This article was written by Catherine Cleary and published on www.IrishTimes.com

Here’s a small eureka moment in the Irish food world. The head of a large food company has had a long day in a conference room with executives from an Irish food ingredients giant. They finish with a grazing trip around the hottest cafes, restaurants and cocktail bars. In a bar, someone serves a Bloody Mary garnished with a piece of crispy bacon. He takes a sip, puts down the glass and declares: “Now that’s what I want my burger to taste like.”

It’s as far from the picture of Irish food as it gets but ingredients like a Bloody Mary bacon seasoning are an untold part of Ireland’s food story. If you dream it, there is a team of scientists in Irish labs that can probably make it happen.

Seasonings, thickeners, bulking agents, sweeteners and flavours formulated in Glanbia, Ornua and Kerry Foods labs can be found all over the globe. Ever wonder where the batter on your Chicken McNugget or the spiced pumpkin flavour in your Starbucks coffee came from? That would be Kerry Foods, an Irish company started by a group of what a company spokeswoman describes as “cute farmers down in Kerry” who saw their customers “making a whole pile of money” from the whey they were selling and decided to start processing it themselves.

In the 46 years since, the money pile has grown to epic proportions. A co-operative processing milk in Listowel now makes foods its founders wouldn’t recognise. As one industry analyst puts it: most consumers have no clue what a food giant like Kerry does.

One stab might be that Kerry makes Kerrygold butter? But no, that’s Ornua, which used to be the Irish Dairy Board. Kerry’s consumer brands like Charleville cheese, Denny and Dairygold are the tip of an iceberg. Below the waterline is the much larger “Taste and Nutrition” division, which brought in €5.2 billion of Kerry’s €6.4 billion revenue last year. Most of the food ingredients are shipped unbranded from one factory to another. The company has become one of the biggest suppliers of vanilla to the baking world, according to one industry source, controlling the supply chain from farms in Madagascar to an extraction plant in Grasse in the south of France. Its Global Technology and Innovation Centre in Naas, Co Kildare, is one of the largest in the world. Teams from PepsiCo and McDonalds regularly visit to brainstorm what they’re doing next. Somewhere in Naas, or the sister operations in Singapore or Beloit, Wisconsin, they’re probably working on the McDonald’s summer specials for 2020.

We love to think of Irish food in terms of green fields and farmers. But the food isle is becoming a food-processing isle. It’s less a story of farm to fork than lab to larder.

Driven the growth

Food ingredients have driven the growth in Irish food and drink exports. In the past two decades, exports have more than doubled from €5.6 billion to €12.6 billion. We are not producing twice as much food. Farmers are not farming any more land. Milk production has risen following the dropping of the EU milk quota but the sector accounting for the fastest growing area is the ingredients for the food service, ready meal, snack, cereal, on-the-go and fast-food industries.