We’ve already applied the learning from the programme to many areas including new product development, marketing, distribution, packaging and finance and we are seeing the positive effects.

She also underlines the friendships developed with her fellow participants: “They really are friends for life who I can check in with for advice when I need it and learnings they’ve taken from situations they’ve experienced. It’s really been a great experience.”

Ballymaloe Foods, established by the Hyde Family in 1989, produces a range of table sauces and relishes, salad dressings, pasta sauces and beetroot products.

With its flagship ‘Ballymaloe Relish’ the company has continued to develop and bring new products and products to the Irish and export markets. The firm is one of 16 separate businesses created after Myrtle Allen established a country house hotel and restaurant at Ballymaloe in the 1960s.

“Ballymaloe Foods is my mum’s business, I have worked with her for nearly 11 years now, and engage closely with the sales and marketing teams and help oversee the other business areas. We recognised several years ago the need to resource our team so that we can continue to grow, so I have been busy recruiting and guiding this team, trying to learn to be a leader rather than a hands-on sales and marketing person.”

She admits her average week can be very varied, ranging from agreeing a marketing campaign, introducing or developing a new product, making changes to the manufacturing plant or looking at financial plans for the future.

“We are still a small team, so I could also be loading an order onto a truck, cleaning or many other tasks involved in a busy family business.”

The company has been growing steadily in recent years, recording 12% growth in 2019, which included 30% growth in exports.

“Last year we introduced Ballymaloe mayonnaise which was a big project that included new machinery and lots of careful product development, ensuring what we make on a bigger scale tastes as good as the batch we make at home.”

This year sees the company on a mission to reduce plastic from its packaging, and have just moved their pasta sauces from plastic to glass, and now focused on the outer cases.

"It’s well known Irish consumers really care about packaging and with a mix of a big advertising campaign and glass packaging, our Ballymaloe pasta sauces grew by nearly 50% last year. Food manufacturing is not an easy business in Ireland, it’s a high-cost base and we then compete on shelves with companies of much bigger scale,” she adds.

“We are also about to launch a ‘Fiery Relish’ and by the end of spring we will also have added a ‘Hidden Veggie’ pasta sauce to our range.

And if all these growth plans happen, we will be able to invest in a premises with more space to expand.