“Perth was amazing, a beautiful city with great career opportunities, but there’s no place like home. So in 2015, when my youngest was one, we moved home close to my parents near Rhode. They’re still young, active, and farming, and it was really important to me that my children would know their grandparents in the flesh, not just on Skype.

Our Apple Juice business happened accidentally! Ten years ago, my dad Gerard planted an apple orchard of 20 different Irish Heritage Varieties as part of the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme. The aim was to save the old varieties like Lady’s Finger of Offaly from extinction and support our native ecosystem and biodiversity. The trees were planted in a small farmyard field where our flock of 650 free-range Bronze Turkeys graze all day. The plan was that the apples falling from the trees in September and October would be a food source for the turkeys getting ready for Christmas. Then four years ago, the trees were yielding so many apples that Dad decided not to waste the surplus and started getting them cold-pressed into apple juice. It was a nice, interesting side project. He sold a few hundred bottles from the house each year in a local butcher shop and at the Tullamore Show.

Then last summer, we had a lovely long heatwave and coupled with the trees maturing, our little orchard produced an unbelievable crop of apples. Every day for three weeks in September, my parents would spend a few hours hand-picking apples, and in October, they sent them to be pressed as usual. In the middle of the pressing, they got a phone call from the bottling plant to ask what they wanted to do. As it turned out, they had picked four times the usual amount! It seemed an awful waste not to use them after hand-picking them all, but there was a lot of debate and worry about whether they could sell that volume of apple juice. So they decided to take a chance and juice them all, and a lorry load of bottles returned to Ballybryan the next week. They sold the usual amount to their turkey customers at Christmas, and then the challenge began, where would they sell the rest of the shed load?!!

That’s when I started helping out. There was so much more to getting produce on supermarket shelves than we realised. Barcodes, branding, nutritional testing, labelling, shelf life testing, pricing…the learning curve has been steep and intense since then. But I’ve found it enjoyable to work with my Dad selling produce from the farm I grew up on. I’ve learned a lot from him about trees and farming in general. I think all he’s learned from me is how to use WhatsApp! He is the most efficient and diligent person I know, really open to diversifying and new ideas, and his work ethic is as strong now as it was when I was little. I am delighted to be involved in the juice venture with him.

We’re getting the hang of how retailing works too. It’s funny how it sells great in places we never expected and doesn’t go well in places we thought it would. It’s a simple and wholesome product that tastes great”.