Largo Foods, the Ashbourne-based crisp and snack manufacturer that bought Tayto earlier this year, saw pretax profit increase by nearly 49 per cent to €1.6 million last year.

Largo's turnover increased by €9.7 million to €53.7 million last year, representing a jump of nearly 18 per cent, recently filed accounts show. Founder Ray Coyle has said he expects turnover to reach €80 million this year.

The company's Irish turnover grew from €26.7 million to €32.5 million last year, while its turnover elsewhere rose by about €2 million to €21 million. Forty per cent of Largo's Irish production is exported, and it also has factories in the Czech Republic and in Moldova.

The company Mr Coyle founded in 1983 has been streamlining and modernising its Irish production facilities, and the accounts show exceptional costs of €1 million last year because of disruption in production at the factory outside Ashbourne, Co Meath, as a result of plant installation. "The plant did not perform to specification resulting in lower volumes of product produced than budgeted and higher labour and material costs," the accounts note.

They also note that redundancy costs of €177,000 were incurred as part of the reorganisation of the production process. The exceptional cost was partly offset by €558,000 in credits receivable from the plant supplier, according to the accounts.

Largo agreed this summer to pay C&C €62.3 million for the Tayto brands, Tayto and King, which Largo had already made at the Meath factory for nearly a year. Mr Coyle had already bid unsuccessfully earlier this year to buy the Golden Wonder brand.

Largo paid a higher price for the Tayto business than expected, and beat out competitors including Jacobs Fruitfield, DCC, Tayto Northern Ireland and Close Brothers.

The Tayto brand's market share had dropped from 85 per cent 15 years ago to about 36 per cent, compared with Walkers' 33 per cent and the 11 per cent share of Largo's own Hunky Dorys.

The plan is to leverage the Tayto brand to launch products but Mr Coyle has said his business plans allows for it to lose 2 per cent market share per year.