When Melanie Harty first wanted to train as a chef, she was turned down on two grounds. The first, her inter-cert was “too good.” And the second?

“They said: ‘A woman ... she’ll never last’,” says Melanie with a wry smile.

Given that she has enjoyed a career spanning over 30 years in the industry, they couldn’t have got it more wrong. But if there’s one thing that the woman behind Harty’s jellies is not short of, it’s determination.

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One of 10 children raised on a dairy farm and B&B in north Kerry, Melanie grew up with an innate work ethic.

“As soon as you could reach the sink, you were working,” she laughs.

While her initial attempts to get into the food industry were thwarted, she studied tourism after school, before starting to train as an accountant. All that changed, however, in 1982, when a friend came home from South Carolina and told her there was a job there in a restaurant if she wanted it.

“I went to the States ... and I didn’t come back,” she says.

Melanie spent seven years working on Hilton Head Island before relocating to Washington DC, where she trained at L’Academie De Cuisine, ran a home catering business (she recalls going to cater at one party where the client had a “baby grand, a swimming pool and nothing else, not even a knife and fork”) and also had her own stall at the well-known Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, selling homemade jams and soda bread.

Which is how she came across a product that would one day become very significant.

“A friend said: ‘Can you make my grandmother’s pepper jelly?’” recalls Melanie, explaining how pepper jelly (in essence, a savoury jam) is a traditional accompaniment to cheese in the southwest of the United States.

“I said: ‘Never heard of it, but I’ll try it’.”

Fast-forward to 1995, when Melanie came home to Kerry on holidays and saw an ad for a property in Tralee with 100ft of road frontage.

“I thought: ‘Oh my God, we can do something with this’,” she says, even though she had never intended on returning to Ireland to live.

Melanie opened The Cookery restaurant in 1996, with a business partner whom she bought out in 2002. The restaurant was a great success – featuring in the Les Routiers guide – but in 2006 she made a move to sell up.

“I was afraid of getting burnt out,” she says of her decision. “I enjoyed it too much and I thought: ‘Now is the time’.”

With no firm plan of what was next, Melanie took a job with her former head chef, who was opening his own restaurant. While exploring different options – including floristry and earning a diploma in business, executive and personal coaching – the idea for the pepper jellies she had first made in Washington DC returned.

Working first from the restaurant and then from home, Melanie spent two years trialling her jellies at local markets before she decided to take the step to the next level and work with Folláin in west Cork to produce her recipes on a larger scale.

However, she soon learned there were many challenges in making the move from stall to shop shelf.

“I know we have margins in the restaurant, but you can give an extra scoop when you want,” says Melanie. “But it’s very different with margins and percentages, and every penny counts.

“Or when you’re buying labels, are you buying 500 or 50,000? And is everything on the label correct because if you’re buying 50,000, it better be.”

(A lesson learned after realising that 20,000 labels she had ordered did not have the barcode – which she solved by printing the codes separately and sticking every one of them on by hand.)

Melanie officially launched Harty’s at SHOP in the RDS in 2009, and built up stockists in Munster, as well as developing some export business.

However, her biggest break came in 2013 when – after making a deal to supply three Dunnes Stores locally – she was able to grow sales through in-store promotions and tastings, to the extent that by the following year she was given a listing in 90 stores nationwide.

“It went from three to six between September and June, and then it went from six to 90 by the middle of July,” she says.

Similarly, having built up a relationship with SuperValu stores in Munster, she is listed nationwide, with a target of 100 stores this spring. Central to making this a reality is not only her working relationship with Folláin, but also with distributors Jaymark and Taste The View, as well as the ongoing support of the local enterprise board.

Much of Melanie’s focus now is to make the public aware of how her jellies can add appeal to any meal. With six flavours – cranberry, mint, hot pepper, ginger and hot pepper, apple and sage and cha-grilled pepper – Harty’s jellies can be served with cheese and crackers, spread on a sandwich, stirred through pasta or used to liven up mid-week dinners.

“The jelly heats up, it melts in, there’s no more to it,” says Melanie.

And as the latest chapter in her fulfilling life in food unfolds, you’d wonder what the people who said she’d never last would think now.

“I love what I do, but I don’t consider it work,” smiles Melanie. “I have never gone to work in my life.”