Ballymaloe Foods’ Maxine Hyde on relish, family and growing a food business

Maxine Hyde on growing Ballymaloe Foods into a 70-person business, sustainability, family succession, food innovation and UK expansion.

The culinary empire that emerged from Ballymaloe – including the famous Ballymaloe Foods’ relish business and the famous cookery school, both separate businesses – all emerged from a situation that a newly married woman in rural Ireland who could barely cook found herself in.

Myrtle Allen was the daughter of a prominent architect in Cork city and had never set foot in a kitchen. On their wedding night her husband Ivan taught her how to scramble an egg. Ivan, a horse vet, was immersing himself in the world of horticulture and when he travelled to the UK on business he discovered a strange plant called a tomato.

“She just couldn’t believe the quality of the produce coming into her kitchen, and started teaching herself how to cook,” recalls her granddaughter Maxine Hyde, general manager of Ballymaloe Foods. “She would read cookbooks. She’d write to the authors of the cookbooks if she had a question on it, so she developed a good friendship with some interesting international chefs, and she was asked to write a food column. My granddad was very involved with the IFA, and the IFA would be very interested in futuristic farming methods. And the editor of the Farmers Journal asked her, “Look, would you ever do a weekly column of your cooking?” And that was kind of her first step into the professional food world.”

Origins of the secret sauce

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Emboldened Myrtle decided she would open a restaurant but Ivan insisted if she did so she would run the restaurant from Ballymaloe House. “They opened some bedrooms then, so that they could get a [bar] licence, and that turned into Ballymaloe being a restaurant and a hotel. They started doing cookery lessons in the winter just to keep a bit of income going in the winter, mostly training local ladies to cook, and that developed then into the Ballymaloe Cookery School.

“There were lots of tomatoes being grown in Ballymaloe up to the end of the 70s, and the glut at the end of the summer would be turned into Ballymaloe Relish, and that way the tomatoes could be enjoyed for the following year. The guests seemed to love it. They’d be asking for a jar when they were leaving the hotel.”

It was in 1990 that Myrtle’s daughter Yasmin started selling the relish in jars at stalls and would bring them into grocery stores. “So I’m told when they tried to sell them locally, shopkeepers wouldn’t buy them. They didn’t know what they were,” says Maxine, who now leads the company with her sister Rosaline.

Today, most people in Ireland are fans of Ballymaloe Relish. The business now employs 70 people and makes a range of sauces, relishes and condiments. You could say Yasmin Hyde saw a product with commercial legs.

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“My mum also noticed the versatility,” Maxine says. “You know, bacon and sausages in the morning, a sandwich at lunch, maybe a burger or shepherd’s pie at dinner.” A long natural shelf life meant the relish could be cooked, packed and sold from the boot of a car.

The early years were hard graft. “1990s Ireland was a very poor place and my mother didn’t pay herself for years She was advised to charge £4.99 and position the relish as an upmarket product. She set the price at £2. She really wanted it to be available to the mass market,” Hyde says.

That thinking still shapes pricing. “We’re operating in Ireland, it’s a really high-cost place to do manufacturing, and we want it to be very good quality,” she says. “It’s never, for us, picking which margin we want to go for. It’s always the best possible price we can get it to shelf.”

Rosaline, a former equine surgeon, joined in 2016. Maxine had set her sights on the business “from probably 13 or 14 years old.” Rosaline runs operations, quality and maintenance. Maxine covers marketing, sales and people. “We’re very different people, so we have different brains, different skills,” she says.

“Rose has a technical brain, takes on operations, takes on running of the business, the quality, the maintenance, all of that, and then my brain is much more marketing, sales, the people side of it. So thankfully, we’re a productive partnership.

The next generation

Maxine and Rosaline Hyde, owners of Ballymaloe Foods

Stepping in as the second generation of a very successful and recognisable brand was daunting but also invigorating for Maxine. “Running a business is challenging, and I joined the business straight after college, and it worked at the time. I was already involved in projects going on, but I don’t think that’s advisable. If I had gone and worked for maybe a slightly bigger business, you would be bringing back so many learnings, whereas I probably had a long, slow road of making mistakes and learning things bit by bit. In fairness, I got great guidance through the years from both Bord Bia and Enterprise Ireland, with various sessions, and various consultants would come and help.

