New seafood firm to create nine jobs

Owen O’Brien, managing director, and Miriam Crowley, head of sales & marketing, Kinsale Gourmet, launching Ireland’s first range of ‘sea vegetable’ meals. Picture: Neilus Buckley.

With nine new jobs and a state-of-the-art production facility for an innovative line of premium seafood products, Kinsale Gourmet is the latest in a series of food brands to emerge in West Cork.

Kinsale Gourmet will operate from a facility at Barrack Lane, which is scheduled to start production over the coming weeks, preparing the ‘sea vegetable’ meals for supermarket multiples and independent food halls across the country.

Using 100% Irish natural ingredients, the Kinsale Gourmet range will initially encompass five frozen dishes—seafood pie, lasagne and cannelloni, as well as beef and porter and beef cottage pie.

Each of the meals, which will also be available in the food service sector, uniquely incorporate Irish seaweed, otherwise known as ‘sea vegetables’, primarily the locally harvested Irish Dillisk.

Managing director of Haven Bay Foods Ltd, Owen O’Brien, the local entrepreneur behind the new brand, said that the business development strategy for Kinsale Gourmet will be strongly focused on growing export sales.

 “We’re in the final phases of negotiations with a number of continental European distributors – from the very outset we’ve been extremely focused on capitalising on our brand’s export potential,” Mr O’Brien said.

The idea for Kinsale Gourmet sprang from Mr O’Brien’s identification of a gap in the market for convenience meals incorporating Irish sea vegetables.

And he emphasised that the brand would combine healthy eating and superior taste: “For us, it’s not a case of ‘either/or’. In Kinsale, we’re surrounded by some of the very best restaurants in the country. We’re committed to offering the unrivalled benefits of sea vegetable nutrition, married with the flavour of chef-developed, restaurant quality cuisine.”

Mr O’Brien said it was an exciting time for the Irish food sector, which was marked an “amazing sense of innovation” among indigenous businesses, and he added that Kinsale Gourmet was part of that groundbreaking trend.