How Irish are the 'Irish' products on our shelves?

BUYING IRISH:IN RECENT months, cash-strapped consumers have been called upon by politicians and lobby groups to think local for the sake of the nation and the chorus of food producers warning against the "Tesco-isation" of Irish society and exhorting us to buy Irish has grown increasingly loud.

Speaking to a food conference in Dublin earlier this month, economist Jim Power, the chairman of the Love Irish Food (LIF) campaign, pulled no punches when discussing the Irish retail business. He gave out yards about consumer organisations which claimed that food shopping was all about price and he warned that Irish suppliers were being put under intense pressure by big retailers, some of whom, he claimed, wanted to stock the same products regardless of where in Britain and Ireland they were plying their trade.

While few people would argue with the principle of buying locally produced foods, there are certain issues which can not be glossed over. Price is always going to be a factor, whatever Power believes and finding out what is and isn’t actually Irish can be a lot trickier than you might think, with many of the products which you might assume to be home-produced actually coming in to the country from as far afield as China and Chile.

We carried out a straw poll on Twitter last week, asking how much, if anything, people would be prepared to pay to ensure their food was locally produced. The vast majority of people who took part said they would be willing to pay in the region of 10 per cent extra when it came to fruit and vegetables, rising to 25 per cent more for meat.

“It depends on who is gaining, a supermarket or the producer,” said one reader. “I would pay more for vague green/support-thy-neighbour reasons but local should mean cheaper so it feels wrong,” came another response. “I would but only as long as I was sure farmers were getting a fair shake for producing it,” said a third person. “Often I don’t think to check so I think reminding shoppers is key,” said another.

Reminding shoppers is a central plank of the LIF campaign. It was set up last autumn to promote Irish-manufactured food and protect jobs and in the last six months has brought more than 70 brands – including Avonmore, Club Orange, Flahavan’s, Cadbury, Barry’s Tea, and Tayto – under the same marketing umbrella. Some of the brands in the LIF tent are owned by foreign firms, but have been allowed join the campaign because at least 80 per cent of the manufacture of their product takes place in the Republic.

It is a privately-run company with members paying fees according to the turnover of the brand and is focused entirely on the Republic; by comparison, the Guaranteed Irish brand covers the whole island. “These are brands that are being produced in the Republic of Ireland and we also insist that, where possible, the ingredients are available locally,” says Dervila McGarry, the co-ordinator of the campaign.

McGarry accepts that asking people to buy exclusively Irish products is unrealistic but says if people “just buy one more Irish brand” each week it will have a tangible affect on the economy. “There is a high percentage of the population who are very pro-Irish brands and we are tapping into that,” she says.

THIS WEEK MARKS THE BEGINNING of the second wave of an extensive advertising campaign aimed at promoting the LIF strategy. It has received the support of most of the major retailers doing business in the State, with the notable exception of Dunnes Stores.

A cornerstone of the campaign is two-for-one deals and discounts, so shrewd shoppers should be able to salve their conscience and save money at the same time. This week there’s 50 per cent extra free with Bewley’s coffees; Ballygowan is on a buy-one-get-one-free deal; Mi Wadi juices are heavily discounted; while Glenisk is offering 50 per cent extra on its organic yoghurts. “A lot of the brands recognise that they need to be doing a lot more to bring value to the Irish consumer,” McGarry says. Their campaign also makes much of the fact that there are money-off coupons available on its website (loveirishfood.ie) although when we visited last weekend there were just three coupons available offering 50 per cent discounts on decaf tea from Barry’s, fruit porridge from Flahavan’s and Squeeze fruit juice, which is hardly the most generous and wide-ranging discount scheme we have ever come across.

One issue which LIF has attempted to address is the confusion in many consumers’ minds as to what is and what is not an Irish product. While Boyne Valley honey, Donegal Catch salmon and Fruitfield Old Time Irish marmalade may sound Irish, the reality is somewhat different.

This confusion about where our food actually comes from is doing shoppers no favours, says the chief executive of the Consumer Association of Ireland (CAI) Dermott Jewell. “We do aspire to buying Irish and repeated surveys have shown that. People want good quality food and they want to support Irish jobs but very often people are buying products with labels that suggest the product is Irish when they are from God knows where.”

Jewell cites Fruitfield jams. Its jars contain a Tallaght address but he says it took CAI researchers two days and many phone calls to the company to establish that the product was produced partly in the UK and partly in Portugal and not at all in the Republic.

“Quite often the industry will say that it is not misleading Irish consumers and that the products they are selling are made to an “Irish recipe” but not one single ingredient will be Irish. You can have a situation where a chicken breast from thousands of miles away is labelled Irish because the breadcrumbs used to coat it come from here.”

Jewell describes the Love Irish Food campaign as “considerably better” than many similar campaigns that have gone before it but expresses concern that “locally-produced foods are often outside people’s budgets” and marvels how Irish foods frequently sell for less on the shelves of UK and US supermarkets than they do much closer to home.

For her part, McGarry refuses to be drawn on price specifics although she is willing to address it in general terms.

“I can’t say if the Love Irish Food brands are more expensive than other brands as I wouldn’t be monitoring prices on a day-to-day basis but I can say that the companies involved are a lot more conscious of the need to offer value for money and they are very mindful of that fact.”

JACOB’S FIG ROLLS

This company says that the fig roll has been “Ireland’s favourite for over 100 years” which may well be the case. The secret of how Jacob’s gets its figs into the rolls has, however, been lost to this country for ever and when we called last week, we were told that the biscuits were now being manufactured in Malta.

SIÚCRA

The only thing that’s Irish about this brand is the name. All the beet factories have long since been shut down so not so much as a single grain of sugar is produced in Ireland. Greencore, the  company which owns the Siúcra brand imports it from elsewhere in Europe, most frequently Germany, before repacking it for our supermarket shelves.

WILLIAM SHAW’S PORK PRODUCTS

The “Olde Worlde” packaging and dewy-eyed shots of Limerick in the “rare auld times” in the advertising campaign used to promote this product could lead people to think this is made with Irish meat. Shaws is not, however, owned by a Limerick butcher called William, it’s owned by Breeo Foods, a subsidiary of co-op giant Dairygold and its bacon could just as easily have come from the Netherlands, Denmark or Scotland, or, indeed Ireland.

BOYNE VALLEY HONEY

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Boyne Valley Honey contains honey from the Boyne Valley or, at a pinch, Ireland. And there is a chance – admittedly a small one that it does – but the packaging tells us no more than it is made with both EU and non-EU honey which suggests that many of the bees involve in the process were buzzing a long, long way from the Boyne.

DONEGAL CATCH SALMON

If for some inexplicable reason you assumed that the fish caught by Donegal Catch came from Donegal you’d be wrong. This company’s salmon might have been farmed in Ireland. Or Scotland. Or Chile.