From farmers markets to national brand: How Irish food entrepreneurs can scale without losing their identity

John Cradden reveals how Irish food entrepreneurs can scale from local markets to national retail while protecting brand identity, product quality and profitability.

It can be tricky to make the transition from a local food business to a national brand while maintaining the very elements and chemistry that enabled you to win over your first customers.

Achieving success at local markets and independent retailers can be an meaningful first step in the journey but the decision to scale such a business can create a difficult paradox.

The very qualities that make a small Irish food brand attractive can be harder to preserve as production volumes increase and the business starts working with supermarkets, national distributors and international supply chains. These qualities could include the product’s provenance, the brand personality, the craftmanship that goes into making it, and a distinctive backstory.

But it’s not just about preserving brand authenticity. A brand can still be true to its founding principles and remain authentic but could become less profitable. Or it could remain profitable at a cost to its product quality or distinctiveness.

Scale or stall?

There are a few examples of Irish food companies that endured unexpected difficulties or growing pains as they scaled.

Wicklow-based The Happy Pear, run by the well-known twin brothers Stephen and David Flynn, expanded its retail café operation into packaged foods, books and digital products, but then endured a number of challenging years of revenue losses. Despite that, their brand remains a strong one, based as it is on the identities of the two brothers and their focus on plant-based food and healthy living. But it does show that even when you have a powerful brand, the numbers need to work at every stage of growth.

Due to an outbreak of listeriosis in 2025 other food brands had to recall product from shop shelves, illustrating the challenge of maintaining consistent food-safety system, production controls and traceability as firms expand.  

So what separates food companies that scale successfully from those that stall?

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The primary challenge is to scale production and distribution without losing the local narrative and quality that made you successful.

Define your essential elements

To start with, it’s worth setting out the elements of your food product that are non-negotiable, that cannot change as volumes increase. This could include the taste, the ingredients, the suppliers, production and the customer experience. 

For instance, it may be a good idea to keep your proprietary or unique processes (like hand-blending spices or slow-proving dough) in-house, even if you invest in larger machinery to automate the packaging or sealing stages.

Consider outsourcing logistics

As you scale up your operations, it could make sense to outsource logistics and distribution as this is less likely to affect your capacity to control quality than the manufacturing side. Options here include partnering with chilled or ambient food distributors like Musgrave Supply Chain, C&F Quadrant or Sheridans Wholesale.

Seek out back-up suppliers

If you work with certain local suppliers, particularly if the ingredient is essential to your product quality, there is a risk that they might struggle to keep up with you as you expand your production. So seeking out verified secondary local suppliers will ensure you won’t have to compromise on your core ingredients.

Focus on packaging

When moving from a local or farmers’ market environment – where you’re able to talk to customers and tell them all about your product – to being stocked on the shelves of a national retailer, your packaging will be critical to your sales. This should convey effectively your origin story, particularly if your ingredients are sourced locally and is reflected in the product name. You could also apply for the “Love Irish Food” endorsement label that you can carry on your packaging.

Apply to retail incubators

A good first step for many small food businesses on the road to volume expansion would be to approach one of a number of structured retail incubators, such as the SuperValu Food Academy, Grow with ALDI and Lidl Kickstart.

The SuperValu Food Academy is run in partnership with Bord Bia and the Local Enterprise Office and runs a scheme whereby you can scale on a regional basis before going nationwide. So SuperValu would stock your products in five local stores, then stepping up to cover a region (eg. Leinster) before expanding to the entire country.

With ALDI and Lidl’s programmes, small Irish producers can partake in a limited edition “Specialbuy” nationwide trial that tests your production capacity over a period of one or two weeks to make sure you can fulfil a high volume contract on a permanent basis.

Although he had been supplying Aldi since 2015, the supermarket’s programme was instrumental in enabling well-known Cork buffalo mozzarella farmer Johnny Lynch of Macroom Buffalo to grow his buffalo herd by 40% to 300 animals with a two-year €1 million deal to meet customer demand and increase production quantities.

Consider a hub and spoke model

If your local markets were integral to the origin of your brand, some food entrepreneurs recommend leaning on a “hub and spoke” model as you expand, whereby you maintain a flagship market stall or keep a presence at iconic market markets like the Midleton Farmers Market, Galway Market or Dublin’s Temple Bar Food Market. This can help you anchor your brand’s authenticity while also serving as one of the ways to test new products directly with consumers before scaling them nationwide.

Long-term success depends on looking after your branding, developing a digital sales strategy and bringing operational expertise into the business early. Most importantly, founders should focus on measuring profitability as closely as revenue growth, ensuring expansion creates a resilient business.

Once you’ve created something stable and sustainable, then you can look to export markets.