The members of Good Food Ireland are like a family and they are coming together in a kind of meitheal to impress the thousands of Web Summit delegates due to visit the country next week. And how are they going to impress them – with the quality and flavour of our food of course, says managing director Margaret Jeffares.

Cheese

Take the cheesemakers, there’s Breda Maher of Cooleeney Farmhouse Cheese in Tipperary. Breda is bringing her three-star Great Taste Award-winning brie. She sent cheese last year but couldn’t make the event herself, so she is very much looking forward to getting to it this year.

“It’s a privilege to be part of it,” she says.

Victor O’Sullivan of Bluebell Falls and Helen Finnegan of Knockdrinna are also getting ready, making 275kg each of their goats’ cheeses, while Jane Murphy from Ardsallagh near Carrigtwohill is making 1,750 hand-shaped goats’ cheeses.

Toby Simmonds of Toonsbridge is producing 275kg of his distinctively Irish buffalo mozzarella. He also has the extra challenge of producing 24-hour-old, spankingly fresh Irish grass-fed mozzarella for the Thursday of the Food Summit.

Eamonn and Patricia Lonergan will bring their award-winning Knockanore Farmhouse cheddar, made of the rich, raw milk from their pedigree Friesian herd, something they have been perfecting at their farm in Waterford since 1987.

Wild at heart

Sharon Greene of Wild Irish Foragers, another Good Food Ireland member, is pressing her foraged crop of crab apples by hand to make the necessary pots of 120g crab apple and chilli fruit cheese for the Food Summit. The handmade nature of the process means she can only make 12 pots per batch.

Fruit cheeses are a traditional Irish condiment and Sharon has added a smidgen of chilli (not entirely traditional) to bring out the flavour of the crab apples. Wild Irish Foragers is a family business, using only wild, hand-picked foods from their 50-acre farm in Offaly. They turn the ingredients into syrups, sauces, jellies, preserves and fruit cheeses using old Irish recipes.

Veronica Molloy of Crossogue Preserves will be supplying a huge variety of her jams and marmalade to the Food Summit and is picking sloes for her newest variety – a hedgerow jam. Crossogue will also be supplying its handmade rhubarb and ginger, blackcurrant, blackberry and apple, and summer fruit jams as well as its Irish whiskey breakfast marmalade

All-island bread basket

The various forms of bread in the bread buffet come from all over the country, making it an all-Ireland bread basket. Waterford blaa (Dermot Walsh of M&D Bakery) sits beside Ditty’s oatcakes from Co Down (Robert Ditty) and next to gluten-free and vegan breads and scones from Galway’s Foods of Athenry (Siobhan Lawless).

Then there’s sourdough from the Bretzel Bakery (William Despard), soda bread from Arbutus (Declan Ryan) and barn brack from Hickeys Bakery in Tipperary (Nuala Hickey) and Barrons bakery in Waterford (Esther and Joe Barron).

Dermot Walsh of M&D Bakery, who is providing 7,000 blaa batches to the Food Summit, says of the Good Food Ireland members: “We all love what we do and we love who we are doing it for – an appreciative audience. What we are doing at the Food Summit is not just important for our own businesses, but for the reputation of the whole country as a food island.”

And you can’t have bread without butter, which is where Allison and Will Abernethy from Co Down and Sean Mulligan’s Cuinneog’s from Mayo come in.

Vegan, gluten-free

The vegan/vegetarian hot main course options are being provided by a variety of suppliers – Ballymaloe is doing a chickpea stew – but the biggest responsibility is with Deirdre McCafferty of Cornucopia. Her business will be serving up to 1,000 vegan meals a day, with the chef from her busy Dublin restaurant making 50% more food every day than he does in a week in the restaurant.

Siobhan Lawless in Foods of Athenry has also taken some of her breads, crackers and scones and has subtly replaced certain ingredients to make even more of them gluten-free and vegan. Foods of Athenry has what Siobhan calls a “great taste guarantee” in that every single free-from product they produce stands or falls on how good it is to eat, and they have almost 40 Great Taste Awards to back that up.

As well as some vegan and many gluten-free breads and scones, chocolate biscuit bars and flapjacks, Foods of Athenry is also providing double-baked gluten-free soda bread craicers, vegan honeyed almond and rosemary craicers. They also have a new range of tiny cookie shots, Brownies and Blondies, at just 18 calories per gluten- and wheat-free biscuit – perfect with a cuppa.

Ugly fruit

Ten thousand Irish apples are being provided for delegates to the Web Summit by Con Traas and The Apple Farm in Tipperary. With the emphasis on Irish varieties, what these apples look like is of much less importance than how good they taste.

This is something many large retailers are now coming around to, giving consumers the choice to eat ugly fruit so as to prevent food waste. Con Traas of The Apple Farm says that delegates last year were really impressed by the delicious flavour of these home-grown varieties – over 15 different kinds are grown on his farm. As 95 of every 100 apples eaten in this country are from abroad, Con is keen that as many people as possible get to experience the exceptional flavour of a real Irish apple.

Something sweet

Patricia Farrell of Wilde Irish Chocolates in Clare is hand-making 2,000 mini chocolate squares, featuring up to 30 different flavours and varieties. These will be served after the final dinner of the Web Summit.

These time-consuming and labour-intensive chocolates are individually hand decorated, so the process of getting them ready will take a few weeks for this small artisan business.