Sweet success

Mary Ann O'Brien, founder of Lily O'Brien's chocolates

Lily O'Brien's is experiencing healthy growth with a new dessert factory and a growing export trade. Fionnuala Carolan travelled to Newbridge in Co Kildare to meet owner, Senator Mary Ann O'Brien and company MD Eoin Donnelly

News

14 February 2013

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While the thoughts of running a chocolate factory has most people salivating, Mary Ann O’Brien says that tasting chocolate all day long can be tough work. The company is currently doing a huge private label project for an American client so the days following the Christmas break were spent tasting up to 40 different chocolate caramel variations to complete a bespoke caramel collection. I can think of tougher pursuits and O’Brien readily admits that there are worse jobs out there!

Although she has been running the company for over 20 years, O’Brien has recently appointed a new managing director named Eoin Donnelly. Prior to this role Donnelly spent 10 years with Nestlé. Of the appointment O’Brien very graciously says: "Every company needs to grow up. I have someone who is far better than I could ever have been as MD of Lily O’Brien’s. Eoin has the day to day responsibility of running the company and he’s an excellent guy."

Donnelly credits his years with Nestlé as giving him a certain skill set that he can utilise in his current role. "The benefits of coming from somewhere like Nestlé is you know a lot about processes and controls so I brought those kind of benefits and skills with me which helps in purchasing more effectively, and looking at any waste or inefficiencies and then reinvesting those savings into the products," he says.

Despite the new MD’s arrival, O’Brien is still very involved in the business and devotes most of her energies to new product development and sales with key customers. She is a true entrepreneur with bundles of energy and when you meet her you can quickly understand why the company has been so successful. Over the years her chocolates have won many Great Taste Awards and O’Brien was awarded Image Businesswoman of the Year in 2007 and Food and Drink Exporter of the Year 2006 by the Exporter’s Association.

Recession proof product

O’Brien says the recession gave them a bit of a shake up because retailers wanted big promotions yet a premium brand like Lily O’Brien’s cannot afford to go down the discount or promotional route too far. "We are a premium brand and people don’t mind paying that little bit more for it. We come under a little bit of pressure from the retailer but the sell through is good and we work hard to see what they need and fulfil those needs."

Donnelly adds: "There is a danger in doing too much promotion on a premium product because at the end of the day, our product is a gifting product and you have to think of the gifting category as quite different to others. People are willing to pay for better tasting and better packaged products because it is a gift.

Lily O’Brien’s factory in Newbridge, Co Kildare

"We’ve heard the horror stories from years ago where other companies had run BOGOFs for Valentine’s Day and these products were known as the break-up pack as the girl was asking, ‘who got the other one?’"

As a way to reduce costs in recent years, they looked at making the chocolates smaller and the cardboard lighter but thought against it as they wanted to maintain its premium credentials. According to Donnelly: "We saw some of our competitors reengineering down and changing the boxes so they were lighter, using cheaper ingredients in the product but there is a tipping point with that, where the product is no longer something that you might even buy, never mind give as a gift. People are very quick to pick up on taste changes in products they like. We noticed during the recession that people still bought chocolate because it was an affordable luxury. It was recession resilient."

The origins of Ireland’s top chocolatier

Lily O’Brien’s came about somewhat by chance, according to O’Brien. Over 20 years ago she was suffering from ME and got the opportunity to go to South Africa for a few weeks to recuperate. The daughter of the owner of their guesthouse was making beautiful chocolates and chocolate chess sets. O’Brien was instantly intrigued and spent the entire holiday in the kitchen learning the trade. "I came back to my flat in Maynooth and that’s where it started," she says.

While the company was named after O’Brien’s eldest daughter Lily, she says that 21 year-old Lily has little interest in joining the business at present and is more of an academic than an entrepreneur like her mother.

Getting listed in Superquinn was O’Brien’s first big opportunity in retail and she credits this advancement to her great mentor John Foy, who was one of Feargal Quinn’s right hand men back in the day.

"We really went from working in a tiny flat producing for family and farmer’s markets to getting into Superquinn Lucan. I slowly got the entire Superquinn group to take my products. At that stage it was only me and two part time employees so I did the delivery, the accounts, the selling and the making myself. It was seven days a week."

