Contender Are You Ready.....

Evening All,

So...
I want to be taken seriously, to  be a contender for 2016 IMAGE female entrepreneur  of the year. I want "The Delicious Food Co" to be in everybody's mouth...on everybody's lips, literally. I want to be the one offering advice on radio & in the press to start ups, on how to keep going when the going gets tough, how to raise finance, the pitfalls to avoid....

 I want to really feel the success I've achieved this far. Ten years in business, a doubling in sales since the beginning of the year...I want it because I've earned it, and more importantly because

The Delicious Food Co has earned it.

I've earned it  through sheer hard graft, a ten year commitment

to producing wonderful healthy preservative free  salads & sandwiches, solidly working away building relationships with clients and customers 

No more sitting quietly hoping that somebody picks up on our story..., I should know by now, that ain't going to happen., I am going to have to go out & grab that spotlight & shine it on our kitchen in Smithfield, on our team & on our products. 

Things are already afoot. 

There is a new packaging design on it's way; we finally got round to entering into Blas na hEireann where we were finalists in the Hummus category; I have bought myself a great working wardrobe for meeting & pitches...and as for my day dream believer who sees a big future by merging his knowledge & skillset with ours at The Delicious Food Co, let's just say he wants to talk margins & in his language that means we could be getting serious.

Watch this space !

Shirley

It's a new dawn... It's a new day... It's a new life for me..... And I'm feeling good

Evening All,

It's taken a while for me to register that I am no longer a blogger.

I am somebody who used to write a decent humorous blog about my life as a producer in the food industry.Over the past two years I wrote about all sorts, my brand, my van , Mr Delicious, cash flow issues & sleepless nights, my kids & the dog. I told you  endless stories about things I was going to change (but didn't). To my own embarrassment I still don't have a website & I am still driving the van.There was a blog about setting up my office at home, becoming the type of business woman I read about in business supplements....I was to start jogging down the canal & to take up yoga in between closing deals & munching raw carrots.

Instead I've gained a stone & my cheekbones have all but disappeared.

Maybe I just got a bit fed up of that persona I portrayed, maybe I lost a bit of confidence, maybe somebody came along & burst my bubble.

But now things have changed, subtlety, quietly but very significantly. In my own way I am growing into the business person I've wanted to be in earlier blogs. Our business The Delicious Food Co has  almost doubled in size since the start of this year. Instead of  rationalising these sales in terms of ten years of lucky breaks, I know without a shadow of a doubt that we are celebrating our tenth year in business with such phenomenal growth, not just because we are good, but because we are great at what we do.

I am leading a team who are fully committed to myself & Mr Delicious and our growth phase. We have taken on some new blue chip clients , we have a potential investor who has a vision for a a chain of  Delicious Food Co proper healthy food outlets & we are finalists in Blas na hEireann food awards for our amazing Hummus.

So here we are; you & me (again)

 I'm  ready to share the next leg of this food producers adventure as it unfolds
check in every now & then see how I'm getting on

......next time you see me the cheekbones will be back.....

I promise !

Shirley

Overnight Success...it takes years

Evening All,

Earlier this year I told you that this being our tenth year in business is the year we finally become an overnight sensation.We may well be into the second half of the year and you may well think...what happened with that, but I promise you things are on course for that overnight stardom.

If we were an X factor kinda company I'd tell you quietly & in confidence that we have made it through to judges houses....Simon Cowell & "his team"has been working away with us. Simon is confident that we have the most potential since Leona Lewis in 2006 to fill stadiums or in our case supermarket shelves.

 We've been focusing on what kind of artist /producer we need to be. We've agreed we will not do cover versions, we are serious authentic artists, we will produce our own lyrics /recipes, we will stand out in the market

 .....we will make  millions for him & for  us.....

Simon is beyond excited & so are we. Just as Leona quits his Syco label, along comes The Delicious Food Co.

Everybody needs a day dreamer believer...we might just well have found ours.

Watch this space !

Shirley

x

Young Blood , Old Turk....Foodie Prophet

Hi Evening All,

I know, I know, I know....

