Tayto Park supremo straps in for uncertain times
Tayto Park founder Ray Coyle is not afraid of taking a risk, he tells Ailish O’Hora of the challenges he’s faced and sucesses he has enjoyed
TAYTO Park, the country’s biggest zoo and theme park near Ashbourne, Co Meath, celebrates its 10th birthday this year. However, when it opened in October 2010, its founder and majority owner Raymond Coyle wasn’t sure it would make it to its first birthday. It nearly didn’t. In hindsight, Coyle said there were two ‘NoNos’ around its opening. With the majority of the rides being outdoors, the business is seasonal and dependent on the weather — so a winter launch might not have been one of his best ideas.
In addition, it opened in turbulent times. A month after Tayto Park’s 2010 opening, Ireland entered a bailout programme and the ECB, IMF and European Commission troika came to town. It was a winter of major discontent.
“You don’t open an amenity park in October, in the depths of winter and when I think about it, it was in the middle of a recession too. People didn’t start to come until 2011 and it was a worrying time. But things did pick up in 2011,” he told the Sunday Independent.
Coyle, it seems, is not risk averse — as is the case with many entrepreneurs. Nor is he afraid to admit to past business mistakes and is sanguine when he recalls some of his misadventures.
A decision to enter the crisp market in war-torn Libya was a lesson learned, he said. The 80,000 sq ft factory in Tripoli was built in 2008 and Coyle pumped about €2m into it.
For nearly three years, it churned out Tayto products and, according to Coyle, it became profitable in its last few months before violence erupted in February 2011.
The rest is history, as they say.
“I met this fella who was supposed to be well connected. It never worked out — I lost money,” he said.
He recalls another decision to launch a precooked spud range called Potato Cuisine 20 years ago, which didn’t work out either. However, today supermarket shelves are stocked with different sorts of pre-cooked potato products — it’s big business.
“Remember this was years ago, we were just ahead of our time, it would definitely have worked out later on. But mistakes are part of business, it’s what you learn from them that counts.”
If there’s one theme in the Coyle story, it’s potatoes, in one form or another.
He was born into a medium-sized tillage farming family. The family also owned a small pub, O’Donoghue’s in Kilbrew, near Ashbourne.
“My people were farmers. It’s what I came from. They grew crops and grains. But before I turned my hand to the potato business, I spent a couple of years working in the US before I came back. In 1975, potatoes were a very cheap product to produce and the timing was lucky for me. We grew to over 1,000 acres at one stage. But then the third year was dreadful and I owed the bank £1.2m punts. I managed to get some of the money together, but not nearly enough. I was sitting in a café in Enniscorthy on the way back from making a delivery and I saw a poster where a guy was raffling a boat,” he said.
That was his eureka moment. He decided to raffle off a farm. He sought the necessary legal and financial advice and decided to sell 4,000 tickets at £300 a pop.
“We paid off the bank and I had enough money left over to plough into another business. The man got the farm, the banks got their money. I was already growing the spuds for Tayto and they had about 80pc of the crisp business and I figured if I could even get a small percentage of that business I could make a good living,” he said.
So instead of growing spuds, he started making crisps.
“We started off small in the early 1980s. There were seven people working in the business in a 6,000 sq ft factory. The first brand was called Cottage but it wasn’t up to it. It was unknown and going nowhere and it wasn’t until I bought the Perri brand that things took off. I was on the road all the time, selling crisps to shops around the country. It was a difficult time though. Because of the previous debt, it was five years before we could access bank loans again. We bought the Sam Spudz business in Donegal and we came up with Hunky Dory brand and ran very good marketing campaigns,” he said.
If the campaigns were successful, they were also controversial as they featured scantily clad women playing sport and subsequently fell foul of the advertising standards authority following complaints.
Coyle has no regrets about the campaigns, though. “It wasn’t like Tayto, it wasn’t a family brand. Nothing happened at first then some of them went viral. The campaign lifted our figures very successfully. I have no regrets, none whatsoever, I’d do it again if I could,” he said.
Coyle remained busy with the brands he had bought up, but his eye was still on the prize — the Tayto brand — which he wanted to add to his Largo Foods business.
He couldn’t afford to buy Tayto when it first came onto the market but he acquired it when drinks firm C&C offloaded it in 2006 for over €60m. He had also been involved with a Czech snack company which he sold before buying Tayto.
German snack firm Intersnack acquired a 15pc stake in Largo for €15m back in 2007 but Coyle only sold off his remaining 25pc stake in the company back in 2017.
“I had put so much money into it then, it had racked up a lot of debt and then the crash came. I sold it off in bits and pieces,” he said.
That same year he terminated his relationship with both Largo Foods and subsidiary Tayto Crisps when he resigned as chairman and director at Largo, which has since been rebranded as Tayto Snack under the ownership of Intersnack.
The brand is still important to Coyle and his family though, as he still owns the naming rights.
And he literally faces a constant reminder of it every day — Tayto Park is located across the road from the Tayto factory.
Coyle had been eyeing up the amenity park business for a good while before Tayto Park opened.
“I had a plot across the road from the factory and had acquired other land down through the years. I was watching peoples’ habits. They were going away to parks, Orlando, etc and there was nothing in Ireland. We still don’t really have any competition here, there’s Center Parcs, which is a slightly different offering,” he said.
Tayto Park is located on 141 acres, including running and walking paths.
“We came up with the design ourselves, with the help of some consultants. Because of Covid, we’re on 30pc capacity but we are lucky most of the rides are outdoor. Last year 750,000 people visited the park and the business generally grows at a rate of 7pc to 8pc per year. We employ over 400 people both full- and part-time and are planning our next phase of expansion. But the most important part of it is the visitor experience, you could probably spend a full day here and still not have the time to enjoy everything,” he said.
Pre-Covid, the park had an annual turnover of €22m on ebitda of €3m. It is managed by Coyle’s son Charles who joined the business about eight years ago — his daughter Natalya will represent Ireland in the Tokyo Olympics as a pentathlete. The park is majority owned by the founder and his family but key staff own shares too.
The park boasts the biggest wooden roller coaster in Europe — the Cú Chulainn — as well as a major water ride, dubbed the Viking Voyage and many other attractions, including a zoo.
While plans for a new €15.5m roller coaster hit a setback recently after local residents lodged an appeal to An Bord Pleanála against a decision by Meath Co Council to give the project the go-ahead, Coyle is hopeful the issue can be resolved as he is keen to get on with the next phase of investment at the park.
And while he is positive about the future of the park, he is concerned about the world and Irish economies against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic and Brexit.
“Brexit isn’t a huge concern for us because we don’t export but it is the big unknown and is a worry for many Irish businesses, big and small. And the Government intervention for business was a welcome one. We availed of the Covid grants when we could and we deferred our rates when we could. I think all business owners will agree it is a very worrying time for the Irish and global economy. We are living in very uncertain times,” he said.