Eight years kneading £20,000 into £20m

Eight years ago Mr Ronan McNamee and his partner, Dr Pat Loughrey, started out in business with seed capital totalling £20,000. Last week they each received a £20 million windfall when their business, Cuisine de France, was acquired by IAWS. Although Dr Loughrey is expected to retire, Mr McNamee (45) will continue as managing director at Cuisine's headquarters in Tallaght, Co Dublin. "The truth? The acquisition deal does not mean anything to me. Cuisine de France was the same the day before as the day after. What gives me the biggest buzz is to see boxes of bread made in this factory being sold in England," he says. A £15 million investment by IAWS will allow his firm "to speed up the expansion of the company".

"That is what IAWS is going to do for us. We have plenty of projects," he says.

In the same year that he began importing frozen baguettes from France, Mr McNamee almost became a full-time professional rally driver, winning the RAC Rally of Britain as the co-driver for Airikkala Pentti of Finland. "That is management. When you are co-driving you are managing under pressure the driver, the car, a back-up team, including mechanics." But between getting married and the business taking off, he chose the profession he knew best - bread. The irony of the business's success is that it now has a pilot project in the Benelux countries, neighbours to France from where the par-baked concept was derived.

But expansion opportunities are available in Britain and current plans are to increase the manufacturing aspect of a business whose strength was built on distribution.

Although most of the company's diverse products are supplied by other bakeries, the flagship Parisien baguette and rolls are par-baked 24 hours a day in the humidity-controlled, air-conditioned Tallaght plant. Within the next year, Cuisine de France will build new baking facilities in England and increase its Irish baking capacity. From Crossmaglen, Co Armagh, Mr McNamee is the third generation to be involved in the baking business, although he says he is not a baker himself. He has worked at Downes's Buttercrust bakery and the Batchelor group.

"I know the business inside out, I have a very good spread of knowledge of baking and frozen food and food processes generally. I come from a general management/production type background."

Cuisine de France is a hybrid of these industries. For its bread, French flour is used, the loaf is then par-baked, frozen, packaged and distributed to outlets whose staff have been trained by Cuisine in finishing the product. The secret lay in devising a system which would suit retail outlets. "A lot of groups had got themselves involved in too complicated a process, and a process that needs a lot of space does not work in a retail environment," he says. It's a long way from selling bread in the small Crossmaglen bakery but he says that working in a small business teaches one all the techniques of working in big business, right down to being pleasant with customers. The one thing that makes him angry, he says, is if customers are let down. He and Dr Loughrey, who had previously spent 12 years as managing director of Batchelors - began by importing frozen bread from France and used couriers to deliver it for the first few months. "Then as the business grew we bought our first van and we got a delivery driver. Six months or a year into it we got a rep. And then we got somebody in the office, and it just went from there."

The present fleet of 35 vans deliver as far as Achill and Schull, and the company is in negotiations with the last major multiple in Ireland, Marks & Spencer, to stock its 122 products. see also page 24