Cullen Allen and Colum O'Sullivan are friends since childhood and dynamic business partners. They are also setting up a microfinance project in Nepal, writes Michael Kelly
There's a tendency to look on the slow-food debate as a black-and-white issue: either you're growing every morsel of food you eat yourself or you're eating nothing but packaged, processed gunk. The reality is that there is a middle ground. Even if you love to cook, sometimes you're just not in the mood, and you'll look for a ready meal. Young entrepreneurs Cullen Allen and Colum O'Sullivan - aka Cully & Sully - are carving quite a niche for themselves at the premium end of the market with their soups and pies.
If you feel guilty about buying ready meals, it may be comforting to know that Cullen is a grandson of Myrtle, nephew of Darina and son of Hazel and Rory Allen of Ballymaloe House. It may be convenience food, but it's got the Ballymaloe imprimatur. Colum O'Sullivan's mother runs the Granary Food Store in Midleton, Co Cork.
Cully & Sully, who have known each other since childhood, began discussing business ventures at college. Perhaps inevitably, given their backgrounds, the venture they agreed on was a culinary one. "When I left college," Sully says, "I was working in Dublin, and when I'd go to supermarkets there was nothing I could buy that compared to my mum's prepared meals from the Granary. I felt that Cully and I could put together meals for that market."
Crucial to the success of the enterprise was being able to use Ballymaloe recipes, given the brand's cachet. But could the Allen family be persuaded to lend its name to convenience food? "We had to prove ourselves to them," says Sully. "The challenge was to come up with a method of cooking the recipes that would give the products a decent shelf life without using preservatives, colorants, stabilisers and emulsifiers."
The solution was sous-vide cooking, a method of preparing food by simmering it inside airtight plastic bags. "It is not available in Ireland yet, so we use a company called Fleury Michon, in France. One of the things that impressed us was that their meals were endorsed by chefs like Joël Robuchon and Paul Bocuse, three-star Michelin chefs."
It helped that Robuchon and Bocuse are involved in the pan-European chef community Euro-Toques, of which Myrtle Allen is a former president. "I think she could see that this kind of food wasn't the end of the world," Allen says. "She's very pro-business, and she was very much on our side. The fact of the matter is that people are buying meals in supermarkets, so why not give them the option of buying decent ones?"
Busy establishing their business, their nomination for last year's Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards brought them face to face with a new challenge - and the concept of corporate social responsibility. At the 2005 awards ceremony, John O'Shea of the charity Goal asked the entrepreneurs in the audience to spend a week of their lives in the Third World, setting up businesses that would benefit impoverished communities. Tullow Oil's Aidan Heavey, Michael Carey of Jacob Fruitfield and Stockbyte founder Jerry Kennelly took O'Shea up on the challenge and established different ventures in Africa.
This year, with their fellow nominees Anne Heraty of CPL Recruitment and Frankie Whelehan of Choice Hotel Group, Cully & Sully undertook projects in Asia. "The brief," O'Sullivan says, "was to set up a business that would benefit local people, but it had to be sustainable." The project they devised was to establish a microfinance co-operative in Nepal. Microfinance involves lending small sums to people who do not qualify for conventional loans, to help lift them out of poverty. "I heard of microfinance when the Grameen bank won the Nobel Prize, and it made a lot of sense to me, because it's trade, not aid," O'Sullivan says.
In April they went to Simikot, in northwestern Nepal, and helped villagers locate and finance the purchase of an oil press. "They take walnuts and compress them into oil by hand," Allen says. "They knead them, as you would bread, and the oil leeches out, but they only get a tiny amount of oil from very considerable effort. An oil press presents them with massive opportunities, because they can use oil for cooking, light and fuel, and also as a base for soap."
The pair are committed to returning to Nepal every year and are looking at other projects to finance through the scheme. "I think entrepreneurs love a challenge," Sully says. "We love working on a problem, and I think we have the ability to get things moving."
There's deep cynicism about corporate social responsibility projects, with opponents arguing that companies get involved only because they see an opportunity to raise their profile and enhance their reputation.
Allen doesn't see it this way. "There's very good reason for the scepticism, because there are companies involved who are up to no good elsewhere. But you have to battle the cynicism and focus on the fact that it's still worth doing this stuff. These are the kind of things that make life worth living." u
Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Challenge, about their trip to Nepal, is on RTÉ 1 next Thursday at 10.45pm