The Blas effect: the little sticker that boosts business
Anna and Orla Snook O’Carroll of Valentia Island Vermouth toast to another successful gold award at Blas na hÉireann this year. Photograph: Joleen Cronin
Mullingar chocolatier Denise Buckley and her husband David Quirke opened their café and restaurant business, The Wholesome Kitchen, in 2019. Three years later Denise realised a lifelong dream by opening The Sugarplum Sweetery, a chocolate and confectionery store, right next door.
A wonderfully Wonkaesque experience, it didn’t just draw on café customers but quickly drew in visitors from much further afield, specifically making the trip to the Midlands town to enjoy her hand-crafted creations.
Winning a Blas na hÉireann award for one of Buckley’s creations, her Florentine Favourite Slab, in 2023, helped boost demand enormously. When, the following year, she hit upon her recipe for a Dubai pastry inspired pistachio filled chocolate bar, which launched exclusively in Avoca in the run up to Christmas, it went viral, and orders exploded. At one stage she had to ration sales, such was customer demand.
Indeed, such has been The Sugarplum Sweetery’s success, both direct to consumers online from its own website and via high profile partnerships with stores such as Avoca and Brown Thomas, that today the chocolatier employs 35 people.
For any food or drink business, winning Blas na hÉireann recognition for a product can result in a huge boost in your business’s profile, says Buckley.
“If something is on a shelf in a retailer, and has a Blas na hÉireann sticker on it, it’s going to drive sales,” she adds.
“On top of that, even just being nominated results in local media attention and, depending on who picks up on the story of your brand, other media profile too. It’s why it is so important for a business to try and win awards in general. Blas ones in particular are very well recognised among consumers because they have a lot of credibility as the foodie award for Ireland.”
Participation in the awards also comes with additional business benefits, such as terrific opportunities to network with other food and drinks producers at its annual awards event in Dingle, a huge industry occasion.
“It’s amazing how many people will travel down to it but it’s not just an awards ceremony, there are great talks and workshops as well going on over a number of days,” she says. “It’s also a terrific opportunity for small food producers to meet with buyers.”
Such networking opportunities are invaluable. “You can email people all you want but it’s meeting somebody face to face that makes the difference, and it was because of meeting Avoca’s buyer in Dingle that I got into Avoca last Christmas, which worked really well for us,” she explains.
Denise also received support from Blas na hÉireann’s expert food business mentoring panel.
“I received mentoring two years in a row, and from a number of mentors. You can read the panel’s bios and put your name forward for slots if they have availability. I availed of marketing and PR mentoring from Vivienne Gleeson and also got mentoring from a former supermarket buyer who came down to our business and spent half a day with us, which was fantastic. At that stage any kind of feedback and information was so welcome in order to help us take the business to the next level,” she says.
“That kind of mentoring and advice is super helpful and well worth availing of when you are a small business and might not have the budget for it otherwise.”
Mark Bergin’s high-end retail and food service coffee roastery business, Coffee House Lane, has won multiple Blas na hÉireann awards over the years, including for its 1690 blend and its water process decaffeinated beans.
Bergin set up the business, which is based in Waterford, in 2014 and it was among the first crop of businesses to come through Food Academy, the innovative food and drink start up accelerator run by the Local Enterprise Offices, Bord Bia and SuperValu/Musgrave.
Today, around 75 per cent of his revenues come from business to business (B2B) sales, with the remainder catering to consumer thirst for his expertly roasted beans and blends.
“We sell on the quality of the product and the service we offer,” explains Bergin.
“To be honest with you, most people out there now have a good product. You simply can’t survive today unless your product is good, so it’s down to service and the team I have with me. We work to British Retail Consortium (BRC) standards and, at our last unannounced BRC audit achieved AA, the highest rating,” he explains.
Of all the awards competitions Coffee House Lane enters and has won, Blas na hÉireann is his favourite, he says.
