Pat Lalor, and his son John, of Kilbeggan Organic Foods.

Local organic food business goes from strength to strength

Have a go. That was the straightforward philosophy behind Pat Lalor’s decision to start selling his Kilbeggan Organic Porridge at the beginning of 2011. He had no business plan drawn up, and no start-up investment drawn down.

“I’m a sucker for having a go,” says Pat. “This is not the first thing I’ve tried, but it’s the first thing that has worked out well!”

It certainly has. In its five years on the market, Kilbeggan Organic Porridge has earned a devoted following and can be found on breakfast tables throughout the world. 

During the last two years, the porridge has even been included in an Irish food hamper presented by the Taoiseach to President Obama at the White House for St Patrick’s Day. “Whether Donald Trump will ever get it or not, I don’t know,” Pat remarks.

His Kilbeggan products are packaged and distributed from a premises in Tullamore’s axis Business Park. The business will soon move to a different unit in the same business park, where packaging the porridge - which has always been done by hand thus far - will move to a semi-automated system.

The success of the porridge led to spin-off products such as a range of Kilbeggan oat cookies and, the newest product line, a porridge bread mix which comes in three varieties.

Pat’s son, John, had been working as a physio in Australia for seven years but he returned home last year to run the Kilbeggan Organic Foods business with his father. The company has one other full-time employee.

A cereal and beef producer, Pat made the decision to go organic on his family farm, Ballard Farm in Kilbeggan, in 1999. “My main reason for doing it was to try and make more money,” he explains.

“It’s expected that people who go organic do so because they want to save the world or save the environment but, quite honestly, I had four children heading for college and there wasn’t a great return on the system of farming I had been in. There was very little job satisfaction in it either.”

Organic farms remain a rarity in Ireland, amounting to around 2% of the total. They were particularly scarce when Pat first made the change, and as a result he had to travel to England to learn about organic farming at conferences and farm walks. These trips planted a seed that ultimately led to his porridge being produced.

“I didn’t have any one ‘eureka’ moment, but when I was visiting the UK I saw what other farmers were doing there. It wasn’t unusual at all for farmers there to have their own little slaughterhouse, and their own little mill for milling their wheat and selling it. They would open farm shops, and so on. So I thought: why don’t I have a go at something like this?”

His porridge was first produced for the marketplace at the end of 2010. “I got it milled on contract – which I’m still doing – and got it bagged on contract with another artisan producer,” Pat says. 

During the “really bad winter” of 2010/2011, he gave out samples at a Christmas food fair in the Mullingar Park Hotel. By the end of that week he had received his first order - for €80 worth of porridge - from the Nuts & Grains health food store in Mullingar.

“It was word of mouth from there on. I did no advertising or anything. People just loved the product, and the packaging, and that was it. I had a good product but I was also lucky – and you need both.”

One of his fortunate breaks came in 2011 when RTÉ broadcaster Ella McSweeney stayed at a B&B in North Westmeath and was served Kilbeggan Organic Porridge for breakfast.

“(McSweeney) came over to me straight away to do an interview, so I had about eight minutes on Pat Kenny’s morning radio programme. We were filling it into the bags at the kitchen table by hand, and putting on the labels by hand. This sounded really novel, and the media loved the story.”

Last year, Kilbeggan Irish Oat Cookies were added to the range. These are stocked in outlets that include many of the Supervalu branches in Leinster, and sales have been steadily growing.

“The cookies are my own wife’s recipe. She’s been making them at home for donkey’s years,” says Pat. “There’s an artisan bakery down in Cork that’s baking them for us on contract.”

The new porridge bread mix - in savoury herb, super seed and natural fruit varieties - will be distributed in the Midlands for six months “just to see how it will go”.

“You can sell anything once but getting a repeat order is the challenge. We have a couple of other products in mind as well, but if we could produce one new product a year I think we’d be doing very, very well,” Pat says.

A father for four, he is married to Lily, a speech and language therapist. Pat concludes with some encouraging words for anyone who might be thinking of starting their own food business.

“One of the things I emphasise when I’m asked to give talks about starting your own business is that, when I started, I hadn’t a clue about packaging, barcodes, food regulation, or anything like that, but that’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a go at something.

“There’s a lot of help out there now – from the likes of the Local Enterprise Organisations (LEOs) – and all of that help is virtually free. So the help is there, and people should have a go. No doubt about it.”