On the edge of Dublin is one of Ireland’s biggest kitchens, home to award-winning recipes that consistently deliver the taste you crave when you’re hungry and short on time. It is here in his development kitchen, Donnybrook Fair’s executive head chef John Dunne oversees a skilled and passionate team which produces 250 different types of food products, all hand-prepared and chef-created every day from scratch.
“Taste is what we’re about,” he says, “and that starts with quality ingredients.” He personally certifies all ingredients for use, from local vegetables to Irish butter, milk, cream and cheese as well as Irish beef and lamb. “We don’t use any added artificial preservatives or additives. Our premium chocolate is sourced from some of the world’s best producers in Belgium and Italy,” adds Dunne. Ingeniously, this chocolate is worked at the optimum temperature in a specifically built chocolate room where a fountain-like device tempers the chocolate to give the desserts and biscuit squares a glossy sheen.
One of Donnybrook Fair’s hero products is its home-cooked meals which are ready to heat and serve to single, double and family-sized households. “We make meals as you would at home,” he says, “with the same emphasis on quality ingredients and taste expectation.”
“Each and every recipe is first developed in individual batches to ensure the flavour and texture meets our demands and is then passed to our team of chefs to create. The scale may change but the methods never stray from a small-batch ethos. What makes our home-cooked meals special is undoubtedly our commitment to traditional cooking techniques, particularly open-pot cooking which makes a fundamental difference on the final product. The slow, attentive cooking process enhances the ingredients, allowing them to release their full flavours to give a lovely rich taste that is both comforting and satisfying.”
Their award-winning gourmet dishes including beef Bourguignon and comfort dishes topped with piped mashed potato, like shepherd’s pie and cottage pie, have become classics and are served up at homes all over the country as a fail-safe, fast midweek meal. Other firm favourites include healthy, protein-rich plates such as dressed salmon, chicken and broccoli crumble and the lasagne range, which includes low-fat beef and vegetarian options. Lasagne is the company’s top-selling product, Dunne says. “We are a nation of lasagne lovers.” The kitchen cooks approximately 5,000 lasagnes a week – its single most popular home-cooked-meal.
September saw the launch of a new Chinese range – sweet and sour chicken, Kung Pao chicken, and beef and black bean – all packed with rich fragrant umami flavours. “We’ve been perfecting these recipes for months,” explains Dunne, “and we strongly feel this range will replace your usual takeaway, offering you superior taste using healthy ingredients at an affordable price.”
Donnybrook Fair’s gourmet meals are industry-recognised taste winners and have notched up 33 awards to date. In the recent Great Taste Awards they won two stars for their chilli con carne and one star each for their chicken korma, Moroccan lamb tagine and beef lasagne.
According to general manager Joe Doyle, the secret to their success comes down to the culture of teamwork, their non-negotiable stance on quality ingredients, the attention to detail and an overall commitment to continuous improvement. “Ninety per cent of my role is to create a good mixture amongst the team,” explains Doyle, “whether it’s the efficiency within the kitchen, cross-training accuracy of the chefs, managing costs, leveraging technology software, reducing food waste and setting the tone for collaborative working. My focus fundamentally is to maintain consistency of quality while cultivating a growth mindset to develop further.”
To help with this, chef John regularly holds tastings in his innovation and development kitchen. “Our chefs carry out daily tastings across all our food range to ensure standards are always at their highest. We are aware that we are only as good as our last meal, and that meal needs to be good enough for your table – this ethos drives us to keep quality high and consistent. We need to be our own biggest critics. Here everyone has an opinion and we benchmark against competitors and internationally acknowledged tasting standards. We encourage our chefs to take pride in their work, and it’s my job to ensure this pride translates into exceptional quality in every meal, throughout the kitchen.”
The full menu of 250 products is all cooked, packed and delivered to Donnybrook Fair stores in the same 24-hour period. The kitchen also supplies its sister stores, SuperValu and Centra, part of the Musgrave Group, with national next-day deliveries. There are 110 people working in the 20,000 sq ft space and the working day starts at 4am when the salad team clock on. The kitchen runs 20 hours out of 24 with the cleaning team finishing the final four hours.
“Communication is everything here,” says operations manager Seamus Ó Súilleabháin. Continuous improvement is always on the menu with efficiencies in meals, bakery, deli and salads all forensically analysed to make sure each team delivers but isn’t overloaded with work either. “It’s about hitting that sweet spot, every day,” he says.
The kitchen is home to 14 different nationalities and once a month everyone sits down to a family meal inspired by a different culture and created by the in-house chefs. “It’s a simple way of team building, built around what we all really care about, food,” Ó Súilleabháin says.
“It’s phenomenally popular,” adds Doyle. “And incredibly insightful. Everyone is encouraged to not only share family recipes but traditional methods of cooking so in essence we’re sharing cuisine and culture from regions as diverse as Eastern European and North African. At the end of the day, we’re all about creating food moments and memories, wholeheartedly delivered with care.”
For more information on tasty home-style meals, visit donnybrookfair.ie