Linda O’Flynn and Ivo Duarte are the driving force behind Terra Ignis, a Cork-based wild fermentation company producing seasonal products packed with the gut-friendly probiotics health professionals are constantly urging us to eat.
O’Flynn and Duarte know a lot about food and drink. O’Flynn is a herbalist with a 10-year background in craft cocktails, while Duarte has been a chef for more than a decade and has a strong interest in food provenance and sustainability. Terra Ignis was launched last July from a stall in the English Market in Cork, where it is still based.
Much has been written about the health benefits of probiotics, and fermented foods are an excellent source of these gut-friendly bacteria. Fermented products already available here include sourdough breads, the Korean-inspired vegetable side dish kimchi, and fermented drinks such as kombucha and kefir. Large-scale producers generally buy in the starters needed to kick-start the fermentation process, but Terra Ignis is taking the long way around by creating its own from scratch using locally foraged sources of wild yeast.
“While we still rely on age-old fermentation techniques to produce our products, we are approaching the process from a fresh perspective as our goal is to develop an Irish fermentation culture, rather than borrowing from others,” says O’Flynn.
“To achieve this we are working with seasonally foraged and home-grown ingredients, and our focus is very much on wild fermentation and celebrating the Irish landscape as it is at a particular point in time. We are now producing the first probiotic sodas on the Irish market, the first fermented cordials, the first handcrafted gluten-free Worcestershire sauce and are one of a handful of companies producing wildcrafted vinegars. Our staple fermented sauces, like oak bark fermented ketchup and fermented hot sauce, have been flying off the shelves since we opened our shop in the English Market last year.”
We are generating enough income to support ourselves and also getting tremendous personal satisfaction from what we’re doing
The company’s potential customers are health-conscious foodies of all ages who like what they eat to be unpasteurised and as close to its original source as possible. These are also consumers who understand that natural products come with variations and that the consistency of look and taste that’s the holy grail for traditional food producers is not the aim here. Terra Ignis produces in small batches and no two will ever be exactly the same because the starter will always be slightly different depending on the time of the year and the raw materials.
A big advantage of starting a business using foraged raw materials is that it keeps the costs down, and the duo got Terra Ignis up and running with less than €5,000. That said they also spent huge amounts of time foraging, growing ingredients and developing their recipes. Growing and foraging will always be part of their process. Patience is also required in spades, as fermented products can’t be rushed.
O’Flynn acknowledges that Terra Ignis is a lifestyle business, which allows the couple, who now have a baby daughter, to live according to their personal values and shared passion for good food and drink.
“Having Daisy inspired us to go for it, as we wanted to show her the value of trying to live the life that you want to live from early on,” says O’Flynn. “We are generating enough income to support ourselves and also getting tremendous personal satisfaction from what we’re doing, and that’s what’s important to us. The next step is to find a bigger kitchen and more storage space in order to meet the demand.
“We are about to take on our first hire and we will also be developing a second strand to the business, which will be around selling our products to restaurants and the food service sector, as this is a market we both know and understand very well,” says O’Flynn.
