Tara Maguire

It’s all about the beef, as North American development officer for ABP Food Group Tara Maguire is putting Irish beef back on American plates.

Standing in the Michelin-star Daniel’s restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, as guests savoured a menu that included Irish beef tartare with oyster gelée and beef tenderloin with foie gras carpaccio, Tara Maguire had what you could call a pinch-me moment.

“Seeing food writers and chefs talking about and eating meat that was produced in Clones,” she says in a soft Fermanagh accent that has just a trace of an American lilt after eight years in the US. “It was a great moment.”

The dinner in February was just one of the events celebrating the return of Irish beef to the US following the lifting of the EU-wide ban, but for Tara in particular it was a turning point after two years’ work laying foundations as North American development officer – a demanding role she has made entirely her own at just 30.

One of three children, Tara grew up in Derrylin, where her father, Thomas, is an agricultural contractor and her mother, Martina, is a beautician. She graduated from the University of Ulster in 2007 with a first-class honours degree in communication, advertising and marketing, but ended up working in America almost by accident.

“I was trying to figure out if I wanted to travel or if I wanted to go straight into the workforce,” she explains. “I came across the job advertisement for the Irish Dairy Board and went for that, and did not realise at the time that the job was actually going to be based in Washington DC.”

As a sales and marketing executive, Tara hit the ground running in a Kerrygold-branded Beetle, zipping around the highways of DC, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia, where her role involved everything from in-store demos to managing the budget for the mid-Atlantic market.

(She also represented Washington DC in the 2009 Rose of Tralee.)

She then moved to Boston to work in the New England market and was later appointed sales manager for Canada, before deciding she wanted a change.

“I crossed paths with ABP and realised that it wanted to enter the market,” she explains. “It was the right place, at the right time.”

Not coming from a meat background, Tara took a back-to-basics approach and spent several months on the factory floor at ABP in Clones, Co Monaghan.

“I had my white suit on me and my hairnet and my hard cap and my wellies,” she laughs.

“But because I was starting with very basic knowledge, I was very lucky to have a good team in Clones that was very patient in teaching me all of the various different steps involved in beef processing.”

Back in Boston, Tara began laying the foundations for ABP to do business in the North American market, whether it was conducting market research, analysing trends and pricing, networking or meeting representatives from the US Department of Agriculture.

Now that ABP is working with Sysco Metro New York and Sysco Boston to supply high-end steak houses and restaurants, Tara is focused on logistics – covering everything from labelling to shipping and sales.

“Because we’re used to the farm-to-fork concept in Ireland, we’re used to small farms and we’re used to traditional farming methods, it’s something that we take for granted, but this is all very exciting and new in the US,” says Tara.

“We haven’t had Irish beef over here in 17 years and the fact that it’s so new for the industry, I’m just looking forward to see how it grows.”

Indeed, she says that Irish beef is held in such esteem, that the recent BSE case did not impact in the States.

“The BSE case was an isolated incident and was not a food safety issue,” says Tara. “All of our customers are very aware of the stringent checks and controls that are in place in Ireland and consequently the incident did not impact here in the US.”

Highlights to date include ABP beef being presented to Barack Obama – alongside a selection of other Irish foods – at the White House on St Patrick’s Day, while it was also served at a lunch hosted by Enda Kenny at the Ritz in Washington DC.

It is also on the menu at multiple restaurants, bars and independent retailers in the North East, including Fraunces Tavern, which is located in one of the most historic buildings in New York. Furthermore, the company has also sponsored celebrity chef Kevin Dundon’s Back to Basics show on PBS.

Going forward, Tara says there are exciting developments in the pipeline, but she would personally love to see ABP meat on the menu at the restaurants of well-regarded foodie Barbara Lynch in Boston, as well as Smith & Wollensky, which she describes as “an iconic landmark when it comes to American steak houses”.

Tara works out of an office right beside the prestigious MIT and loves Boston life. She enjoys running – a highlight is the annual Rás na hÉireann 5km – hiking, yoga and spending time with friends. However, she regularly travels home to Fermanagh and Facetimes her family. Although she admits that sometimes she is accused of Americanisms.

“I am guilty every so often of saying restrooms or trash and it doesn’t go unnoticed,” she laughs.

