Inside Track: West Cork haven delivers success for Durrus

Durrus is one of the original Irish farmhouse cheeses and is handmade in a remote part of the Sheep’s Head peninsula in West Cork.

What is special about your business?
We have been in business since 1979 and make a unique selection of cheeses sold under the Durrus name.

Our original Durrus is a semi-soft cheese slowly matured, Durrus Og is eaten at two-four weeks and Dunmanus is a nutty, fruity, semi-hard cheese.

What sets your products apart in your sector?
We make deep flavoured, natural rind-washed cheeses from top quality milk produced by the Friesian herds of two local farmers.

The cows are grazed on coastal pastures and our raw milk cheese are made seasonally when the cows are out.

What has been your major success to date?
Staying in business for 35 years through good and challenging times; having had my neighbour and friend working with me for almost all this period; being visited by Carlo Petrini, the founder of Slow Food; having Durrus on the cheeseboard at Picholine restaurant in Manhattan; and getting a great mention in Max McCalman's book on cheese.

What has been your biggest challenge?
Borrowing money at 18 per cent in the 1980s. Identifying the technical advice and support that is appropriate and useful for a small cheese producer in the earlier years; dealing with production and milk quota issues that had an impact on our ability to expand in the 1990s.

Helping to establish the right of cheese makers here to continue with raw milk cheese production.

What key piece of advice would you give to someone starting a food business?
It is going to be extraordinarily hard work and will probably give you very little financial reward in the short term.

But decide on your target market, try your product on friends and family first and start small.

Who do you admire most in business and why?
Veronica Steele of Milleens Cheese for being a great cheese maker and a wickedly funny and clever woman.

Darina Allen of Ballymaloe and her mother-in-law Myrtle Allen (along with the rest of the Allen family) who have built a wonderful family business that has become a global name and helped provide a great stage for artisanal food producers in Ireland.

What two things could the Government do to help SMEs in the current environment?
Ensure there is affordable and accessible capital and extend the Innovation Voucher Scheme to sole traders as well as limited companies.

In your experience are the banks lending to SMEs currently?
They have been supportive to me in the past but I do not have any recent experience in trying to borrow from them.

What's the biggest mistake you've made in business?
I may have been guilty of thinking too small in the past when I expanded my production facilities. And perhaps we should have gone for a greenfield site rather than trying to work around the buildings that were on the land when we bought it in the 1970s.

I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t have risked more and gone bigger. It is a hard call but I am still in business, albeit finding the economic downturn difficult even though I am not over burdened with debt which I may have been if I had expanded substantially.

What is the most frustrating part of running a small business?
Finding that there is only 24 hours in each day.

What's your business worth and would you sell it?
I have no idea. The business is so tied up with the farm that provides a rural haven for my children and grandchildren that selling would not be just a business decision but a family and lifestyle choice as well.

In conversation with Olive Keogh