Buying really fresh food often means a long drive to a blustery outdoor market. Three Dublin businessmen want to change that, and they're starting in Smithfield, they tell Catherine Cleary
It's that slice of time after a working day that most people dread. The overloaded wire basket jabs your legs in a strip-lit supermarket as you try to conjure up a meal that will combine health and happiness. Throughout the whole exhausting business, the fridges and freezers call to you with seductively packaged cartons of gloop and hollow promises of comfort and convenience. Then there's the weekend food trip. To use the most annoying buzzword of 2006, it's a "destination" experience, where you drive by several supermarkets to get to a church hall or a blustery car park where a food market has set up for the day. You chat with the producer of a tangy artisan cheese and depart with a wicker basket of food that seems somehow more real than the stuff shipped into our supermarkets.
They seem worlds apart, and both say much about the new food movement, a rebellion by the comfortable classes against the packaged and the processed. Trying to bring the two retail experiences together are three businessmen who have just opened Fresh, a food shop on Smithfield in Dublin, the first of what they hope will be a chain of "good food market" convenience stores.
One of the first things you notice when you go into Fresh is the absence of the wire shopping basket. Instead the baskets are made of greenish plastic, and they slot onto nifty plastic trolleys. They're ergonomically shaped to curve around your hip. Unlike their brutishly stubborn supermarket counterparts, the trolleys are light and responsive enough for a small child to steer. And both baskets and trolleys are made from recycled plastic. The second thing you see is that dotted between all the convenience store staples are products that you normally associate with a corner deli: speciality Italian biscuits, cooking oils and pasta. A mini organic fruit and vegetable market will be set up three days of the week. And inside the bright airy front, large umbrellas and olive-green panels re-create a food-market feel.
Is it all a bit of a con, I ask Simon Kelly, David Kelly and Noel Smith, the three businessmen who are visibly proud of their new venture. Hung around the clean white walls are moody black-and-white photographs of work-worn hands making bread and paring cheese. But isn't this just a posh convenience store? All three smile and argue that the idea is all about giving something more to the food shopper than the dismal chore of a supermarket shop. "Ireland Inc should be famous for food. It's one business where we still have unique appeal," Simon says enthusiastically. They are looking for producers to approach them to sell through Fresh, and have worked with people behind some of the most successful farmers' markets. "The problem for a producer is to get into the retail end."
The development where we are sitting also houses 450 apartments, a hotel, a leisure centre, a medical diagnostics centre and parking for hundreds of cars. Simon Kelly is the son of one of the country's wealthiest developers, Paddy Kelly, and has a bewildering array of projects on the go, in Dublin and beyond, many of them run by the development company Redquartz Boundary. David Kelly (no relation) has a background in management at Brown Thomas. Smith is the "Mr Retail" of the Fresh partnership, with a background in setting up Spar and Mace shops in urban areas where most of the shopping is done on the trip between the office and the apartment.
Simon Kelly controls Dax restaurant and the Thomas Read pub group, which includes the Bailey and Ron Blacks. His company has developed an Olympic village in Italy for next week's Winter Olympics, and has another development in Sarasota, in Florida. One of the largest of the Paddy Kelly family's Dublin projects will be a redevelopment of a block on Middle Abbey Street, whose buildings are to be incorporated into another, even larger revamp of Arnotts.
In April he will reopen an old chapter in Dublin coffee-house history, when the Winding Stair book shop and cafe reopens its doors on the north quays. He promises that little will have changed. The mismatched furniture and rickety, dusty feel will be left intact. The original owners left all the books, taking only first editions with them when they left. New customers will be able to fall in love with the Liffey from two storeys up, and old regulars might hope to step off the busy footpaths into a quieter, gentler Dublin.
Simon Kelly returned to Dublin in 1993 from London and began working with his father on a Tallaght retail centre. It was tough work building boxes in the hope that someone would pay the rents, he remembers. "There were no retailers. There is still a dearth of people in Ireland who are willing to set up new businesses. So much of the investment is in property. But a property cycle only gets you through a bit of your life. As a developer it's very rare that someone would walk in and say: 'I have an idea.' I really admire people who take the risk of doing something different."
Two of the three Kelly sons - Simon and his younger brother Chris - are involved in the family business with their father. The youngest son, 19-year-old John, is working in a Kenyan orphanage. The girl in the Kelly family, Emma, runs Elevate PR, a successful public-relations company specialising in fashion and food.
Simon Kelly is undoubtedly a hard-nosed businessman. But he does not fit the mould of cigar-chomping developer carving up the city into beige boxes and renting them to the usual monolithic corporations. For a start he believes that local authorities should charge developers levies to be put toward schools and other amenities. In Wicklow, where he has lived for four years, he is involved in raising funds for three extra classrooms at his two children's school. Like other commuter-belt areas, Wicklow faces an explosion in its school-going population, with no sign of preparedness to cope - Simon Kelly's family is due to grow by 50 percent with the impending arrival of twins.
The Smithfield branch of Fresh will eventually have a 60- to 70-seat restaurant on its first floor; Smith and the Kellys realise that hundreds of barristers from the Four Courts might form their core daytime customers.
When they opened the doors, in mid-January, the first customers were some locals who had lived in Smithfield for 28 years. Part of the site used to be a fruit and vegetable market, and the locals were delighted with the new store, they say. Wrights of Howth supplies fish for their fresh-fish counter, which sold more on their first day than they expected to sell in a week.
"We always wanted to do something that would look a bit better," says Simon Kelly. "I think there is going to be a big kickback against the supersize Tesco formula. People want to go somewhere nice. Not that the arrival of Tesco has been all bad. They have been willing to open new stores, and that's good for competition."
"We're building the business around fresh foods," Noel Smith says. At the moment the shop does not sell cigarettes. But they are taking a pragmatic position on the future of that stance if customers baulk at it. Smith is targeting what he believes is the gap left when Superquinn began to pile high and try to compete with Lidl and Aldi. But the model for 2,000sq m (20,000sq ft) supermarkets is very much a SuperValu concept.
The businessmen have approached Dublin Docklands Development Authority about putting a Fresh in Stack A. Within two years they hope to have opened another two branches in Dublin. Further afield, they are targeting town centres in areas with at least 20,000 residents. A Kelly project might see a Thomas Read pub and a Fresh store as anchor tenants for a town development.
"We want our developments to be full of good retailers. Deep down I don't want to create boxes and then fill them with Tesco, Boots and McDonald's. I think there is going to be a backlash against that. In London's Covent Garden you have discounts given to non-brand retailers, to encourage diversity." Will the Fresh idea survive if there's a speed wobble in the prosperity race? "People still have to eat," Noel Smith says. "We're not priced to be an expensive shop."
They have a policy of employing local people, Kelly says. "We are trying to be responsible and a bit ethical. Not everything's about the bottom line. But in the future would we open up another Spar again? Yes."
Fresh, near Smithfield Luas stop, is open daily from 7am to 10pm