Sweet Taste of Success
Laura McCarthy’s Drinks Botanicals Ireland started out selling gin infusion kits to a single off-licence. Now exporting to the UK, the Middle East and the US with an expanded range including syrups and dried fruit, the savvy entrepreneur talks to Ben Haug
When marketing student Laura McCarthy approached her local off-licence about selling a homemade gin kit in 2007, she had no idea that seven years later she would be exporting to the UK, the US and the UAE.
Drinks Botanicals Ireland, a supplier of dried garnishes and natural syrups, has expanded sharply since the pandemic and McCarthy expects a turnover of between €1.5m and €2m this year.
“I’m confident it could be higher than that, and with a healthy net profit,” McCarthy, now 27, says from an upstairs office in her company’s new distribution centre in Crumlin Business Park, Dublin.
“We actually only just moved in here a couple of weeks ago. I bought it in March,” she says.
The ground floor of the unit is full of rows of cardboard boxes of stock stacked on top of each other, ready to be shipped across the country and farther afield. The export side of the business accounted for 50% of total turnover last year, but the firm had much more humble beginnings.
While studying marketing in TU Dublin, McCarthy approached Redmonds of Ranelagh off-licence with a basic gin infusion kit containing juniper berries, hibiscus, cardamom and pink peppercorns, priced at €4.99.
The kits were assembled on her kitchen table with packaging designed by her cousin.
“He said they’d take a dozen and see how they go. I got a phone call a week later and I thought it was going to be bad news, but he said ‘Laura, we’re actually sold out.’
“When I got that phone call I knew there was an opportunity to take the product further,” she says.
McCarthy managed to get the product into SuperValu, Dunnes Stores and off-licences nationwide and rented a small premises in Ranelagh.
“When you are that age, people are willing to support a young start-up. The demand was there,” she says.
“In the middle of that, I did an internship in KPMG as part of my college degree. I went into the marketing department for nine months, which was a great experience because I learned so much.
“I ended up going through the growth programme with KPMG and
Enterprise Ireland. That’s the certificate on the wall,” she says, pointing across the office.
The walls of McCarthy’s office are adorned with framed photos of several awards, including the SFA Outstanding Small Business Award and the Dublin City Enterprise Award earlier this year. She will soon be able to add the One To Watch Enterprise Award, which she won two days after this interview. The awards are surrounded by framed printouts of articles about the company, hanging above a display of the full range of the business’s products.
By 2020 the company’s gin kit was selling well, and then the pandemic arrived. But it wasn’t the death knell for the business that it was for others, due to the rise in popularity of have-a-go bartenders at home during extended lockdowns.
“Covid for my business was amazing
‘You have to be very smart on margins. At the end of the day, you don’t want to be a busy fool’
because it gave me time to step back and think of new product ideas and capitalise on what was missing from the market,” she says.
“I did a lot of research and found that a lot of bartenders were cutting up their fruit from scratch, dehydrating it and putting it in the dryer, which is incredibly time-consuming and labour-intensive.
“There was a lot of syrup on the market, but it was all full of artificial flavourings and colourings. I had a lightbulb moment. I thought maybe we can do something innovative here and create a more natural syrup that consumers will enjoy.”
The company launched its range of syrups and dried fruit garnishes, targeting restaurants, bars and hotels. “The business started as B2C and diversified into B2B,” she says.
It now offers eight flavoured syrups — cucumber, sour cherry, passion fruit, lemon, orange, grapefruit, raspberry and strawberry — and about 40 dried fruits.
These new products took off after the company secured distribution deals with Cisco and Conaty Catering, but McCarthy says the export business offers the most opportunity for the years ahead.
She says the company sells to
hundreds of Irish businesses but describes it as a “testing market” to see what consumers want.
“In 2022 we started exporting to the UK via Amazon, which was a huge success in itself. I have a staff member working full-time on our Amazon account.
“For us, building the brand on Amazon was about customer reviews, and people seeing the quality of the product, which sets us apart. In the dried fruit industry it really does depend on the quality.”
At the end of last year, McCarthy decided to have a stab at the US market, where she sees the most growth potential.
“It took a while to set things up because to register the company there was just a lot of paperwork. And so we got set up there and started shipping into the US,” she says.
“And to be honest, it just exploded. Within a month we were literally out of capacity. It just grew legs,” she says.
“Fifty per cent of our turnover last year was export markets. And that was split between the UK and the US.”
The company also works with Bidfood, which supplies hospitality venues in the UK, and in January it secured a partnership with a leading distributor in the UAE.
“We sent out our first shipment to the UAE with Safco International. They’re a big distribution company in Dubai,” she says.
The product labels had to be translated into Arabic and approved by the UAE authorities before shipment.
Drinks Botanicals Ireland employs five full-time and two part-time staff, and is hiring for an operations manager role.
McCarthy is not resting on her laurels and would like to find a wholesaler in the US to expand the company’s market reach.
“I’d like to replicate what we’ve done here in Ireland in the States,” she says. “But you have to be very smart on margins. At the end of the day, you don’t want to be a busy fool.”