A few months ago I promised to get back to writing a weekly blog about life in the food lane. I'm sorry to have let you down, but I have an excuse, honestly I do. I finished my last post wedding blog, telling you that it was mouth to mouth resuscitation I needed to get my body breathing again. I was so, so tired at the end of May and that aching tiredness stayed with me all through June.

As I crawled shattered out of bed each morning, my main goal was to make it through the day to crawl back under that duvet as early as possible and try to recharge my fading batteries.
The tiredness was exacerbated by the sheer volume of work we got through at
The Delicious Food Co.

It was by all accounts an exceptional month  as shop after shop sold out of our wonderful salads & sandwiches, new clients came on board and the excitement in the kitchen grew. We have a superb team in the kitchen, and each day as I would arrive in guiltily  with yet another order, increasing the burgeoning work load...Mr Delicious would groan but our young & exciting team would simply smile & rejoice for our good fortune.

"Another 500 salad pots for client X"..No problem !, "400 Hummus Pots"..Hooray!, "Two new sandwich accounts to be delivered before 8am"....Yippee !, "48 kilos of mixed bespoke salads"..Fab! and joyfully they would send me off again like a foodie prophet to gather more orders and bring them back to the kitchen to be fulfilled.

Last week I gave a lift to one of the team and  worried to him about the work load on everybody, especially Mr Delicious.With youth on his side he confided in me ..."don't worry Shirley..I have explained to the guys, that  Mr Delicious  is  an old man, whilst we are young , we can do the work, we are happy to work, you  just bring in the orders and we will make it happen.

So to honour the lads and their relentless energy & positivity, I  feel my old energy slowly & ryhtmically trickling back through  my veins, I am back on track....hungry for business, sniffing out leads at every office building I pass.

So if you crave great food in your office or local deli...watch out 'cos I am coming to get ya!



Shirley x

Here Comes the Bride ....Mouth to mouth required !

Evening all,

At the end of last month I sat down & started to write a blog. It was a cold Sunday afternoon,dinner was in the oven & I was sipping a lovely glass of red wine. The house was clean & I  was in a very chilled zone.The topic of my blog was energy, the kind of energy that pushed a business forward, the kind of energy that no amount of hours in the gym or  Red Bull can activate, the kind of energy I had been feeling of late.

I was trying to explain, that, that  kind of  energy comes from somewhere deep within you. It's a kind of energy that pulls you out of bed, when every bone & your body is screaming no !An energy that comes from being excited about your business or your life. As I typed away merrily, sipping my wine, I became very  aware that at 6pm Mr. Delicious, was not yet home. After a very long day (& week) he was still in work, It felt wrong to write about energy...I knew he was exhausted & despite my own excitement about our business, I was beginning to feel tried too.

No sooner had I committed the blog to "Drafts",than the energy I'd been eulogising just minutes  earlier seemed to abandon my body  and  bizarrely I have been exhausted ever since.The daily rhythm of  life, up early, dash, dash, dash...deadline after deadline culminating with the organisation of a wedding on the June bank holiday weekend finally caught up.

....I cannot even begin to describe how much energy the organisation of a wedding saps from a small event planner...it looms in the distance overshadowing everything until two days before it arrives. Like a well prepared Leaving Cert student you know you've put the work in..but what if something goes wrong...this is the most important day of somebodies life & they've given ME the responsibility to organise it.(What were they thinking..!!.) It consumes every ounce of your being. My bride was gorgeous, her wedding was planned by her in meticulous detailed excel sheets & folders...my plans for her wedding were a few scribbles at the bottom of the Cater hire list.

The success of her wedding was in my hands...I trusted me & my team, but she was right to be nervous. Her wedding was in my head, only I could see it.

On the morning of the wedding I probably got more good luck texts than the bride herself.The wedding in a private house was a triumph...my team from The CaterWaiter were sublime...Mr Delicious was outstanding ..the bride was overwhelmed by our transformation of a beautiful drawing room in Rathmines to a fairy tale wedding banqueting hall.

As for me, with dinner out of the way & the dancing in full swing, people were offering me champagne, toasting my great work, but as the release of pressure took over & the exhaustion impaled itself in me, I knew that it wasn't a drink I needed  keep me going, 'twas   mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Sweet dreams !

