Tayto crisps can be found easily on the shelves of Australian supermarkets thanks to Eamon Eastwood – and a humble GAA fundraiser.
In the early 2000s, the Tyrone man was in a Sydney pub trying to raise cash for his local GAA team when someone suggested auctioning off a single packet of cheese and onion Tayto. They’d figured at least one person in the homesick crowd would put in a decent bid for a taste of home.
“I don’t know where they came from, they just appeared in the pub. Someone’s mam probably sent it to them,” remembered Eastwood.
“This Kilkenny man was the highest bidder at 25 Australian dollars (approx €23 in today’s money). He won them for his Galway girlfriend. It was very romantic.”
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Eastwood refers to the competitive pub auction as his “crude market research”, establishing a demand for Irish comfort foods in the large Irish expat community in Australia.
But the journey from turning that first A$25 packet of Taytos into a business doing million-dollar deals with Australian retail giants was far from plain sailing, thanks to lost shipments and currency hikes.
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“It was just paid a pittance to start off with and I was living with Irish lads working in construction who would tell me I’d never make money selling f**king Taytos,” laughed Eastwood. “They’d be off partying while I would be sitting home, eating cornflakes for dinner.”
But Eastwood was determined to stay the course, having identified his entrepreneurial passions from a young age.
“I’m from Cookstown in Tyrone where the name Eastwood was very synonymous with business,” he said. “It was in my blood. The Eastwood name was all over the place on the signs of bookmakers and shops.”
Despite “not being particularly great at school” and only “wanting to play football”, Eastwood went straight into a marketing degree at the University of Glasgow. After realising his semi-professional football career was coming to an end, he knuckled down and scored a place in a marketing programme funded by the Northern Irish government.
“I didn’t want to go back home because the job opportunities were crap, so I thought I’ll hide out in this graduate program for a bit,” laughed Eastwood.
After that one pallet, I brought a full container of Tayto with my life savings... which was years of construction money
The programme placed marketing graduates with Irish businesses abroad for two years. Eastwood’s initial excitement at his New York posting was soon tempered by the realities of the gig.
“It was just after the [Northern Ireland] ceasefire in 1998 and I was matched with a Belfast tourism operator, so it was my remit to tell Americans how great Northern Ireland was to visit,” he said. It was an “unbelievably tough sell” after years of the Troubles had dominated international headlines.
“I learned to deal with rejection early on,” he said.
By 2000, Eastwood found himself in Sydney working in construction during the Olympic Games building boom. Keen to stop spending his days pouring concrete in the hot sun and to put his marketing knowledge to use, Eastwood saw an opportunity in importing Tayto crisps to sell to his fellow countrymen.
Buoyed by the success of the GAA raffle, he used his savings to buy a pallet of Tayto, storing it in the bedroom of his shared house.
“I was working from 6am to 6pm laying tunnels, then I would deliver Taytos to Irish pubs at night in my Suzuki soft top with no air conditioning.”
His customer base expanded, but an early disaster nearly called curtains on the enterprise.
“After that one pallet, I brought a full container of Tayto with my life savings which was around A$20,000 (approx €11,500 at the time) – which was years of construction money,” he said.
He went to a friend’s wedding in Ireland, optimistic his big business was just about to take off on his return to Oz, where his shipment would arrive soon afterwards.
Except it never made it to Sydney. The shipping company advised him that it had been dropped off at the wrong port, and now A$20,000 worth of Tayto was slowly reaching its expiry date on a dock in Rotterdam.
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By the time they could get it to Australia, the crisps would barely have any shelf life, rendering them unsaleable.
“I was on the phone to my father crying and he said ‘look, maybe this isn’t for you’ but I was determined to give it another lash,” said Eastwood.
The name Taste Ireland restricted us a little bit, so that became solely the online business, while Taste Distributors gave us the space to advance in other international food brands
A loan from his brother and a sympathetic call with Tayto led to another shipment on the way at cost price. On the upside, it meant Eastwood “learned about maritime insurance”.
He still wasn’t out of the woods, with the weakened Aussie dollar against the euro pushing up his costs and the recession making it difficult to coax credit from suppliers. Eastwood calculates that he didn’t pay himself “really for five or six years”, even as his company, Taste Ireland, outgrew his bedroom into warehouses.
In the 2010s, Taste Ireland continued to expand, carrying over 100 product lines including Barry’s Tea, McDonnells Curry Sauce and Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate (different in taste from Australian-made Dairy Milk).
Then in 2013, Australia’s largest supermarket chain came knocking. Woolworths was looking to stock Eastwood’s Irish products in its fledgling “international” aisle at some of its 1,500 locations as Australia’s multiculturalism created a demand for foreign food.
It had been testing the waters for a few years but now it was ready to offer Taste Ireland a A$1.5 million contract.
Coles, the other grocery giant, came in hot pursuit, meaning Taste Ireland products were in supermarkets that held over half the country’s market share between them.
Eastwood says the business has been playing with the online space since 2018 as the company expand beyond its Irish-only origins.
“The name Taste Ireland restricted us a little bit, so that became solely the online business, while Taste Distributors gave us the space to advance in other international food brands,” he says. “Taste Ireland still talks to our original customer, and we saw that during the pandemic where we grew 60 per cent year-on-year.”
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Eastwood credits “persevering with ecommerce during the tough years” with being ready for the Covid-19 online shopping boom at a time when many Irish expats were prevented from going home.
According to the 2021 Census, Australia was home to nearly 81,000 people born in Ireland at the height of the pandemic, with that number set to increase now that borders have reopened.
In addition to revenue, the online store also provides an incubator for product lines.
“We can introduce a larger variety of products online to see what works. We have different levels to experiment on so we’re not at the mercy of Woolworths or Coles,” said Eastwood.
Eastwood recognises his business was the result of “tough sacrifices” in terms of relationships, his health and moving across the world from his supportive parents Charlie and Fionnuala.
“It takes a strong mind to get away from a small town where your identity is tied up with your family,” he said. “But when you move to a new country, there is this freedom about you every day.”
The long distance between Sydney and Cookstown also saw Eastwood grow more comfortable in his Irish identity, which might seem ironic now but makes sense for someone who grew up at the tail end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
“Coming from Tyrone, my mother was afraid for me to go to St Patrick’s Day parades, so my first St Patrick’s Day parade was actually in New York,” he said.
“You couldn’t express your Irishness as freely as you wanted, so when I came to Sydney, I just exploded with Irishness through things like the Gaelic games.”
In 2005, Eastwood helped establish the Cormac McAnallen GAA club in Sydney, named in honour of the late Tyrone captain. He still conducts the odd fundraiser, but these days the prize has been upgraded from a packet of Tayto to an entire Irish food hamper donated by his company.
In addition to businesses and Irish events, Eastwood devotes his time to his fiancee Diane and their daughters Everly (3) and Maeve (9 months), who he plans on passing on his “exploded” Irishness to. “They’ll be going to St Patrick’s Day parades,” he said.
