Part of our series with Euro-Toques Ireland
TheTaste.ie is a proud community partner of Euro-Toques Ireland, and we are delighted to relaunch our Producer Series for 2025, where we shine a spotlight on the passionate people behind Ireland’s exceptional small-scale food producers.
We chat with Catherine Kinsella, Founder of Saltrock Dairy, which is a family-run farm in County Wexford that produces fresh, non-homogenised milk and handmade farmhouse butter, as well as yoghurt and kefir. Catherine tells TheTaste about how her background and how Saltrock Dairy was started, discussing the various challenges the business has faced along the way, as well as the support available to Irish food producers, such as the community benefits of Euro-Toques Ireland.
Read on to hear more about Saltrock Dairy and the local producers around Ireland that Catherine admires…
Can you tell us about your own background in the food industry?
I have always loved food, so growing up on a farm and then marrying a farmer, it has always been an integral part of my life. The passion came from my mother, who was a fantastic cook and, more specifically, baker. To this day, I have never quite managed to master her bread and her brack – none of the five of us have.
When my youngest child was born, I took some time away from my nursing career, and I started baking bread for the local farmers market – a decision that was driven mainly by a desire to be at home with the kids, but was also feeding the producer inside me, I guess. Before I knew it, I was churning out over 300 loaves of bread on a Friday evening ahead of the Saturday Market.
Eventually, as the kids were starting to grow up and college fees were on the horizon, I decided to return to nursing. It took another decade and a pandemic before I started to let the food producer inside me emerge once again, and in a week of frustration where I was housebound due to COVID I made a decision, a plan and paid a deposit on machinery for what was the beginning of Saltrock Dairy!
All of this was rapidly followed by panic and regret, but I was too far in then to run away from it! Six months later, dairy renovations were complete, and I handed in my notice – Saltrock Dairy was born!
What inspired you to set up your business? Did you notice a gap in the market?
I grew up on a Dairy Farm, so raw milk and homemade cultured butter were always on the table. When Paul and I got married, he was farming beef and continued to do so until they opened up the milk quota for applications in 2013, when we switched to dairy. Naturally, we started drinking milk directly from the tank again, and I couldn’t believe the difference in that and what I had been drinking for the last 15 odd years from the supermarket shelf.
I was a bit disgusted that all over the country we were producing this amazing product, but what we were consuming was nowhere near it in terms of quality!
My son lives in the UK and works within the agricultural community where the concept of direct-to-consumer dairy farming has taken off, and a number of farms have adopted the vending machine system for their milk.
He had sent me some social media posts and some information on it, and then it only took one frustrating week at home and out of work to push me the next step and to pull the trigger!
How did you set up the business, and how has it grown over time?
Well, a big fat loan from AIB for starters! It was a huge learning curve dealing with the Department of Agriculture, HACCP, the Department of Food and all the other regulations involved. Having worked in healthcare, I was very familiar with public bodies and how they operate (eg. HIQA), but this was a whole new animal.
Starting with the milk and getting that set up and sorted, and then I started to play around a bit with making butter and trying to get that cultured, salty farmhouse flavour that I so remember my mother making.
The same happened with yoghurt, and what had started as me tinkering about in the kitchen in the house soon grew into a whole new product range! Then from the butter and yoghurt I was left with by-products like skim milk and buttermilk, and so Kefir and Buttermilk became products too!
Where do you source the ingredients used to make your products?
We are so blessed in this country with the quality of food we can produce from our land, our animals and beyond. Obviously, from our end, all of the milk and cream are coming from the farm and then for the butter, I use a salt that is made just down the road from us in Wexford.
The lads at Wexford Sea Salt harvest seawater in the summer, and they put it into shallow trays – they don’t use any energy but instead let the sun and the wind do their thing. As a result, we get to use their gorgeous mineral-rich sea salt in our butter, and it makes such a difference!
Can you tell us about some of the benefits associated with your products?
I think the biggest and overarching benefit to our products is their simplicity. Our whole business is built on as minimal processing as we can get away with. We have to pasteurise our milk at the moment according to our local inspector, but if we could, we would be using raw.
