Life after the Pratts: Avoca’s new boss Tara O’Neill

Working with Jamie Oliver and a former SAS fighter set Tara O’Neill up to command the upmarket name, writes Samantha McCaughren

Under new owners Aramark, Avoca will grow slowly to protect its ethos, says managing director Tara O’Neill, a former CFO for the Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group. See interview,

ONE of the first things Tara O’Neill did when she took over the running of retail and food business Avoca a year ago was pare back on the number of wholesalers which could distribute the brand’s own products. Most particularly this applied to Avoca’s signature throws and rugs, still made in a Wicklow Mill which dates back to 1723.

When food service group Aramark bought out Avoca from the Pratt family in 2015, speculation was rife that the giant would bring Avoca to canteens in Ireland and even further afield, that Avoca products would become widely available. O’Neill’s plan for the company is quite different. “My vision is to find a way to grow it, but grow it carefully and slowly,” she says. “Share it with more people for sure, but not to mass roll it out — to keep the existing sites incredibly special, to keep them destinational.”

As O’Neill, the former CFO of the Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group, walks through the expansive Avoca outlet in Dunboyne, Co Meath, she enthuses about the rugs and throws, explaining the history of some of its best known patterns. They can still be bought in shops other than Avoca, but O’Neill wants to ensure they are in sold in the right types of shop. Protecting the brand and what it stands for is central to her strategy.

“We have to remain true to where we started and that we have the luxury of having a brand that has a history. And so many people sit in a room and try to think up a brand, ‘How are we going to create a brand?’. And we don’t need to do that.”

On her walkabout, O’Neill passionately describes how the baked food is made just as it would be in a home kitchen. “There is no production line,” she says, explaining how the pastry stars on the 120,000 mince pies it will produce this Christmas will each be cut out by hand.

This is, of course, highly labour intensive and reflected in the prices, but for Avoca’s customer base, the extra efforts behind the scenes are worth the extra money.

“Our space is in creating amazing service, providing great quality products and allowing people to dwell and spend time in a beautiful environment together,” says O’Neill.

Despite the storms, which hit retail and hospitality hard this year, business is growing, with sales up year on year and the new Dunboyne store performing well.

However, Avoca isn’t in a rush to open lots of new shops. A new food-focused Avoca will open in Ballsbridge, Dublin, next spring and the company will look at “amazing sites” that become available around Ireland, but there are no additional stores planned.

The UK has also been seen as the natural next step for Avoca, but Brexit and high street woes mean that the company will take its time.

“I think it’s always something that we would have been incredibly cautious about anyway, taking the brand outside, because of the attention to detail, the complexity within (the company) of doing everything, making all of this stuff ourselves in a central kitchen, relying so heavily on people,” she says.

“So you need to, when you’re then taking it to another country, think of how does all of this translate, how do we do this really well and right. And so that needs to be very carefully thought out. Of course Brexit will factor into some of those considerations. But, for me, there’s a hell of a lot more than that we would need to get right.”

O’Neill, who first crossed paths with Aramark when the group entered into a partnership with Jamie Oliver, says she believes that in a way, all her experience and background were preparing for this role in Avoca.

Like Avoca, O’Neill hales from Co Wicklow — she grew up in Rathnew, where she says she had “a blissfully happy childhood”. Growing up, her father was a gardener in Hunter’s Hotel and her mother did the accounting in a local hardware shop.

She attended the local national school and then the Dominican College in Wicklow town.

To the dismay of her parents, she chose to study law and accounting in Limerick, rather than attend Trinity College, meaning that she had to attend university aged just 17. Despite her tender years she put in the hard graft. “I had to study very hard, I was a bit of a swot,” she says.

Upon graduating, she attracted the interest of several law and accounting firms. “I ended up getting McCann Fitzgerald, which at the time was the top law firm, and Arthur Anderson, which at the time was the top accounting firm,” she says. It was a difficult decision but she chose accounting.

