Ciara Troy built Irish sushi brand Oishi from a farmers’ market pitch in Greystones into a fixture on shop fridge shelves across Ireland. Twenty years on, she and Bank of Ireland’s head of Food and Beverage Sector Lucy Ryan reflect on what it actually takes to get a food business off the ground and keep it there.
On a July morning in 2006, a young woman set up a stall at the Meridian Centre in Greystones, County Wicklow, and started rolling sushi. She had a Tefal rice cooker, a bamboo mat and a handheld fan for glossing the rice. She had no business plan, no funding and, she admits now, no particular idea what she was doing.
She did have one thing: the fish seller next to her was a man named Stephen from Harvey Seafoods, and he became her first supplier. Nearly two decades later, Oishi Foods distributes fresh sushi to supermarkets and forecourts across Ireland, employs 75 people and operates from a purpose-built factory in Dublin 12. Stephen’s company was acquired by KishFish, who retained Oishi as a client. Troy still meets him every Christmas.
“I always wanted Oishi to be an affordable luxury. Quality at an affordable price”
That story, told by Ciara Troy herself, contains most of what you need to know about building a food business in Ireland: the improvised beginnings, the relationships that outlast the early chaos, and the long, grinding process of turning a good idea into something that actually makes money. Speaking alongside Lucy Ryan, head of food and beverage at Bank of Ireland, Troy recounted a journey that was by turns exhilarating, exhausting and, at one point, genuinely dangerous.
A semester in Tokyo, a lifetime in rice
The origin story begins with a university exchange. Troy was studying at Trinity College Dublin when she spent a semester in Tokyo as part of her degree. She returned convinced that Ireland was missing something.
“I just felt so good on the diet,” she says. “It was rice-based, so tasty and delicious. Over here at the time there was a lot of bread, French sticks, whereas over there it was completely different.” She started Oishi that same summer, making Japanese food for farmers’ markets. The name, she concedes, has required two decades of patient spelling out to customers.
The early months were a proving ground. The markets gave her real-time consumer feedback at the lowest possible cost of entry. She learned quickly what people would pay, what they came back for, what they ignored. She had lemon and green tea drizzle cakes, gyoza, yakitori, miso soup. Most of it was dropped. The sushi kept selling.
“It was a trail of discovery. I had a George Foreman grill and I used to baste the chicken skewers. Shoestring, dynamic, a lot of hard work.”
Running on empty
The moment Troy identifies as her real wake-up call had nothing to do with spreadsheets. Around 18 to 24 months into the business, she had a near-collision while driving her refrigerated van after a pre-dawn shift at the kitchen.
“Only he honked the hell out of me,” she says of the van in her blind spot. “We would have collided. I was shaking, and I just thought, I can’t continue like this. I’m running on empty.” She hired her first salesperson shortly afterwards.
The decision, she says, is a pattern she has seen repeat itself throughout the business’s growth: you hit a crunch point, something gives, and the business moves to the next level.
Ryan, who spent more than 20 years working in the food industry before joining Bank of Ireland three years ago, recognises the dynamic immediately. “You have to know when you have to let go,” she says. “And that can be a bit of a challenge. You’re working all hours and are you asking enough people at the right time for help?”
The economics of a sushi tray
For all the passion and energy that characterises food start-ups, Ryan is clear about where they most commonly come unstuck: they do not fully understand their cost base. Founders know they have a good product. They are less certain what it costs to produce, what margin a retailer will demand, or what a logistics company will need on top of that.
Troy’s own financial education came via her brother-in-law and a simple spreadsheet. He asked her how many trays she made each week, how many hours people had worked, and what the materials cost. What was left? At seven trays per hour, Oishi was losing money. Breaking even required 15 or 16. Profitability started somewhere around 18 to 20.
“It was simple, but it gave me huge clarity,” Troy says. The exercise led her to the Wicklow Enterprise Board, which provided financial mentoring and helped her put together a capital funding application. That, in turn, brought in Bank of Ireland, where she had held a personal account for years.
“You have to work backwards from the retail price. What are you actually going to be left with, whilst paying yourself?”
The first round of funding paid for a bigger kitchen in Bray and the first desktop sushi machines. Output rose from seven trays an hour into double figures. A subsequent move to the Spade Enterprise Centre in Smithfield, funded through Dublin’s Local Enterprise Office and Bank of Ireland again, doubled down on machinery and space. Each move followed the same logic: efficiency first, then scale.
Ryan points to a broader set of supports that food businesses often fail to use. Local Enterprise Offices, county council grants and sector bodies such as Bord Bia and Enterprise Ireland all provide a mix of mentoring, networking and funding access that can make a material difference at an early stage. “It really is critical,” she says. “Cracking the code to get some of the local grants or supports gives people a huge boost.”
