In just three years, Michael and Amanda MacGabhann have gone from making chocolates for their friends to exporting them worldwide.
The Skelligs Chocolate company is based in Ballinskelligs, Co. Kerry, employs a workforce of ten and produces very distinctive pots of chocolate and fudge sweets.
‘The inspiration for the boxes came from tins that our grannies had,’ explains Michael MacGabhann. ‘They were always brightly coloured and had exciting things in them. Also, grannies never threw anything away and people don’t throw our boxes away either. ‘Our boxes hold pens on desks in London, Paris and New York,’ he says smiling.
Each box is hand-painted by Amanda and others, in fun, eye-catching designs, like the black and white Friesian cow or the pint of stout, and each pot has a lid which is sealed on one side with sealing wax. We now have 60 different flavours of chocolates and fudges,’ says MacGabhann, ‘including champagne and orange (Bucks Fizz), brandy and champagne (Champagne cocktail) and a Beamish and champagne truffle, which is called, ‘Black Velvet.
Our ‘Hot Toddy’ chocolate, which is a milk chocolate truffle with whiskey, spices and chilli, recently won a bronze medal at the Fortnum and Mason’s Great Taste Awards.’ This is not the only accolade won by the chocolates. At the last Fancy Food Fair in New York, they appeared in the top ten products out of 3,000 exhibitors.
In the early days, Skelligs Chocolate Company got help from Údaras na Gaeltachta in the form of grants which enabled them to get their premises up to the required standard. It was great,’ says MacGabhann. ‘Also, the postal system in Ireland is very good. We can send our parcels by SDS to anywhere.’
‘We came here on honeymoon from England and later decided to come back and set up the business. Amanda learned to make chocolates in Italy, years ago, before we were married,’ explains MacGabhann. ‘I had been working in marketing in London and we just didn’t like the way life was going there. Here, we have a lovely life. The children are safe, there’s no stress and we can run a business from one of the most beautiful spots in the world.’
‘We do a lot of corporate work and we find that people come back to us again and again. We supply large conferences or functions, not just in Ireland but in the U.S., on the continent and in Japan. We supplied over three thousand boxes of chocolate for the Eurovision in 1995 and they were all hand-painted with the Eurovision logo. We also provided chocolates for the recent Pavarotti concert at Stormont. Bewleys have used our chocolates in their hampers even though they make their own chocolates. But we will fill any size order. If someone rings up and wants a box for a particular occasion, we do it. We are very conscious of the fact that we started small and we don’t ever want to forget it.’
In Ireland, the chocolates can be found for sale in Brown Thomas, Moons, Todds, The Big Cheese Co., Andrew’s Lane, Dublin, Douglas Food Co., Donnybrook, Dublin and The Good Food Store, Pembroke Lane, Dublin. The company has never advertised over the past three years and does not intend to in the future.
There’s no need,’ says MacGabhann, adamantly. ‘People come to us. Either they hear about us, or they see one of our boxes somewhere, or they find us on our website which we set up a couple of months ago. We have had people from all over the world wander in here, and spend hours watching the chocolates being made and then sample them. We had an email from somebody last week telling us that he had eaten our chocolates on the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro.’
‘At the moment, we are all working flat out getting ready for Christmas and this year we have a snowman box, a Christmas pudding box, Millennium Midnight Mints and a wooden, hand-painted advent calendar.’
In its first year of trading, the company’s turnover quadrupled and last year it tripled. And we enjoy it,’ says MacGabhann, ‘ and so do the people working here. It’s important to try not to take it so seriously that all the enjoyment goes out of it.’
by Katharine Blake, Freelance Journalist and Editor
