Meet Irene Queally: the farmer's daughter behind baby food brand Pip & Pear

Irish Country Living is slightly worried that we might be enjoying our sample of Pip & Pear’s “banana blue”– a puree of apple, banana and blueberries, with a hint of vanilla and basil, if you don’t mind – a bit too much considering that it’s a stage-one weaning product aimed at five-month-old babies.

“But,” says Irene Queally, the Waterford mum-trepreneur behind the brand, “if it doesn’t taste like you would want to eat it yourself, then we’re failing.”

Not that anybody could accuse Pip & Pear of that.

After little more than a year on the market, the baby food company with the tagline “all of the goodness, none of the guilt” is currently stocked in 100 SuperValu and all Aldi stores nationwide, as well as 70 Carrefores in Spain, with plans to break the UK market in 2017.

But then, this business is in her blood. Raised on a beef and pig farm, Irene’s father, Peter, is the co-founder of Dawn Meats, while she also credits the immense influence of her mother, Eileen, who reared the family of eight.

While a strong work ethic was always encouraged at home, Irene never felt pressured to follow into the family business.

“I think when you’re young – especially as a teenager – you’re always trying to be independent of your parents and, to be fair, mum and dad were very encouraging of that,” she says. Having studied business with French and Italian in college, she lived in Italy for a year before moving to England to study at the London College of Fashion, and training as a buyer for Marks & Spencer.

She later relocated to Dublin but through helping a friend, Lisa Fitzgerald, from Waterford on buying trips for her clothes store, was offered the opportunity to take over the business when Lisa went travelling.

Though you could joke that she also got a husband in the bargain, after meeting and falling in love with Ciara’s brother, Bill, who was involved in the restaurant business as well as retail through the family-owned George’s Court shopping centre.

Irene ran her unisex fashion store, The People Of Oslo, for nine years, during which she also had her son, Luca. However, when the recession hit Waterford, menswear sales “fell off a cliff”, and despite trying to save the business by moving to a smaller premises and reducing staff, Irene made the difficult decision to close in 2011.

“I was devastated, especially when I worked so hard and you’re thinking: ‘Is it me? Is it the stock?’ But, in reality, it was the economy,” she says.

“You feel a sense of failure but actually now you look back and think it was a great job, it was a great shop, we paid all our bills, nobody got stung and I can actually look back now ... it’s like: ‘That was great and super learning.’”

In 2013, Irene and Bill decided to launch a new venture: a 140-seater cafe, 9 Barrowstrand St, with a family friendly emphasis, such as a healthy children’s menu. By now, the couple had daughter Tilda. While Irene says that she was a “purist” when it came to following the Annabel Karmel guide when weaning Luca, second time round she was feeling the pressure.

Realising that other parents might be the same, she suggested trialling a baby food menu in the cafe – featuring her own recipes such as lamb tagine and chicken curry that she’d cook every evening once the restaurant was closed – alongside their free “baby bowl” offering.

“Then we just found people were coming in asking: ‘Could I buy them as a takeaway?’” she recalls. “They’d buy 10 tubs at a time and off they’d go.

“They were literally bulk buying, so we thought that was interesting. What we thought we might do in a week in sales, we were doing in a day.”

Keen to test her product, Irene entered the Blas na hÉireann awards in October 2014 and was blown away to find out she’d won bronze, silver and gold in the baby food category. Not only that, but both SuperValu and Aldi approached her at the festival and little more than six months later Pip & Pear was launched in 75 SuperValu stores nationwide, followed later by Aldi.

Of course, Irene acknowledges that she was in a very unique position with her family being in the food business, as she was able to work with The Culinary Food Group in Kildare to bring Pip & Pear to market and make sure it met all the criteria for food safety – especially as a product for babies.

“Here was me with my concept and they were able to say: ‘Well you must be able to do X, Y and Z.’ So they had the capability to help me bring exactly what I wanted to the market,” says Irene, who used personal savings to launch Pip & Pear.

However, she admits that some people did think it was a risk.

“When I started out, people thought I was crazy because it is a smaller market,” she acknowledges.

“But I actually believe – really believe – most parents are trying to do the very best by their kids and there’s just not the options there to help them.

“So (it’s) just giving them a healthier option and people have responded to that.”

Pip & Pear currently has nine products for stage one, two and three weaning – from butternut squash and sweet potato puree to beef ragu and the recently launched toddler range.

The company uses only Bord Bia approved meat and sources its fish through Keohane’s in Kinsale. Organic fruit and veg is imported through a distributor for quantity and continuity. Products have a 28-day shelf life, though are suitable for home freezing and are as close to homemade as possible – for example, even the chicken stock is made in the traditional way from chicken carcass.

But having got the product right, Irene’s challenge has been to reach out to as many parents as possible. With 70,000 babies born in Ireland, it is a small niche market, and because it is a chilled product, it is usually stocked beside the yoghurts rather than in the baby aisles.

That means that Pip & Pear has put huge energy into reaching out to parents online through social media such as Facebook, with Irene crediting Pip & Pear marketing administrator, Clodagh Phelan, who she was able to take on as her first staff member with the help of a priming grant from the Local Enterprise Office.

“She does the Instagram and Facebook and all of that and that has been a huge brand builder for us,” she says. “People write to us and we’re back to them in half an hour. We get a lot of mums talking to us.”

Indeed, Pip & Pear is using Facebook to find customers who might be interested in working with them as brand ambassadors, doing tastings in their local supermarkets.

“We’re trying to find people dotted around the country who could actually work with us and grow with us,” says Irene.

By the end of the year, Irene hopes that Pip & Pear will be available nationwide (“because people are not going to travel 20 miles to pick up our products, no matter how good they are”) but having launched in 70 Carrefore stores in Spain this year after being approached by a distributor, building the export market is the ultimate aim, especially in the UK, where 800,000 babies are born each year.

The company recently won gold in the food and drink category at the Bank of Ireland Start-Up awards, as well as gold at this year’s Blas na hÉireann awards – which must surprise Irene, who quips that out of all the family, she “worked so hard to not get into the food business”.

But despite admitting to many mistakes along the way, she says she has never learned from – or loved – anything as much.

“Just the challenge of it – how people have responded to it, how you’re actually hitting on something that people actually want and this has changed the game for them,” she says.

“I do feel this is really important. I do feel we could actually change how people feed their children.

“I just think that’s so exciting.”

For further information about Pip & Pear and stockist details, visit www.pipandpear.ie or follow on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram