Larry Murrin, CEO of Dawn Farm Foods, says: “Great ingredients make great food and great ingredients come from outstanding food innovation.”

Murrin believes that one of the essential building blocks of Dawn Farm Foods has been food innovation.

He says developing new products to meet changing consumer tastes has been at the heart of the growth of Dawn Farm Foods for over 33 years.

Today, Dawn Farm Foods supplies a fast-moving market that is constantly evolving. Such is the scale of product churn, it doesn’t make a single product the same today as it was making 10 years ago.

Global food print

The company supplies world-leading food brands across more than 44 markets, such as Subway and Pizza Hut. Chances are if you have eaten a pizza or a sandwich in Europe with cooked meat, it came from Dawn Farm Foods’ factory in Naas, Co Kildare. Its products are available in more than 20,000 retail and food service outlets across the UK, Europe and the Middle East every day.

But it wasn’t always this way. It is less than 35 years old, having been established in 1985. “We were a 12-person startup with a 4,000 square foot warehouse and a small cooked meat plant, from which we intended to sell deli cooked meats to Irish supermarkets,” explains Murrin.

Larry Murrin, CEO of Dawn Foods.

Within five years, the business was turning over €5m, and even though it had garnered a fair share of the Irish market, Murrin and his team knew there was more potential. He explains: “The Irish market wasn’t really that big and rather quickly we soon realised if we wanted to grow, we needed to export.”

But consumer habits around food were beginning to change and a variety of foods started appearing on supermarket shelves.

“We could see an opportunity if that trend was to continue. Brands were going to need companies to deal with the challenge of customising ingredients that made manufacturing of their products easier,” says Murrin.

This allowed the big food brands outsource aspects of their manufacturing processes in order to focus their efforts on assembly, creativity and marketing. He says they used their capabilities in meat to craft customised solutions for brand holders that they could incorporate into ready meals, recipe dishes, sandwiches, pizza and snacks.

One of the really big breakthroughs came in 1988 when Pizza Hut UK chose Dawn Farm Foods as one of its suppliers of pizza toppings.

Dawn Farms HQ.

Within two years, it was its sole supplier of pizza toppings in the UK and, two years later, it was its sole supplier of pizza toppings throughout Europe. Employing 700 people in Naas and a further 400 on its Northampton site in the UK, Dawn Farm Foods is now the largest cooked meat ingredients company in the world outside of North America.

It is estimated that up to 50m people per week eat a product that has an ingredient from Dawn Farm Foods. It produces 500 different products every week and more than 90% of everything is exported, with just under one-third going to the UK. The majority of meat is sourced locally.