Brian O'Casey, founder, pictured at the opening of OffBeat Donuts in Cork city. One of the country's leading bakeries has opened its first outlet outside of Dublin. Picture: Michael O'Sullivan

It’s often said that when one door closes, another opens, and for Corkman Brian O’Casey, this much has proven to be true.

A former product-developer for the likes of Cuisine de France and Pierre’s, including the Celtic Tiger-era arrival and popularisation of chicken fillet rolls and spicy wedges, with all their culinary consequences, he spent 25 years in total working in the bakery business, from primary process to consumer-facing branding. But as homegrown businesses gave way to multinationals, and downward pressure came from supermarkets like Lidl entering the bakery space, O’Casey saw his craft changing in fundamental ways.

“When Lidl came into the bakery market, they would have brought the prices down considerably, and obviously, the major chains needed to follow suit. In order to do that, they were no longer prepared to pay a premium for a brand, for training, and for all of the other elements Cuisine de France would have brought to the mix.

“My background is product development, marketing and training and all of those supports. I was offered positions in other countries, I didn't want to leave, so I took a decision to take redundancy, and then I had to figure out, what would I do for myself? I didn't want to go back into the corporate world, into another business. I had been involved in growing that one, enjoyed it, was very heavily invested. The idea of doing that in another business in Ireland was hard for me.

“The other thing is my family background. They'd owned their own business, most of their lives, and I always had a hankering to open my own business, and my wife said it's my midlife crisis, that's really what it was, but she said, go and do what you wanted to do. And what I wanted to do was set up my own business.” 

That business has become Offbeat Donuts, an Irish-owned chain of shops specialising in sweet treats like doughnuts - baked in-house and served up fresh - as well as coffee, ice cream and other comfort-food staples.

Doing deals like coffee and a doughnut for a fiver, and selling boxes of doughnuts for sellthrough and delivery, the chain’s eight Dublin outlets have been joined by a hometown excursion for O’Casey, opening doors last week on a branch on French Church Street in Cork City.

While the doughnut craze of the last few years has largely abated, O’Casey’s skillset and experience in the bakery business has seen Offbeat establish itself in the long-run, and look into expansionary methods like franchising.

“Looking around, I knew more about bakery than, probably 90-odd percent of people. So it was a bakery or a restaurant, my parents had been in the restaurant business, and I knew more about the bakery business than the restaurant business, to be honest. I thought I could put a brand and a concept and an offer in there that would stand out, whereas it's very hard to stand out in the restaurant business, of course, huge competition and very good operators.

“I looked at bakery, and within bakery, there's a lot of good bread producers, you've got a lot of good artisan bread producers, and you could see those starting to come up in terms of local bakery operators. It's nice that that bakery is coming back to the localities in Ireland, but we don't really have that big tradition generally as much as you would on the continent. When I'm looking around the continent, they have patisseries, and there are a lot of sweet confectionery offerings, but we had nobody doing a really good sweet confectionery offering.

“At the time, I could see that there was a trend for premium doughnuts, and at the end of the day, doughnuts are excellent carriers, insofar as it's quite a light, airy product. It's fried as opposed to baked, but it's still very, very light. I was excited with that, because I could do it commercially. I just had to figure that part out.

“We researched consumers in Ireland, asked what their favourite treat was. You had your apple crumble, lemon meringues, chocolate cakes, a lot of stalwarts that were favorites, but then I went into sweets, and we got feedback on things like cookies, caramel. I just had to develop recipes for the doughnuts that I thought people would enjoy.

“The trick is, and I keep saying to the guys, look, we can make anything, but it doesn't mean the customer has to buy it. So we have to pick recipes that the customer will like and enjoy.” 

In doing so, O’Casey and crew have laid foundations for the expansion of Offbeat from Dublin’s city centre in 2016, and into the city’s suburbs in subsequent years. However you plan for consumer sentiment and responses from competitors, however, there’s no planning for events - and the current chain of events affecting businesses began with the low rumblings of Brexit.

“In terms of the impacts of the various challenges to us as a business, it's hard. It's hard financially, and it's hard psychologically, for any business over the last number of years, or any business owner. I think it's important to remember that behind every business is normally people (laughs). There are stakeholders, from the owners and managers to the employees, but it affects everybody. In terms of Brexit, to be honest, there was an awful lot of complications, and we switched ingredient suppliers as much as we could to European supply.

“You can work around a known. So if you know that it's a week, or if you know that it's two weeks, for the fulfilment of ingredients or packaging, you can work around it. You know that you need to plan a bit further in advance, and that's fine. If you expect it in a week and it gets delayed because some piece of paper hasn't been done, or something else is not right... the unknowns kill you, because you have to figure out in the meantime, how to sort it out.”

From there, the onset of the Covid-19 crisis threw the entire world for a loop in a way that no event has done in decades - and the same was true of the food services and retail sector, which scrambled from temporary closures to try and find solutions to reaching people via direct delivery, click-and-collect, and other measures as and when the circumstances allowed.

"I have to say in fairness to the government, they put in support for small businesses and big businesses, but small business in particular, and helped businesses reopen, helped businesses with information, as much as became available and was becoming available. At least we knew how we were to reopen, with screens, and with sanitising and masks and stuff like that, so we got up to speed with all of that. We had to re-engineer the stores and train the staff and do all of those things.

"Initially, we reopened one store. We did production from that store out to our other stores, and then we did deliveries. And as soon as we started doing deliveries, they were very, very popular, and I think it's fair to say that took us by surprise. We had to then gear up, and learn how to do the delivery business better than we were at the time. We had to learn very quickly how to put in structures and websites and everything, platforms that will cater for that.

“So we had a big learning curve to go through, but at least we had money coming in the door. But it was one store. And then we went to two stores, and then three or four, and then depending on circumstances, we opened up.” 

On the other side of the Covid crisis has been the continued success of the chain in the retail and delivery spaces, as well as the opening of the Cork branch, a €500k investment including the refitting of the former Amity shop premises facing both ways onto Carey’s Lane and French Church Streets, the installation of ovens, fryers and other gear, as well as the creation of an upstairs seating area - as well as ten jobs in preparation and service.

“Cork has been on the horizon for a few years now, and then we were looking at premises, for a year and a half. We needed premises that we could put the production into, so we needed a certain size. We were looking for a location that I think we want to be quite trendy, and cool. It's not just about a production unit in the back of beyond, we want people to see the production, to be able to touch and feel it. We can't have it in the basement, we wanted it all on one level. It restricted the number of premises that we could get in the city centre.

“We wanted a very high-profile, high-traffic location that people could get to and from fairly easily. So we looked at lots of premises around the city, and eventually we came upon this, we love the building. It was previously a mill, there's a mill wheel in the wall in one of the rooms here, still. We love the area in terms of the Huguenot Quarter, with a nice feel about the area. It was a restaurant street, so the Council were quite open to developing more food premises on this area as well, which made planning easier. We like to work with the environment that we're in, we like to work with the architecture, and it's important to us, so we found this building, and we loved it. It was about just going through quite a long process in terms of the planning, and getting everything ready.

“We've been looking forward to opening, it's been a year since we signed the lease to opening the doors. I'm very much looking forward to getting going.” 

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