After raising four children while farming for most of her married life, Catriona O’Flaherty decided she wanted a new challenge.

“We had up to 300 sheep at one stage, which means that I was very hands-on with the farm. I was born in Dublin but when I married Brian I fell in love with farming, even learning how to lamb a ewe. Eventually I reached the decision I wanted to do something different,” Catriona says.

The something different was making award-winning sticky toffee pudding with her son, Rory. The business idea and the name of the product came to Catriona one day while she was in Dublin cleaning out her mother’s home after she had passed away.

“My mum was from Belfast and she used to always call dessert pudding. We would have our main meal in the middle of the day when we were younger and we would always come home from school and ask: ‘What’s for pudding?’,” Catriona recalls.

“As my mother got older and I started to mind her, she would tell me to go get something nice for the pudding. I noticed when I went to the shops there were very few hot desserts available and I thought: ‘That’s it – there’s a gap in the market.’”

And so the idea for Catriona’s new business venture, What’s for pudding?, was born.

A family affair

Rory came on board and together they set about making the perfect pudding.

“We carried out some research, tried different recipes, began shelf life tests and by 2014 we had a product that was ready to sell,” says Rory.

Both mother and son are very passionate about their products. The three puddings they finally settled on making were sticky toffee, chocolate and lemon blueberry. Two years later they are still making them, with plans to introduce a ginger and orange flavour.

“These were variations to what we would have made for family and friends at home in the past,” Rory explains.

Coming from backgrounds unrelated to the culinary world – Rory is a building surveyor – they say cooking and hosting has always been a big part of the O’Flaherty family tradition.

In fact, their business still very much centres around the family, with father Brian helping with deliveries and Rory’s fiancé Anna assisting with the baking and deliveries too.

Cooking from scratch

Rory and Catriona began their business from a shared kitchen in Navan in 2014; in the morning it belonged to a catering company and in the evening Rory and Catriona would descend upon it to create their baked goods.

“It suited me well at the time because I was working during the day and then could bake in the evening,” Rory says.

At the beginning, the team availed of funding from the Rural Development Programme, after they saw an ad in their local newspaper.

“The money from this went towards the branding of the product,” Rory says.

The pair also went to their Local Enterprise Office where they got funding and mentoring which helped them a great deal at the beginning.

Sheridans Cheesemongers were the first to carry their brand, bringing it to independent shops around Meath. As their business matured, the mother-and-son team outgrew the shared kitchen. In 2015, they decided to convert a haybarn on their farm in Kilmessan, Co Meath, into a kitchen.

It was around this time that Dunnes Stores became interested in the What’s for Pudding? products, in particular their sticky toffee pudding.

“The Dunnes Stores version is very like what we produce for our own brand but with a little twist,” Catriona says.

“In spring 2016, we began producing for Dunnes Stores,” Rory says.

In less than six months, the Simply Better All Butter Sticky Toffee Pudding has won the O’Flaherty family two Great Taste Awards and the recent Golden Fork for Ireland award presented by Bord Bia.

“We are really proud of our product and it’s great that Dunnes Stores felt the same too. They gave us a great opportunity with bringing us on board with them because we would have found distribution of our product very hard to tackle otherwise,” Rory says.

Proof is in the pudding

These are not the only awards that Catriona and Rory’s puddings have won. In fact, since beginning their business two years ago, the mother and son have won 11 awards in total for their own brand pudding and the two sauces they also make: rum butterscotch and toffee.

“I’ve always said if you start with good ingredients, don’t over process, add a bit of egg and sugar at a time to not make them curdle,” Catriona confides.

Both Catriona and Rory believe the key to their success has been that their products taste homemade.

“We use the best of Irish ingredients, fresh butter and fresh cream. It’s not unusual to find a piece of date or plum in the pudding, which I think adds to it,” Catriona says.

The business now employs three part-time workers who “are equally as enthusiastic and dedicated to the product as Rory and I are,” according to Catriona.

A normal day for Catriona begins at seven in the morning and runs until three or four in the afternoon. Fifty-four puddings are made in one go, with approximately four batches in one day.

For Rory, he fits the business around his own nine-to-five job, baking in the evenings and attending food fairs at the weekends. Despite the hectic kitchen, the family farm does not stop either.

“We keep a small number of cattle on the land and supply the local butchers in Kilmessan village. Generally myself and my dad keep an eye on the cattle,” Rory says.

Sticky situations

Their success has not come without challenges, however.

“At this stage, the easy part is making the pudding,” Catriona laughs. “There are just so many things you must consider, like if you have enough trays, enough ingredients, packaging and everything else.”

One obstacle that the two faced was with the branding of the product.

“With our first attempt the packaging didn’t do the pudding justice,” Catriona says. “At one food award we were told that our pudding was compromised by our packaging. Funnily enough, we also received two emails from customers who said the same thing.”

Catriona and Rory see this as a learning curve in their journey to success, however, and are now rebranding the packaging of the product.

“I suppose you can see it as a growing and advancement of the company,” Rory says. “We are trying to constantly do better and our new packaging will help us achieve that.”

For people who are starting out with a new business venture, Catriona and Rory insist on making a trip to your Local Enterprise Office.

“Even if you only have an idea, they can help you advance and move things on. Your Local Enterprise Office will have panels of wonderful mentors and they can help you with feasibility studies too,” Catriona advises.

“Every time we took a knock-back, something great would happen down the line though, and the message is to carry on,” she says.

“It is hard work but you get great satisfaction when you know you make a really good product that people enjoy.” CL

Catriona and Rory’s own brand puddings are available in independent shops around Meath and retail between €5.99-6.50, while their Dunnes Stores Simply Better All Butter Sticky Toffee Pudding is available in all Dunnes Stores outlets for €6.50.

What’s For Pudding

Tel: 086-410 5723

www.whatsforpudding.ie