IRISH ATLANTIC SEA SALT:AILEEN AND Michael O'Neill run a shellfish business in the picturesque town of Castletownbere in west Cork.
Michael is already unusual in being one of a handful of abalone farmers in Ireland. Now Aileen has struck out on her own, with the support of Enterprise Ireland, to launch Irish Atlantic Sea Salt.
“From what we can determine from research and from talking to people who know the food sector over many years, we are the first to go into commercial sea salt production here,” she says.
Producing sea salt requires a lot of energy and O’Neill says the power costs have undoubtedly been a deterrent to anyone thinking about commercial sea salt production in the past.
“Ireland is not exactly the cheapest place to buy electricity. We wouldn’t be doing it either if we hadn’t come up with an innovative way of using and reusing heat to get the maximum value from our power consumption,” she says. “We have been working on the energy issue with a Skibbereen company, Alternative Heating Cooling, and we tried a lot of strange ideas before coming up with our solution.”
The product will sell in 250g packs at 4.99. There has already been considerable interest from Irish food groups such as Musgrave’s and Superquinn. “I’ve been really surprised by the level of local interest, as I saw it more as an export product,” O’Neill says. “That said, there is also strong interest from overseas, particularly the US, Germany and Scandinavia. The fact that Ireland has ‘green’ credentials and good quality sea water has definitely helped.”
The O’Neills have always had an interest in the potential of the sea to generate new business opportunities. They got the idea to produce sea salt commercially following a visit to the UK where they heard about a sea salt company that had invested £1.4 million (€1 million) in its facility.
“We felt this level of investment demonstrated the market potential for the product,” says O’Neill. “And, given our experience with salt water from farming abalone, we thought it would fit very well with what we were already doing.”
