Dairy scoops Arab market with Baskin-Robbins deal

A CO Cork company has scooped a major contract to supply large ice cream cakes to stores in a number of Arab states.

Silver Pail Dairy, Ireland’s largest ice cream manufacturer, has secured agreement to make the cakes for Baskin-Robbins stores in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Bahrain, Kuwait and Quatar.

The Fermoy-based company said it will ship more than 300,000 of these cakes to the Middle-East in the first year.

The new contract will sustain over 20 jobs at the Fermoy plant.

More than 1.4 million litres of fresh local milk will be used to make the dairy ingredients in the cakes.

The ice cream cakes are large and serve 12-20 people. They are produced in two sizes — 9ins round cakes and 8ins by 12ins rectangular cakes.

The original cake concepts were designed by Baskin-Robbins’s culinary team who then worked with the research and development team at Silver Pail Dairy to make the intricate handmade designs a reality.

The cakes include Praline Chocolate Delight, Royal Vanilla Treasure, Chocolate Chip Charm and Vanilla Mango Sophistication.

Silver Pail chief executive, Michael Murphy, said the company was delighted to secure the new business from Baskin-Robbins, which owns the world’s largest chain of ice cream speciality stores.

“The ice cream cakes are everybody’s dream treat. They look and taste stunning and certainly demonstrate the wonderful products that can be made with milk from the lush pastures in north Cork. These cakes demonstrate how we can add real value to our world- leading agricultural produce,” Mr Murphy said.

Silver Pail Dairy, which has been in business for 30 years, has been making GMO-free ice cream to service Baskin-Robbins’s European market since January 2006.

The Fermoy company currently produces over 15 million litres of real dairy ice cream each year including its own brand, Corrin Hill, along with producing ice cream for the retail and food service markets.