At just 31 Thea Murphy is set to take over her father's Cork ice-cream business, which has just landed a €2 million-a-year contract with Baskin-Robbins, writes Claire Shoesmith

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Golden Medal Ribbon and Cherries Jubilee - all ice cream flavours for those of you who don't know - are an everyday feature in the life of Thea Murphy. Not only does she have millions of litres of ice cream at her disposal but soon she will have individual deserts and ice-cream-based cakes too.

At 31, Thea is being groomed to take over Silver Pail, the ice-cream business her father established 28 years ago. Thea has been in the company for four years. She runs it with her father, Michael, who has grown the Fermoy, north Cork-based firm from three people to about 60.

Thea is relaxed about the prospect of running a business that in January signed a €2 million-a-year contract to supply ice cream to Baskin-Robbins's shops in the UK and Europe. This is also in addition to producing its own brand of ice cream, making frozen products for Irish retailers and producing Carolan's Irish Cream liqueur under contract for C&C.

Her father is also relaxed about the idea. "If Thea wasn't coming up behind, I couldn't keep going," he says, dismissing the idea that he will struggle to hand over the reigns when the time comes for him to step aside.

"I have more experience now, but within three or four years there won't be much more I can teach her," he says, declining to divulge his age.

While full ownership of the company will one day pass into his daughter's hands, the decisions concerning the future of the company don't lie on her shoulders yet. According to Michael, Silver Pail has a very good management team, which includes a product manager who's been there from the start.

Thea's main duties, as well as part-running the company, lie in product development and looking after suppliers. She divides her time between travel and the Fermoy factory.

Since the start of the year, most of her time has been taken up with the Baskin-Robbins contract. The world's leading chain of ice-cream stores, based in California, used to source its ice cream from a plant in Canada. However, changes to labelling regulations in Europe mean that any products containing genetically modified ingredients must say so on the label. Because some of the Canadian ingredients were modified, Baskin-Robbins decided to switch to a European GM-free supplier.

This is where Silver Pail came into its own. The company, whose philosophy is to use only natural local ingredients, fitted the bill perfectly. As a result, Ireland's largest privately owned ice-cream manufacturer will by June be producing 36 flavours of ice cream for the American chain.

This year more than 1.5 million litres of Baskin-Robbins ice cream will be produced in Fermoy, using cream from seven million litres of milk sourced from local farms. According to Michael, the contract has the potential to be worth three times the initial €2-million-a-year estimate.

"This is a very significant contract for us," says Thea, adding that what makes it better than other business is that it's static throughout the year. "This is a quieter time of year for our own business, so it's good to have new business."

It has, however, taken up a lot of the company's time - so much that its plans to start manufacturing individual-sized desert portions are now 18 months behind schedule. The company hopes to launch the new range at the beginning of April to satisfy the demands of much of the catering industry.

Silver Pail is also introducing an ice-cream-based cake business, but this is a little further down the line, according to Thea.

Once the bulk of the Baskin-Robbins development work is out of the way - Silver Pail has had to replicate all of the flavours exactly - it can focus again on the company's own brand of ice cream.

Corrin Hill ice cream, named after a landmark overlooking the town of Fermoy where Thea was born, was launched in 2004. Last year it had sales of €1.3 million, according to market research group AC Nielson. However, it isn't making any money for Silver Pail and won't do for at least another two years. Corrin Hill is aimed at what Silver Pail believes was a gap in the market.

"There were no good quality dairy products on offer in the mid range," says Thea. "That's where we saw a gap - between the economy pack sizes and the premium end, which was proper dairy, but that cost a lot.

"So that became our brief: to make a dairy product using only natural ingredients, colours and flavours but to keep its price down."

Then came the fun bit. To test the suitability of the product, Silver Pail took it into local schools for testing. The results of the school tasting sessions were then put to the test again at DIT in Dublin. Ultimately, five flavours were chosen, which can be found in most Irish supermarkets, including Supervalu, Dunnes, Tesco and Centra. Silver Pail has just taken on an agent in the North and may expand the brand further.

"Any expansion into the UK will be very targeted," says Thea, while her father acknowledges that by focusing on just one UK town, the group can reach more people than in the whole of Ireland.

Things haven't always gone swimmingly. During 2000 and 2001 Silver Pail was forced to downsize its business after being squeezed by the British supermarkets. "The margins they were asking for were just impossible," says Michael, who initially learned his trade as part of Express Dairies in Cheshire and London.

He then went to South Africa where he set up a yoghurt factory outside Johannesburg. When that was sold he moved on to ice cream and eventually back to Ireland. "We were forced to end the contracts with the UK supermarkets and as a result had to lay people off," he says of Silver Pail around the turn of the century. The group's headcount fell back to about 40 and a decision was made to focus on more niche markets.

It still supplies to some Irish supermarkets.

However, in the UK it focuses simply on speciality chocolate maker Thorntons and one larger group, Nestlé.

Michael declined to comment on the company's financial performance, saying he didn't want to divulge any information to the group's competitors. However, according to the latest filings with Companies House, Foxway, the ice-cream manufacturing part of the business, made a profit of €125,579 in 2004. Gross profit before distribution and administrative costs and interest was €1.166 million.

Whatever the outcome of the accounts, Silver Pail appears to be in the right market. At more than 10 litres per person each year, the Irish eat more ice cream than most other Europeans. And with an increase in household spending and a desire for natural products, the company is certainly making its way down the right path.

Whether it will succeed in its unspoken aim of displacing the multinationals in the Irish market remains to be seen, but in the meantime I certainly would be content with sampling as many new flavours as Silver Pail wants to try out.

Factfile

Name: Thea Murphy

Position: Co-director of Silver Pail

Family: Single with no children, lives in Fermoy, Co Cork

Background: She studied food nutrition at UCC in Cork and then worked at Kerry Foods before joining the family company four years ago

Why she is in the news: Thea is being groomed by her father to take over as head of the family company when he retires. She already co-runs the company, which in January won a 2 million-a-year contract to manufacture ice cream for Baskin-Robbins, the world's leading chain of ice cream stores