With people falling over themselves to land a job in the lucrative IT sector, it's unusual to find someone who has opted out of it. John Healy spent almost a decade working in the industry with leading edge companies such as Unisys and Kindle before leaving the lot behind to get involved in Absolutely Organic, the vegetable distribution company and brainchild of his wife Anne Marie.

"I'm someone who likes a challenge and I've been lucky in my career to date to have always spent time in jobs which were exciting and challenging," says Healy who studied town planning in Cardiff following a BA in archaeology and the history of European painting at UCD.

"When I graduated in town planning I worked on urban renewal projects in Wales for a couple of years which was very interesting and, when I came back to Dublin in 1980, I joined the IDA and spent almost five years there at a time when some very exciting and important big projects, such as Microsoft, were going through."

Having developed a taste for IT Healy moved from the IDA to the big mainframe computer company, Unisys. From there he joined the software company, Kindle, and this brought a busy schedule of international travel selling accounting and financial software packages all over the world.

"Each time I moved because there was the challenge and the buzz of being involved with a newly developing area," Healy says. "With Kindle I had the opportunity to do a lot of travel and to do business in a whole range of countries from New Zealand to Russia and that's exciting in its own right.

"I was also working with senior managers in the companies we were selling to so I had a lot of exposure to different models and methods of doing business. It also made me very aware of how all aspects of a business should revolve around the customer and although what I do now might seem very far removed from what I used to do, there are plenty of parallels," Healy says.

From Kindle, Healy moved to Point Information Systems which supplies software to run large-scale customer support operations such as international call centres. "This was an equally challenging period in my career," says Healy. "This kind of customer support was new and fast growing and it was forcing companies to radically rethink how they related to their customers and to their markets. For example, Dell had arrived selling computers direct and this demanded a fundamental rethink about the channels companies used to sell their products and how they supported their customers."

It was during a period of corporate reorganisation at Point that he decided to take the leap into something completely different. "The company was changing and this gave me the opportunity to decide what I wanted to do next. I've spent all my career so far in the thick of new things and I wanted to continue like this. My wife, Anne Marie, has always been very interested in food and concerned about the quality of what we eat and she came up with the idea of making deliveries of boxed organic vegetables."

The Healys set themselves a budget and a time frame of three months within which to experiment with their delivery idea on a formal basis. The response was excellent and they began to see that it could be made to work as a full-scale business.

In mid-1998 when Healy decided to leave Point, they were fairly confident that they had the makings of a good small business. They reversed roles with Anne Marie returning to her career as a town planner, while John became the home-based parent caring for their two children aged 10 and seven and running the business.

"We're still at a very early point in our development but it's going very well," says Healy. "We feel the potential is certainly there to make it work and work well. Sure, it's very hard work and very long hours - I work six or seven days a week - and I do everything from ordering and packing the vegetables to route scheduling and looking after cash flow and general business management."

THE company delivers boxes of vegetables direct to customers' homes. Fruit is about to be added to the list and, says Healy, they are looking at introducing more products. Delivery routes cover the greater Dublin area and Healy now has two people working with him part-time.

"The public's response to us has been very good indeed, but we're also getting a great response from the growers. We have some excellent growers here who just want to grow, they hate getting involved in the distribution side and they're delighted we'll do that for them.

"It's not an easy business to be in because of seasonality and the problem with volume - we're still four or five years behind Britain in terms of what we produce and Britain lags well behind the leaders such as Italy, the Netherlands and Germany.

"Ireland has the potential to become a key organic producer. I just wish more people would realise this and wake up to the potential of what could be done with "Ireland Inc" as the brand of a country with our reputation for being green and clean."

Healy has no regrets about swapping his business suit for wellington boots and a big jumper. "I love it," he says. "I love the flexibility, I like handling all the different aspects of running the business and, most of all, I like the fact that you're in pretty much in control of what's going on around you.

"In big organisations you're so dependent on other people. When you're in a big company you're normally responsible for just one part and you don't understand all the inputs and all the costs involved. It's a great eye-opener to be responsible for the whole lot. I enjoyed working in the corporate sector while I was there. But I don't miss it."

Healy is passionate about organic food and anxious to encourage its development. He is equally anxious to point out the career opportunities in the sector to young people. "A number of organically-based courses are available which they could consider if they're interested in this type of career. They don't have to confine themselves to the more conventional courses such as agricultural science or botany."

Contact: Absolutely Organic, 38 Ormond Road, Rathmines, Dublin 6 - phone (01) 496 8912.

`I enjoyed working in the corporate sector while I was there. But I don't miss it'

John Healy with a selection of organis fuit and veg: Photograph: Frank Miller