Recipe for Success: How Food Brands Break Through | TikTok, Retail & Margins

Welcome to The Recipe for Success. This is brought to you with the Local Enterprise Offices and the National Enterprise Awards. We have three finalists in front of me. Introduce yourselves.

Hi, I'm Denise, a co-owner of Sugarplum Sweetery from Mullingar.

Uh, Pat Falvey, uh, the owner of Blarney Brewing Company and Active Brewing Company.

Uh, Ian O'Rourke, co-founder and managing director of Rise Chocolate.

Very cool. All food brands, food and drink. Um, that's why I call it The Recipe for Success. You see why they pay me the big money?

[laughs]

I came up with that all on my own as well. No AI needed. So we're gonna do something different, right? We normally talk about, like, how'd you start your business, what happened then, what happened then. Today we're gonna do, like, a masterclass for people who are either in the food and drink business or want to get into the food and drink business, who kind of want to be where you are in a couple of years. So we're gonna do The Recipe for Success. I'm gonna get you to pick one or two things from your journeys that have been fundamental to your success, and then we'll kind of talk around your story from that. So Denise, I'll start with you. What's been one thing that's been fundamental to the Sugarplum Sweetery?

So I think for us, I can never just have one thing, so I'll, I'll then two halves. So I think, um [laughs]...

[laughs] You're breaking the rules already, Denise.

I know, I'm sorry. [laughs] Um, just to be relevant for us and actually attention to detail and obsession is really important for us. So I think just making sure that you're really connected with the customer so you understand what the customer is looking for, that you're kind of, like, whether it is just looking at social media, TikTok as well, and trying to make sure that you're appealing to a wide audience, um, I think made a big difference for our business. We obviously had massive success last year in growth, and a lot of that came from just not looking at what the classics in, in terms of chocolatiers even in Europe are doing, but just looking at becoming a little bit more dynamic and edgy as well. So I think that was our big recipe for success, and I think you always need to have attention to detail and obsession with whatever you do, that you can't just be a one-trick pony and have one, really good at one thing. As an entrepreneur, you have to be good at multitude of everything. So it has to be an amazing product. It has to be marketed really effectively, et cetera. So I think that's what I think is a, a huge factor for our business and how successful it is.

Okay, there's a lot there I want to unpack already.

Yeah.

You said staying relevant, but how do you not jump into, like, things that might be a fad?

Mm-hmm. You have to test it, and I think what we do very good is that, like, we'll launch a product. It mightn't be the finalized packaging, but we will launch it and see what the customer wants, and does the audience pick up on it? So when we launched our Dubai bar, it was in a cellophane wrap. Um, I had this crazy perception that we'd get it into its gold foil wrapping, which is on the table there, in, like, say two months. It takes five