Earning their crust after leaving the farm behind

FUTURE PROOF Foods of AthenryIt's been a roller-coaster ride for Siobhan and Paul Lawless who converted their farm into a modern bakery and now run a thriving business, supplying all major retailers

WHILE THE wave of recession crashed over most of us from 2008, farmers had weathered their own storms a decade earlier. With milk prices in the doldrums in the late nineties, farmer’s wife Siobhan Lawless started to look at alternatives.

“We were struggling on the farm,” she recalls. “No matter how hard we tried, milk prices, the bureaucracy around milk production and the quota system . . . so I started to bake to supplement the family income.”

First supplying bread to local restaurant Moran’s Oyster Cottage, she soon converted a bicycle shed on the farm into a mini-bakery – and so the Foods of Athenry was born. As word spread about her bread, Lawless started to supply local shops, including a Dunnes Stores branch.

With family members suffering from eczema and asthma, Lawless was conscious of what they ate and her baking always had a natural ethos, free from artificial colours, flavours, preservatives, flour improvers or bread enhancers.

“The rock that the business grew off was that if I couldn’t feed it to my own kids, I certainly wasn’t going to feed it to somebody else’s,” she says.

While orders mounted and their bakery business blossomed, the couple’s income from farming continued to trail. By 2003, Lawless says, “it was time to pee or get off the pot”.

Deciding to ramp up the baking side of things gradually, the couple’s oldest son, then aged just 14, milked the cows for six months, morning and evening, freeing his father to work in the bakery.

“Paul came into the bicycle shed to me to see if it was viable for us to make a business out of this before we made a huge leap,” recalls Lawless. “After six months we said, ‘that’s it’.

“We sold all the cows, dismantled the milking machinery that Paul had spent probably a good €100,000 on, and moved the bakery into the milking parlour.” Selling a field to pay off their farming debts, they looked ahead.

Seeing 20 per cent growth year-on-year from 2000, over time, more of the farm buildings were remodelled, funded from cash flow, to support the business.

By 2009, the company was supplying soda bread, scones, pies, cakes and, in the last two months of the year, premium Christmas products to shops including Dunnes Stores and SuperValu shops throughout the west.

Growing to 10 staff and with two delivery vans on the road, Lawless says her husband took care of distribution while she did the baking. It wasn’t until 2009 that they felt the recession bite.

“I remember people talking about the recession and I remember thinking ‘what recession?’” recalls Lawless. “But the following summer, say by May 2009, it was like ‘oh, this is what they are talking about’.”

While shops were taking fewer items with each delivery, Lawless also saw an upsurge in local micro-bakeries as rules for small food producers were relaxed, which began eroding her business in the smaller towns.

“It was maybe a mum whose husband had lost his job and she was now baking bread . . . I saw that spring up in every small town we were in.”

While sales dropped 20 per cent between 2009 and 2010, Lawless says she always tried to focus on a bigger picture.

“I just didn’t see a future in ‘fresh local’ if it was constantly going to be eroded. And if our capability was only ever going to be 50 miles away, then where were we going? I wanted something we could roll out nationally and even export because I felt the answer to this country’s problems was going to be export.”

With legislation due in January 2012 requiring gluten-free products to be prepared entirely separately, Lawless felt this would force many kitchens to outsource their gluten-free requirements. And with celebrities like Posh Spice and Miley Cyrus expounding the benefits of gluten-free, Lawless saw it becoming a more mainstream choice.

The fact that many of Ireland’s youth were emigrating was another factor in her decision to diversify. “The primary people who ate bread were all leaving, all the young men, the athletes, the hurlers, your primary carb-eaters, most of them have left the bloody country.”

Using money from cash flow, the couple remodelled the farm’s slatted unit into a separate gluten-free bakery. A Galway Rural Development grant helped pay for mixers and ovens. But with the new equipment stored in the existing bakery, awaiting installation in the new building, in June 2011 disaster struck when a fire broke out.

“The damage was 100 per cent, total loss,” says Lawless. “The new machinery waiting to go into the new building was burnt on pallets. There was nothing left, zero.”

Praising insurer FBD, the couple recouped about 95 per cent of the policy – but with the new equipment not yet added to the policy, they were still out of pocket.

“In the scheme of things, we probably lost €1 million worth of stuff,” says Lawless. But with Christmas commitments to Superquinn and Harrods, their turnaround had to be fast. “I phoned the buyer at Superquinn and I was crying and said, don’t phone me for four months but I said, hail, rain or snow, I will do Christmas.”

With a third of their premises up in running by October, Christmas and their first gluten-free plum pudding was delivered, winning a two-star Great Taste award in the process. By the end of April this year, Lawless says the Foods of Athenry was back to where it was the day before the fire.

Now stocking outlets nationwide, including Spar, SuperValu, Dunnes and Tesco, the company also has products in 300 Tesco UK stores. “We’ll be in every major multiple by the end of July so it’s been a roller coaster,” says Lawless.

With pre-fire turnover in 2009 of €700,000, she says she’s hopeful the company will turn €1 million this year.

With a possible sugar tax on the cards and a drift towards functional food – “food with good stuff built in”, she says she is full of ideas. “I suppose we are all looking to feel better because life is so stressful and if food can help you combat the stress and tribulations of modern life, then I think there is a market for it.”