Teresa Roche – Cheese manufacturing

Teresa is qualified nurse and worked abroad for number of years. Her parents are milking almost 100 cows and she returned home from abroad 2 years ago and started a cheese business.

Motivations

Her motivations to return home and start Kylemore cheese was to:

• ‘add value’ to the raw material
• Farm is producing milk for the last 60 years and with the poor milk price when she returned home she believes if she did not begin this alternative enterprise the family would have had to get out of milk
• She also want to ‘keep interest in the family dairy for the next generation’
• She also ‘wanted to put an identity on the local community’

Success Factors: 

• Having the “raw material”
• She visited cheese operations abroad e.g. Switzerland, UK – these acted as mentors
• Having a “unique product”
• “Fully traceable product from grass fed Pedigree Holstein cows producing high quality milk

Key hurdles:

• Capital – “lack of funding from everyone”
• Turnover – waiting to make a profit
• Support
• Lack of education in cheese making – learning as progress, had to pay for courses aboard
• Staff – difficult to find staff in rural Ireland, cost of staff

Recommendations:

• “There should be a farm diversification policy implemented”
• “Grant aid system put in place to interest people”
• Farmers should be offered more courses/ tours
• An education programme should be set up e.g. developing produce into product

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