“We learned really big lessons with hiring people. We didn’t really know how to hire. I think coming into a family business that has been run by, say, one person, as you’re growing the business, you need to grow the team. We definitely learned lessons in the early days, made mistakes. The same with things like, my mum was really into making the product, and I think having that foundation of having products really well-made is an amazing foundation in a business. And then when I joined, we were growing. We needed to account manage. We needed to get a budget in place. So there was an awful lot of HR strategy, budgeting, as I say, just general growth strategy that needed to be done. And we got there, and even in the last six, seven years we’ve gotten better again, so I feel like I could write a book at this stage, from knowing nothing to what I know now.”

Ballymaloe Foods has achieved B Corp certification. This goes to the heart of what the business is all about, says Maxine. “

“We’re sustainable from the word go. My mum was running a sustainable business before the word sustainable was even a word that was used, very much getting her ethos from her grandparents in Ballymaloe House. And we have been long-term members of the Bord Bia Origin Green programme. We’re gold members for a number of years, which is the higher end of the certification, and we wanted something that consumers would recognise internationally, which was the B Corp. It’s very well known in the UK, where we’re really working hard on our retail growth, and we have had a graduate in sustainability here for the last two years, which has been fantastic, supported by Enterprise Ireland. Before that, sustainability was a little bit hard because everyone was doing a little bit of it in the business. So to have one central hire made moving on from Origin Green into B Corp possible, and now we can proudly put that B Corp on all of our labels across the Ballymaloe brand.”

There are few people in Ireland who aren’t familiar with Ballymaloe Relish and I asked Maxine does she foster plans to go global. “It’s very expensive to enter retail markets around the world. We’re very lucky in that we supply pretty much all of the key Irish food importers, who would be selling on to the Irish shops, the British and Irish shops. But beyond that, we’re very careful where we will try and enter a retail market, if we are going on to the normal shop shelf where you’re going to be mixed with all of the other international or just the normal condiments, because relish beyond Ireland and the UK does need a lot of explaining.”

How to get ahead in food

The business is also focused on R&D and a new product being launched is Ballymaloe’s 100 Recipe Sauce. “It’s born really from myself and Rose, plus many members of our team, being exhausted and stretched working mothers. So it’s a tomato-based sauce that we’re calling 100 Recipe Sauce, and we have a website to go along with it. You scan it on the pack, and there’s 100 recipes for how to use this sauce. And yes, of course, for pastas and bolognese and all of that kind of thing. But we have curries, we have shepherd’s pie, we have baked eggs, all sorts of recipes.

“It’s really born out of, I guess, the personal struggle, like when you have very young kids and you come in from work and they just want their mama and they want hugs and they want your attention, and you’re trying to dice an onion with a sharp knife, and you have a child hanging at your knees. So it’s kind of born out of that real struggle that we’ve been through, and hopefully, hopefully, we get the word out about it now.”

With Blas na hEireann – the Irish Food Awards – taking place in Dingle this week, I asked Maxine what she thinks of Ireland as a place to build a food business in 2026. “When my mum would have started in the 1990s, it was a lot tougher. There was no such thing as a farmers’ market, and there was definitely not the bravery or even the multiculturalism that we have today. And Irish food is really in fashion. If you go to London, if you go to New York, Irish chefs are doing really amazing things in restaurants. We have, I guess, our key brands like Kerrygold and Flahavan’s, who have done really well in the UK and other markets, and I think they do an awful lot for the value of an Irish brand. We’re just finding there’s such an appetite in the UK for Irish food, and it’s trendy. You’ll have burger joints, you’ll have pubs. So there’s a great appetite. It makes it easier for us to knock on the door of the supermarkets in the UK and the food service distributors, so we’re delighted to see it.

Her advice to food founders? “I think if you’re going to a supermarket, if you can demonstrate demand from, say, a local farmers’ market, if you can demonstrate you have the loyal followers and the demand is there. If you’re trying to be the fifth version of something, where there’s already four, that’s going to be really tough. Know your numbers. Know your margin. You might have to factor in a distributor margin. You might be asked for price promotions a few times a year, and that all has to come off your end margin. So knowing your numbers.

“I think as well, there’s so many Irish food businesses willing to help,” she concludes. “So reach out to them and ask for guidance. We love helping a smaller business here, and it might just be telling them where they can get a particular label or a particular cardboard box, or a contact for a distributor. We love to help here. I think it motivates the team if we can be helpful. We have learned so much from reaching out to other businesses, so I would definitely recommend that.”