A new Irish ice-cream company has launched in the United States before its home market as it seeks to tap into Americans’ long-standing love of Irish dairy.
“Whenever I was in the US travelling, I would always find myself going to grocery stores and being in awe that a product like Kerrygold was performing so well in the States,” Eoin Kennedy, dairy farmer and co-founder of Limerick-based Emerald Ice Cream said.
Kennedy spent 17 years working for Sysco, the world’s biggest food service company, until he decided to return to his family’s dairy farm in Co Limerick. He maintained contact with some of his old colleagues in the food service industry and worked as a consultant and commercial director for another food service company alongside what he refers to as his “day job” of being a dairy farmer. It was during this time that he was travelling a lot across the US and got the idea for Emerald Ice Cream.
“I started thinking about ice-cream and the potential for an ice-cream brand that utilises Ireland’s rich dairy heritage, which would resonate with consumers around the world,” Kennedy said.
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He had worked with co-founder Janet Miley during his time at Sysco.
“Janet was making some ice-cream at home on her dairy farm. She was thinking about making her own brand. I said, ‘I think we can do something bigger than this’. I knew that Janet had experience with creating the product and I started having conversations with some retailers that I knew. I decided then to exit the other business. We had been messing around with the ice-cream idea for about a year and a half before we launched,” Kennedy said.
Early on, the pair knew that they wanted to call the brand Emerald and play into Ireland’s global reputation for great dairy products. The ice-cream features a harp on its packaging and emphasises its grass-fed dairy cows, a selling point that has served Kerrygold well through the decades.
When it came to the company’s branding, Kennedy admitted that the pair “initially went on to ChatGPT and started playing around with different designs”.
“But we then contacted some friends of ours who were in marketing and they gave us some assistance. We knew that we wanted a kind of Celtic touch to it and that we wanted to be a heritage brand, but we wanted to have a bit of fun along the way”.
Kennedy said Emerald’s customers want “a clean, natural, healthy indulgent treat that’s made with real ingredients”.
“Janet and I were adamant that we wanted to use fresh milk, fresh cream and free-range eggs,” he added.
Kennedy had some contacts who had recently bought an ice-cream factory in the south of Ireland and they agreed to manufacture Emerald Ice Cream. The venture also secured an investment from the Geary brothers, who built the food service business Pallas Foods, which was acquired by Sysco for more than €150 million in 2009.
“We produced some kitchen samples and I contacted some of the buyers that I knew in the US, and the Sprouts [Farmers Market] buyer asked us for a box of samples,” Kennedy said.
Sprouts, a 450-strong US chain specialising in natural and organic produce, loved the ice-cream and asked to stock all seven flavours in all of its stores. This was before Emerald had a single buyer in its home market.
Having launched in March, Kennedy estimates that Emerald Ice Cream is now stocked by 700 US stores.
“We’ll probably be in 1,000 by Christmas.”
Emerald Ice Cream is shipped in containers from Cork to Houston in the US. “The logistics and supply chain so far have worked pretty well for us. When you launch with a big retailer like Sprouts, you find the other smaller natural chains like Bristol Farms in Los Angeles, Mother’s in California and Haggen up in the Seattle area easier. They’ve seen the product, they’ve got the samples and they will take it because they know it’s working in the market,” Kennedy exaplined.
While the brand has seen exceptionally fast growth, the uncertainty around the Trump administration’s tariff policies made the first few months of business, “a bit of a rollercoaster with the reciprocal ups and downs”.
“But I think where it’s at now, it’s fine. We would have had to pay a tariff going in anyway. So it hasn’t really affected our long-term plan, thankfully,” Kennedy said.
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With Emerald Ice Cream successfully stocked in the US, Miley and Kennedy have turned their focus to their home market, the UK, Germany, the Middle East and Canada.
“When we looked at the ice-cream offerings in larger stores, even in Ireland, we felt that there was a big opportunity for an Irish brand to do well because it’s principally taken over by Häagen-Dazs and Ben and Jerry’s.”
Emerald Ice Cream launched in the Republic in June, with two small distributors who cover Leinster and Munster. It is now available in some 120 Irish outlets, including all Tesco Ireland shops. It had a soft launch in Germany in August in a handful of Rewe supermarkets in Osnabrück in the northwest of the country.