Early on she knew she would rather be in industry than practice. “Clients were coming in, really exciting businesses wanting advice and we were giving them advice on small snippets of what they were doing. But I was thinking, I’d absolutely love to see where that went.”

When O’Neill’s then boyfriend decided to move to England, she took the opportunity to move also. It was time of the Enron scandal — in Ireland Anderson was merging with KPMG and O’Neill took an internal transfer. “But actually I really saw this as my opportunity to get into industry. So my first client was a big healthcare PLC called Huntley Technology PLC and I went on board with them to do in-house tax.”

She originally went in to cover maternity leave but, some time later, when the group financial controller role became available she got the job.“I would never have got it off the basis of my CV at that point, it really was the right place at the right time,” she says.

Her next job was “a fascinating role” in a company called Global Strategies Group.

“It was defence security so a guy, an ex-SAS guy, in the right place at the right time in the Middle East when all the conflicts kicked up, chartered some planes and gradually built a man-on-theground business manning the embassies in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, Nigeria. It was a fascinating world.”

The business was cash rich and it acquired a US defence technology company, headed by Irish-American John Brennan, who went to become Barack Obama’s head of the CIA. It was an exciting job that involved extensive travel but O’Neill had a young son (Noah, now aged nine) and began to think that a job rooted more closely to home in England would be better suited. She joined a hospitality company called Luminar and through this she began working with Jamie Oliver’s business empire.

O’Neill said she learned a huge amount from Oliver and his business. “It just blows you away by how well respected, well known he is globally. And it doesn’t happen by chance, there are lots of people working behind the scenes tirelessly to get to that point, all hugely passionate about education, food, supply chain and just doing things the right way.

“And I think that very much resonates within the Avoca business and its probably one of the reasons I was really attracted to it. It’s the same values, it’s the same principles — ‘Is the supply chain clear? Are we proud of what’s going into the food?’ Respect for people. You know, being kind.”

In the past number of months Oliver’s restaurant business has been under financial pressure and in February it was forced to close a dozen outlets.

O’Neill says there were always challenges in the business, but the UK retail scene is having a tough time now more than ever.

“While you can see challenges on the high street building and building, ultimately there’s a perfect storm on the UK high street at the moment, so your ability to react to them can sometimes be challenging.”

But O’Neill says that the motivation behind her decision to leave over a year ago was a desire to return to Ireland and be close to her family here.

“Ideally, I’d have liked to stay in Jamie’s for a bit longer and there was lots that we were still doing — but this role in Avoca was a perfect role to come back to.

“For me it was very much about taking back lessons learned from the UK high street, from building a global brand — what revenue streams work, what revenue streams didn’t work so well. I see just huge potential with the brand. I think there is an honesty and an integrity embedded into it,” she says.

O’Neill says the relationship between Aramark, which has been criticised for its direct provision contracts, is actually a good fit with Avoca.

“It’s the best of every world at the moment because Aramark bought this business because they loved the values of it, they loved what it stood for, they loved the attention to detail, they loved the offer. And they have been incredible in allowing that to continue to be controlled under the Avoca team. And then what you have within the Aramark organisation is fantastic access to capital, you have resource that you can tap into as and when you need to.”

At the same time it has to return value to the shareholder.

“We’ve to make sure that we’re doing all of this in a really commercial way. There are untapped revenue streams that we can look at and we can for sure think about our online strategy,” she says.

The company does sell online into the US market and the UK market, but not to Irish consumers.

“There is certainly a strategy to be worked up around online,” she says.

There is also some further development likely for existing sites, which will total 13 when the Ballsbridge premises opens. The original transaction did not include the Avoca mill, but it was acquired by Aramark earlier this year.

“There is a visitor element to it and it’s first and foremost a working mill. It’s something that we could for sure develop.

“I think there’s a hell of a lot more we could do with some of the amazing sites that we already have,” says O’Neill.

“I feel so privileged to have inherited this and I really want to look after it so carefully through its next phase of growth.”