For Billy and Mary Sharpe, who own Irish Gourmet Butter in Dunhill, Co Waterford, business and butter-making runs in the family.

The husband-and-wife team are Déise born and bred. Mary, who is a publican and chair of the Vintner’s Association in Waterford, and Billy, who was the youngest ever master glassmaker at Waterford Crystal – have been developing their craft for decades.

Billy’s career took a complete change after leaving Waterford Crystal. \ Mary Browne

“As a young boy, I would have made butter as a hobby,” he says.

“I spent a lot of time on farms growing up. Making butter into a business though came from a conversation I had a few years ago with our daughter. I was talking about how you can’t get good butter any more and she said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘Look, I’ll make you some and you’ll see for yourself.’ Our son, a chef, mentioned that flavoured butters were becoming popular – we thought there could be an opportunity there.”

In 2017, Irish Gourmet Butter made their commercial debut at the West Waterford Festival of Food and the rest, as they say, is history. Starting off with a product line of three flavoured butters, they handed out samples to festival-goers and were thrilled with the response.

“Eighty per cent of those who tasted our butter ended up buying more [that day],” Mary laughs. “We got lots of business opportunities from the festival.”

“It was there that someone told us about the Blas na hÉireann Awards,” Billy adds. “I hadn’t heard of them. We quickly sent in our applications and samples and I couldn’t believe it when our garlic and herb butter won silver that year.”

From there, the product line grew to five uniquely flavoured butters (favourites among butchers and fishmongers to sell alongside their proteins), their original lightly salted butter and pastry butter; made specifically for pastry chefs and patisseries around the country. Mary and Billy have been married for 32 years and have three grown children, but it wasn’t until Billy rekindled his love of butter-making that Mary revealed an old family secret.

“While I was making butter one day, Mary commented that her grandmother was All-Ireland butter champion,” Billy says. “In 1935-1936 she won first, second and third in the Cork show, then she went on to the RDS and got a gold medal.”

Safe in the knowledge that butter-making was well entrenched in their bloodlines, Billy and Mary decided to move the business forward. Billy had spent 34 years working as a master glassmaker with Waterford Crystal – a job he adored. He left in 2008, not long before the company shut its doors in Waterford permanently.

Billy and Mary’s butter has won a silver Blas na hÉireann award. \ Mary Browne

“I worked with a lot of the designers [at Waterford Crystal] and I was involved with the famous Times Square Ball in New York,” he reminisces. “I loved my time there. When I decided to leave, it was because manufacturing was not going to be as involved in new products – and I didn’t want to be involved in outsourced products.”

His career has since taken a complete change of direction, but Billy says his training and experience in Waterford Crystal left him well prepared to start his own business.

“[What I was doing] was very niche, but my skillset could easily be adapted for business,” he says. “Mary is a publication by trade, so business was something we had plenty of experience in.”

Before launching Irish Gourmet Butter, Billy took a business course with the Education and Training Board (ETB) in Kilmacthomas. He credits this course for helping in areas like website design and social media, with which he would not have been familiar. Along with developing his overall business plan, the course in Kilmacthomas also made him aware of the Ecopark in Dunhill – a specially designed space for small food producers to operate.

Other local businesses

“I got a small, affordable unit upstairs and, from there, we planned our first West Waterford Festival of Food appearance,” he says.

“From our initial success there and from Blas na hÉireann, we ended up moving into a larger unit. That was when we started working with Sarah to make pastry butter.”

Sarah Richards is an artist and Ballymaloe-trained baker who owns Seagull Bakery in Tramore, just down the road from the Dunhill Ecopark.

Sarah Richards is an artist and Ballymaloe-trained baker.

She specialises in sourdough breads made with locally grown wheat, but also sells an array of sourdough-infused pastries, including flaky croissants, almond pastries and pain au chocolat – all of which require high-quality pastry butter. Before Billy and Mary came along, the only pastry butter Sarah could get came from France. It wasn’t really fitting the bill.

“It was getting so expensive that suppliers were buying it in bulk and freezing it and that would completely ruin the butter,” she explains.

Getting it right

Having a butter maker just down the road; Sarah started working with Billy to develop the perfect pastry butter.

When you slice a well-made croissant in half, you should be able to see the layers.

This type of butter is generally sold in sheets as opposed to blocks, which facilitates the process of making laminated pastry doughs. When you slice a well-made croissant in half, you should be able to see the many different layers – this happens because the butter is folded and rolled into the dough as opposed to being mixed. It’s an arduous process and requires a high amount of skill – having the right butter for the job is essential.

“Usually pastry butter is unsalted, but we really feel that with just the tiniest bit of salt added, the flavour comes alive,” Mary says. “So we always include a bit of salt in our pastry butter.”

Croissants in the making at Seagull Bakery. \ Mary Browne

“We don’t mind the salt at all,” Sarah says. “We were using another brand of butter for a while, which was salted, and the resulting flavour is really nice.”

Community and the environment are both great drivers for what Sarah does. She feels that the future of her business isn’t necessarily getting bigger, but being more inclusive of the local farmers and food producers available to her.

“Farming is something I’m really excited about,” she says. “I’ve always lived in town but I’ve also always been obsessed with nature, and it’s finally working its way into my baking. For me, finding a way to give farmers an avenue to work with us is what’s important. The more I look at it, it helps everything, from the farmers themselves, to biodiversity and nature.”

Sarah is active within the Real Bread Ireland network and has told others about Billy and Mary’s ability to provide Irish-made pastry butter. As a result, Irish Gourmet Butter supplies many of the artisanal patisseries and bakeries in the country. Altogether, their wholesale supply accounts for over 80% of their business sales.

Business plans

At the moment, Irish Gourmet Butter source their cream from Avonmore, but are looking to work directly with farmers.

“The cream we use has a very high fat content; about 94%,” Billy says.

“We churn it, wash it out and very lightly salt it. The resulting lamination and flavour is second to none. We sell the pastry butter by the kilo, in rectangular slabs, simply wrapped in greaseproof paper.”

Their packaging has zero- and low-waste food shops excited. Irish Gourmet Butter currently supplies shops like The Good Neighbour in Dundrum, who buy in bulk and sell it by weight to customers who bring in their own containers.

“We’re ready for our big expansion,” Billy says.

“We have a cold room and we’re well set up for processing here. We produce 300kg of butter per week, but we hope to double our output in the future. There’s great potential for growth.”

Coping with COVID-19

Since our original interview, so much has changed for Irish Gourmet Butter and Seagull Bakery. While both businesses remain operational, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically affected the way they do business.

“We’ve cut things down dramatically just to try to keep staff,” Sarah says of Seagull Bakery. “We’ve gone up and down with different business methods, and now we’ve settled into a system of online orders just three days a week.

“We’re working on building a hatch from our window to sell from so we can maintain social distancing,” she continues. “We’re a product of our success in a way because if we’d been quieter we might have been able to stay open.”

At the Dunhill Ecopark, Billy and Mary are still churning out butter orders every week and remain optimistic for the future, though the pandemic has had a huge affect on their bottom line.

“Of course it’s affecting our business – almost all of our foodservice business is gone,” Billy explains over the phone.

“We’re getting paid on time by those who are still operating though, which is great. But we are down considerably. Before lockdown, we had expanded. Now we’ve taken a hit. We need some support and there are many others in the same boat. The Ecopark are very good though, and I know we’ll be OK.”

Quieter times mean more time for Mary to create new and interesting flavours for their butter. She recently developed a wild garlic butter they were planning to launch at West Waterford Festival of Food before it was cancelled. Other flavour combinations on the horizon include chilli and chorizo and a taste of Japan.

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