“It’s the first one we won. We knew we were producing a good product but for someone to come along and give us that external validation was amazing. Of course, we love all the awards we’ve won since then but that first was just massive. Just to get shortlisted was a sigh of relief and then to go down there and find out we had won, I was just ecstatic,” says Bergin.
“My parents came down with me. My father had only recently retired, and has since passed away, so it was just great to have them come down there and enjoy it as well, because they put such a lot of work in behind us to start it off,” he recalls.
Consumer goodwill towards his coffee has been tremendous too. “Winning at Blas has helped me massively on the domestic market. When people see it on the front of the bag it gives them immediate assurance of a quality product that they know is produced on the island of Ireland,” he points out.
“Having that quality mark has helped enormously. Even if someone has never heard of us, they’ll pick up our blend when they see that Blas sticker. We’ve seen our retail sales growing year on year and have been investing in staff as a result,” he says.
He too makes the most of the networking benefits participation in the Blas na hÉireann awards brings, including attending the Backyard at Blas workshops which take place around the country throughout the year. These highly educational and informative events cover all sorts of business issues, from brand building and marketing to sales pitches.
“They put together great panels with question-and-answer sessions where you can find out about how to get a product listed somewhere, for example, or who you should talk to. Very often buyers themselves will attend,” he says.
There is also enormous peer-to-peer learning, which is invaluable because running a business can be isolating.
“Dingle itself is a great opportunity to network with all the other producers, while buyers all get to see your product on the morning of the awards, to see what might interest them and what they want to see more of,” says Bergin.
“There’s always plenty of buyers floating around Dingle for the weekend which makes it a great business opportunity. Certainly, it’s a massive weekend in my calendar every year which is why, whether we are shortlisted or not, we go down,” he adds.
“It’s a chance for producers to pick one another’s brains about everything from packaging to repairing machines. The team behind Blas are just fantastic supporters of Irish food producers so for me it’s a no brainer to enter the awards and a real honour when you win one,” he says.
When Orla and Anna Snook O’Carroll, a married couple from Valentia Island in Co Kerry, set up Valentia Island Vermouth in 2021, one of the first things they did was enter the Blas na hÉireann awards.
Their product initially won bronze before going on to win gold, with the company picking up the best artisan producer title too. All of this has helped boost sales enormously, both by raising the business’s profile in the press and because of the little gold Blas na hÉireann badges they can now stick on each bottle, a massive seal of approval.
Today, Valentia Vermouth, which features botanicals handpicked on the island, has secured listings everywhere from off licences and supermarkets to airports. Sales growth is continuing apace, and not just in Ireland. Later this year the couple will begin exporting to the US, a massive milestone.
For any food or drinks business, getting consumers to try it is always the first step to success. It’s why so much resource is typically expended on tastings in supermarkets.
Having a Blas sticker does a massive job of work too in that respect, encouraging that first time customer to take a chance on something new.
“When I’m in a shop to buy wine, I’ll buy the one that says gold, winner, or finalist, even if it’s an award I don’t know, like a French prize,” says Orla. “I think the stickers are integral to people buying a product for the first time.” When it happens for Valentia Vermouth, they typically come back for more, she points out. “It’s fantastic because we now employ four people and every single bottle that another new person buys, or brings to their friends, helps us to create jobs here in south Kerry,” she adds.
She well remembers making that first call to the Blas na hÉireann team, to find out what award category they should enter, and the wealth of support that it unleashed.
Since then, Valentia Vermouth has also benefited from the business mentors they were introduced to via Blas, including food experts Annie Dunne and Sharon Noonan. It was help from another Blas mentor that enabled the couple to get Valentia Vermouth into Tesco.
Indeed, so grateful is she for all Blas na hÉireann’s support, and in particular Artie Clifford and Fallon Moore - its engine - that she feels Ireland Inc should return the favour: “In England they have dames and knighthoods,” says Orla. “I think we need an Irish honours equivalent to bestow on them, because of what they do for Irish food producers, which is absolutely phenomenal.”