The business really took off in 1995 when it moved into a factory in Naas and O’Brien took on a partner named Peter Queally, who she says is a fine businessman.

"My partner is not involved in the day-to-day business but he’s a super partner and his mentorship was vital. He got me thinking in tonnes and about private label as well as brand because private label helped us make the financial gains to build the brand. The brand is our first love but private label pays the wages and helps make a profit."

O’Brien credits private label contracts they have secured over the years with pushing the company to another level.

"Private label is very good for a manufacturer because it challenges you beyond your greatest nightmare and pushes you to a level that you are pleased to reach afterwards. We started with M&S private label, but we moved on to private label in Australia, private label for Starbucks in America, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Walmart in the States," she says.

"We’re now, I’m glad to say, about 80% brand. We’re interested in long term sustainable sales and having a strong brand that the consumer wants and asks for. That to us is what it’s all about."

Hitting the export market

After Superquinn was conquered, the company’s next big client was Aer Rianta and subsequently Aer Lingus. Six months after that they secured British Airways’ custom and today has contracts with 23 airline clients across the globe. "We do business with everyone from Qantas to South African and all sorts of airlines. And that’s important as we are in the gifting business but we are trying to run a business so it’s hard to get a 12 month spread on chocolate," she says. "It’s easy to be successful at Easter or Christmas but in May people are thinking about salads, the beach etc. Airlines and duty free help us overcome that."

Dessert factory

O’Brien says they never threw much money at advertising and it was mainly word of mouth or organic growth that grew the business. "The Waitrose account started years ago with one line, so did Sainsbury’s as did Morrisons, Asda and the Co op – actually all the English multiples have us and it’s a very nice slow growth pattern that we seem to enjoy over there."

A new route the company has taken in the last number of years is producing chilled desserts for the export market. It has a purpose built dessert factory alongside the chocolate factory in Newbridge and O’Brien describes this move as having been very successful. "The desserts are flying for us and we’re exporting 100% of it at the moment. But we are looking at retail trials in the near future. We want to take it slowly. We know the product is fantastic. We have the chocolate raw material and the fresh Irish cream so it’s not very hard to make a beautiful chocolate mousse. There are about 15 different products in the range. We won a Great Taste Award in the first month and that was a great boost and gave us a lot of confidence in the product."

Senator O’Brien

While the company is definitely her first love, she has taken on a new challenge in the past two years. A career in politics was never something that O’Brien had envisaged but she got a call from Enda Kenny inviting her to join the Senate. "The day I got the call from Enda Kenny I thought it was someone having a laugh, I really did. I came up like a rabbit in the headlights. But I love the Senate which is surprising as I’m not a political person. I have a voice firstly for the families of the Jack and Jill Foundation, and then on the business side, I’m always sticking my head in and out of everything to do with job creation, to small enterprise, to entrepreneurship, to sick pay schemes that they might be dreaming up to push onto the private sector. RGDATA retailers are coming in to do a presentation on my invitation in a month’s time."

She says she is there to give a voice to small to medium size business owners because she knows what it’s like to worry about how you will pay the wages and if your business goes bust, you get no financial support from the state whatsoever.

Regarding the Jack and Jill Foundation, O’Brien set it up in 1997 after her baby Jack died aged two due to complications that came about from a near cot death in Hollis Street. She has since helped 1,600 families who have found themselves in similar circumstances. "If someone in this state has a baby who’s very brain damaged, we help to get them out of intensive care and provide help for them in their own homes," she explains.

Going forward

Between her continued work with the Jack and Jill Foundation, her two days a week in the Senate and a family to care for, it is hard to see how O’Brien manages to fit so much in, yet her focus doesn’t seem to ever stray from the growth and success of the company.

Most recently a new range of packaging has been designed and is being rolled out on all Lily O’Brien products at present. A design team created a signature by using the ‘o’ out of O’Brien’s and making it into a torc. "In 4/5 year’s time when you see that torc, you’ll instantly know it’s Lily O’Brien’s," explains O’ Brien.

Always trying to target new markets, the group is currently looking at the Middle East. Russia is also of interest to O’Brien. "Russia is somewhere that scares me but I’d love to go. You need to find the right partner in a country but we are always on the look out for new opportunities."

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