The butter, buttermilk, yoghurt and kefir are all cultured, so they are oozing with good gut bacteria as well as flavour!
How important has social media been for you in spreading the word?
Honestly huge. It’s free (for the most part), and a large part of it for us is about getting the word out there. Social media was the catapult we needed at the very beginning when we were just doing the milk but we have put a really big push (and luckily no investment just yet) recently into our social media once again thanks to the return of one of my daughters from abroad, which has had a massive impact on our recent and ongoing growth.
It takes some getting used to, and it’s time-consuming, but it’s essentially free and is hugely responsible for our success to date. That and the fact that the products taste pretty good! If I do say so myself, ha!
How has being a part of the Euro-Toques community helped you, and what is the best part about the community?
We have only recently joined the community of Euro-Toques. The recommendation to get involved came from Chef Anthony O’Toole, who, even outside Euro-Toques, has been a huge contributor to our growth to date. We’re looking forward to attending the AGM and meeting other members. Our neighbours Karen and Natalie of Bean & Goose Chocolate have also been involved with Euro-Toques and have recommended it as having been a huge asset to them, so we’re really looking forward to being involved!
What makes your product unique?
In a way, the uniqueness of our products is a bit of a tragedy in that I truly believe they shouldn’t be unique! They have been lost in ‘progress’ and how food has evolved over the years, and so we are trying to bring that flavour back as a familiar element of the Irish Food Scene!
Tell us about the chefs/restaurants using your products to create dishes?
We are new to almost every element of the commercial food world, but definitely to the culinary arts! Chef Kevin O’Donnell is about to open a new restaurant on Dawson street in Dublin called Comet, who’s menu will feature Saltrock Dairy and similarly David Harper of Say Fish, with the help of Paul Kavanagh of newly-openeed Dope Tapas in Dun Laoghaire who’s menu will also feature our products – it’s all super exciting!!!!
Are there any other small Irish food producers you admire?
There’s an endless list of small producers whom I wholeheartedly admire, but I guess if I had to narrow it down it would be Pat & Mary O’Neill of O’Neills Bacon for how they have retained quality despite their growth, Sally Barnes of Woodcock smokery for fiercely protecting the sustainability and authenticity of her products.
Karen and Natalie of Bean and Goose for their strong ethics and for producing a product that keeps me company on the couch most evenings, and finally, I guess Anna and Orla of Valentia Island Vermouth for taking a very non-Irish product and for turning it into something almost patriotic in its essence!!
However, this list is far from exhaustive; Wexford Sea Salt, Coolatin Cheddar, Killowen Yoghurt, Rivesci, Isle of Crackers, Nuutprious Nutrition, Elderberry Farm, and SO many more.
What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced since going into business?
Running a business is bloody difficult! Trying to stay afloat and make money. I think there’s still a lot of work to be done in supporting small businesses in Ireland.
Pulling a wage from a small business that you’re trying to grow is almost impossible, and as important as they are, the regulations we face can make things difficult as a small producer because meeting regulations is a costly business.
I haven’t had to hire just yet as one of the kids has returned home and has been able to lend a hand but I am just about to start building on a workforce and I am a little bit terrified of becoming an employer so I anticipate that will be a bit of a challenge in itself!
What do you feel is your biggest achievement to date with this business?
Existing! Haha!
Could you ever have imagined doing anything else with your life?
I don’t think I could have imagined this and the direction it’s moving in, actually. As difficult as it is, it’s also dream stuff, and I can’t believe this is my day-to-day!
What does the future hold for your business?
New products, new collaborations and new customers! I would love for the taste of tradition to be familiar to households all over the country!
About Euro-Toques Ireland
Euro-Toques Ireland is a nurturing community of chefs, producers, educators and food writers that celebrates and preserves the culinary heritage and food culture of Ireland today and tomorrow.
The key ingredients of our community are our deeply engrained values that emphasise a high set of principles within the kitchen, from sourcing to serving. This means striving for excellent culinary standards and always working with quality local produce, in season where possible.
Euro-Toques Ireland is part of a wider European network of like-minded Chefs. Founded in Brussels in 1986, Myrtle Allen is one of the European founding members who then went on to establish Euro-Toques Ireland.