Roisin Hennerty

When Roisin Hennerty joined Ornua (formerly the Irish Dairy Board) as an admin assistant, little did she realise she would one day be president of its US branch, where Kerrygold is the third highest-selling butter in the country.

“I probably don’t have blood running through my veins,” laughs Roisin Hennerty down the phone from Chicago. “I probably have butter running through my veins.”

Still, as president of Ornua Foods in North America – where Kerrygold is now the top-selling imported butter – it’s clear that Roisin lives and breathes her role.

It’s an extraordinary success story, and one that Roisin has been instrumental since coming to the States in the 1990s.

Raised in Greystones, summers were spent on her mother Máire’s family farm in Carlow, while her late father, Michael, was a professor in agricultural science at UCD. Her great-uncle, Tony Hennerty, was also a professor of dairy science at UCC and an original board member of the Irish Dairy Board.

However, the languages graduate never envisioned a career in food, working in a variety of jobs – including teaching at an Ursuline boarding school in Germany – before she applied for an admin role in the Irish Dairy Board.

“I had no real sense of what opportunity might lie ahead,” she recalls. “But I did want to get into a company where I could find my feet and figure out what I wanted to do.”

Roisin went back to college at night to study international export marketing and worked through various roles before moving to America as part of a two-person team, where one of their first challenges was to launch Dubliner cheese.

Unwilling to be pigeon-holed in stores for just St Patrick’s Day, Roisin and her colleagues decided – in a somewhat unorthodox fashion – not to release it until the summer. Similarly, instead of focusing on the Irish-American strongholds of New York and Boston, they trialled the product in California, using Irish graduates to do in-store samplings and spread their high-quality, grass-fed message in an authentic and (pardon the pun) non-cheesy way.

“We took on two interns from the University of Limerick and we put them in the field demonstrating five days a week with one particular retailer in California,” she recalls. “And when we did that for nine months and we measured the impact of it and the benefit of it, it was clear to us that it was going to be the blueprint for the business going forward.”

Using the same strategy to launch Kerrygold butter, the success has been startling. As well as topping the import charts, Kerrygold is the third largest butter brand in the US.

“Butter’s growth has been extraordinary, because that’s only over just about a decade,” says Roisin. “The fact that we’re talking about cresting 10,000 metric tonnes of butter sales in the next couple of years, and looking at a business where we’ll be doing in excess of 20,000t of butter and cheese by 2018, for myself and some of the other team members who have been here over a number of years, it’s just a remarkable, astonishing and very proud time for us.”

Ornua has tuned in to what the US consumer wants. For example, this summer, it will start packing Kerrygold in 4oz sticks because this is the format that the average home baker in America is most familiar with. The company has also used social media to engage with American food writers, bloggers and chefs, shot its first TV ad last year and also sponsors the American Youth Soccer Organisation (AYSO) – bringing its message to thousands of American families. As US president of Ornua since 2013, Roisin is constantly in touch with her 50-strong team, to meet budgets, overcome challenges and set goals. Prior to taking the role, she completed a senior leadership programme for women at the Kellogg School of Management. So what advice does she have for women who wish to move up in the food industry?

“I think women just need to be very actively engaged in advocating for themselves in business and looking and asking for the opportunities rather than waiting for them,” she says.

“We don’t spend as much time asking for things as we should, and I think that’s one of the key learnings that I’ve had over recent years.”

Similarly, with six to eight graduates hired a year, Roisin says Ornua seeks people who can prove they are self-motivated.

“The US is a great place to work, but it can be difficult, like anywhere, to start out. We provide a strong support system, but you’re still asking people to move away from home, to set up in a new city, find a place to live, develop a social life, etc, so we ask a lot of our team and we look for people who can weather that kind of storm.”

Chicago is certainly home to Roisin now, where she and her husband, Phil Stephens, an engineer, have three children: Tomás (15), Úna (13) and Ruairí (10).

“We burdened them with Irish names. But it’s our way of keeping connected.”

And, unsurprisingly, they seem to have inherited their mother’s addiction for butter, and some other favourites.

“They have an incredible addiction to Brennan’s bread,” she laughs. “And crunchies and bags of Tayto.”