Shirley 

Lucky Breaks: The breadman, the auditor & me.

Evening everyone,

There is no doubt about it but every business needs a lucky break.

The biggest break we ever had came in 2006, when a bread supplier came in to pitch business to us, his bread was great, but didn't come in commercial sizes, so wasn't right for us. As he left he picked up a brochure we had produced. His next call was to a small Gallery/Cafe whose sandwich supplier had ceased trading,He passed on my brochure and two days later The Delicious Food Co were the new sandwich supplier. Enquiring as to who the previous supplier had supplied I found amongst others two gems.

 Ernst & Young and Avoca Suffolk St.

I made contact & set up meetings with both clients. After pitching to AVOCA, they were so impressed they had placed   their very first order with us before I'd even  got back to the car. It was the start of a great relationship &  we continued  to make sandwiches under the AVOCA label for a number of years.

The next client, Ernst & Young as it was known then, was a bit more tricky as the catering facility was run by a contract catering company.Getting on the approved supplier list was as difficult as getting a mortgage in 2013.
 However the EY client loved us & ultimately he called the shots.

This required an audit of our food business...to be honest we hadn't a clue. Sure we had a HACCP system, but it was basic. Our (commercial) kitchen was full of cookery books, pretty ceramic platters, a kind of Kath Kidson meets Martha Stewart, mixed with a little bit of Nigella (to keep Mr Delicious smiling). The scope of the audit was 32 pages long & covered things I thought petty ...specification sheets for packaging materials....water certificates...a corporate responsibility statement...OMG..

But the auditor (who had flown in from the UK to do the audit), saw something in us, a small business making seriously good food, albeit in a slightly disorganised way. The audit took 12 hours as both he & I looked for a way to get us over the line: the line from Martha kitchen to a proper professional food business..and we got there (achieving A grades, no less,  in our past two audits for that same client)

Ultimately that one act of passing on our brochure, transformed our business & led to clients that included not only AVOCA, EY, but Citibank, PWC, RTE, Google, Yahoo, Deloitte, Bank of New York..and many many more...

Now wasn't that one hell of a  lucky break !

Shirley

Me, Bord Bia & The (Dublin Food) Chain Gang

Evening All,

By now if you've been paying attention you will know that I'm a bit of a procrastinator...

Benjamin Franklins'  quote

"why put off  until tomorrow when it can be done today"

has been amended in my head replacing "today" with "tomorrow", 

 Leaving things to the last minute, pulling things out of the bag,  well,  that's something at which I excel  I always know I'm onto something I really want to do when I start early, plan in advance & hit that deadline fifteen minutes before it expires.

So, when I got an email from Dublin Food Chain announcing a trip to London with a group other Foodies & Bord Bia to suss out food trends over there I was on to it like a bat out of hell. I emailed by return with a very definite "expression of interest" and despite the trip being over subscribed three fold , as one of the early birds I secured a much coveted place on board.

Dublin Food Chain was started a few years ago by  James Burke a man with a wealth of experience in the food business with a vision & passion to put something concrete together that would bring small food businesses together to share ideas, to mentor & to inform each other.The work that James, Bord Bia & LEO  are doing to support small food businesses is phenomenal.

However despite all the help that is out there I find it difficult to take the time to reach out & explore the many options for help that are available. Self employment can be a lonely place which is why I was so excited about this trip, not only would I have a chance to see first hand what the trends in the ready to go market are in London, get ideas for packaging etc, but I would get a chance to meet my fellow foodie colleagues.

The trip was last Friday and it was a triumph,It was organised with the skill of a military operation. Starting in Kings Cross we visited food business after food business, taking pictures, absorbing the trends, connecting with each other. We walked miles in the sunshine, exchanged tips & stories of the  worries & successes of our businesses, we swapped business cards,  made & received suggestions that might be useful to each other.

At the end of the day, tired, excited & inspired I realised that the most important thing that I took from the day was that in the food business in Dublin, with such a wonderful supportive community nobody need ever feel alone.

Bless you all.

Shirley
x

(Owner of The Delicious Food Co)