New Year, Great Start - Artisan Food Producers Growing Together

Barbara Collins on the groundbreaking collaboration between three complementary artisan food producers in the West of Ireland

Three high profile artisan food producers from the West of Ireland have joined forces to create a complementary group that will boost sales for all of their products. Castlemine Farm Shop in Roscommon has formed a partnership with Kinvara Smoked Salmon and The Friendly Farmer to provide an all-in-one hamper/basket service for customers in hotels and restaurants.

Castlemine already supply high profile restaurants in Galway such as Cava, Aniar and Eat Gastropub as well as Kai and Loam. The company is run by two brothers, Brendan and Derek Allen and they have now teamed up with Declan Droney, Kinvara Smoked Salmon and for Christmas, Ronan Byrne aka The Friendly Farmer.

Castlemine Farm produces and sources beef, lamb, pork and poultry while Ronan Byrne aka ‘The Friendly Farmer’ specialises in pasture poultry farming - chicken, turkeys, geese and ducks - from his base in Athenry.

“I always admired Castlemine farm as they share similar values of quality and customer service with Kinvara Smoked Salmon, so I am delighted with the merger. From a market point of view, both at home and in the UK, there are considerable synergies in offering a basket of West of Ireland premium products. So we really look forward to growing our combined business in the future,” says Declan Droney from Kinvara Smoked Salmon.

“Derek and I have always seen the shared economy and collaboration as a great opportunity for our business and when we met Declan first and noticed the same thinking in him we knew an opportunity existed. The merger is a fantastic step for us and particularly because each brand can continue to produce great products but the unseen elements of the business such as distribution, logistics, admin and management are shared,” says Brendan Allen of Castlemine Farm Shop.

“Mergers are something we hear about mostly from big companies. As small companies we need to consider our options for collaborating and how we can exploit new markets together as complementary groups instead of ploughing lonely furrows and thinking this is the only way,” added Brendan.

The basket includes a choice of speciality dry-cured hams, dry-aged Angus beef, handmade sausages, breakfast puddings from Castlemine Farm, pasture reared bronze turkeys or geese from The Friendly Farmer and award-winning organic Smoked Salmon from Kinvara Smoked Salmon.

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Barbara Collins is a BBC journalist and freelance food, travel and agricultural writer. She contributes regularly to Countryfile magazine, the Farmers Guardian, the Irish News, FFT and the Irish Mail on Sunday. She was Chief Food Writer for Flavour magazine. She is a member of both the UK and Irish Food Writers Guilds and splits her time between Belfast and Galway. Barbara also does menu consultancy and copywriting.

@thegoodchinaset