The supply chain you cannot control
Running a fresh food business means working with very thin safety margins and very little room for error. Oishi’s products move from factory to depot to store in a cold chain it can only partially oversee. The company relies on refrigerated haulage companies, depot handling and in-store management, none of which it employs.
“There are chinks in the supply chain that I can’t control,” Troy says. “That is a worry. You have your internal controls, and then there’s external risks.” The company received an unannounced audit the day before this conversation. She describes such inspections as twice-yearly events, given that sushi is classified as high-risk food.
Her response to the exposure is to build quality ownership into the entire workforce. “Quality is something that everybody needs to own,” she says. “You need all eyes on the product, from the person dispatching at the back to the person receiving goods in. There isn’t a step in that chain that isn’t crucial.”
Keeping prices stable while costs rise
One of the more striking claims Troy makes is that Oishi has not raised its retail prices despite sustained inflationary pressure across food inputs. The company has instead focused on internal efficiency at its Dublin 12 factory, consolidating procurement, buying in bulk where it previously could not, and streamlining processes.
“I always wanted Oishi to be an affordable luxury,” she says. “Quality at an affordable price. We don’t want to be cheap. Sushi will never be cheap. We don’t want to be priced out of the market. We want it to be a regular purchase. We are built on repeat custom.”
Ryan notes that Irish consumers are navigating a genuine split in their spending. More than half now buy private label products in supermarkets, yet they remain willing to pay a premium for fresh, convenient, high-quality food when the proposition is clear. The test is whether a product can sit credibly on both sides of that equation.
A changing table
Both Troy and Ryan acknowledge the sustained shift in consumer awareness. Protein has been a significant trend. Troy notes that “fibre maxing” is a term being talked about in the industry. She is sceptical of chasing such cycles and prefers the building blocks: rice, fish, vegetables.
The broader direction of travel is not in doubt. Ryan describes a slow but visible movement away from ultra-processed food and towards cleaner labels, traceable ingredients and more diverse flavours. Ireland’s food export record, which reached 19 billion euros last year, has partly been built on that reputation for quality and traceability.
Troy points to demographic change as another factor reshaping demand. “The demand for authentic, ethnic and diverse product offerings has never been greater,” she says. “You can see the surge in popularity of Korean and Japanese influences, kimchi, beef bulgogi.” A business built on introducing sushi to Irish forecourts two decades ago now looks less like an outlier and more like an early signal.
Building a team from scratch
Troy is disarmingly candid about her early limitations as a manager. She was in her twenties, she says, and could barely lead herself, let alone other people. Imposter syndrome was a regular companion.
Her approach evolved with the business. She paid people well for the things she was weakest at, as early as she could afford to. She built what she calls an agile team, in part because the sector demanded it.
“We’re in a very dynamic sector,” she says. “It’s been up and down, in and out, and I don’t see that changing. To keep that agility and flexibility, I need my team to be agile and flexible, and in turn I am flexible with them.”
What comes next
Looking ahead, both women point to automation as the defining transformation in food manufacturing. Oishi still employs 75 people making sushi largely by hand. Troy sees robotics as the direction of travel, not as a threat to employment but as a way of redirecting it toward higher-value roles.
Ryan draws a parallel with what is already happening in produce. “There are robots doing those jobs, and the mushrooms tend to last for longer because there is less handling. The staff can do more interesting roles.” The labour challenge in food businesses, already acute, makes automation more attractive, not less.
Packaging is the other pressure point Troy identifies. Sushi trays are predominantly plastic, and rising oil prices are adding cost at the same time as sustainability commitments are pushing in the opposite direction. She sees it as an opportunity for compostable alternatives, even if they remain more expensive for now.
Troy’s advice to anyone starting a food business today is characteristically grounded. Plan before the rain comes. Understand the macro forces, not just the product on the shelf. Use the supports that exist. Ask for help earlier than feels comfortable.
“No man is an island. Reach out to those supports, find out what you are eligible for, get the right advice and take the help when you need it.”
Ryan’s counsel is equally direct: know your worth, and hold it. Retailers will push on price. The operators who survive are the ones who understand what it costs to make their product, add a buffer, and do not give it away.
Twenty years after that first sushi stall in Greystones, Oishi is on the shelves of most major Irish retailers. Stephen from Harvey Seafoods is still a supplier. The rice cooker is long gone.
Top image: Lucy Ryan, head of Food and Beverage Sector at Bank of Ireland and Ciara Troy, founder of Oishi Foods
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