Going green with grain: Offaly company shows how brewers' waste can be good for you

BROTHER and sister Ruairi and Niamh Dooley now employ 10 people at their 9,000 sq ft food manufacturing site in Tullamore.

That's quite an achievement considering that as recently as 2020 Ruairi (34) was living and working in Melbourne, Australia and his sibling Niamh (31) was finishing up a job with Bord Bia.

Their business, Circular Food Co, is firmly established in the Irish food sector after the go-ahead pair cracked the code on how to upcycle the spent grains left over when brewers make beer.

Ruairi recalls that the venture began at a time when the Covid-19 lockdown was quite strict in his part of Australia.

“Five o'clock in Melbourne was basically 9am in Ireland so I had nothing to do in the evenings because we were under house arrest and [Niamh] had nothing to do when she woke up so we started Zooming each other every day and started working on a project that had to be sustainable and nutritious because we both had an interest in that.”

He added: “I had been keen on nutrition and interested in it over the years. The two of us said it had to be good for us and be good for the planet. Those were the pillars. We started looking for ideas of how we could create this new sustainable source of food that's good for us.”

While Ruairi's background is in tech, Niamh is a food science and health graduate from the University of Limerick and she noted that some 172,000 tonnes of waste comes from brewers' grain produced in Ireland each year.

Craft brewing – small scale beer production independent of the global brands – had exploded in Ireland from about 2010, resulting in more by-products becoming available.

Says Niamh: “I started doing trials and testing the grains and found that they were really high in fibre, about 40% fibre and 20% protein. There is a lot of vitamins and minerals in there as well so that excited me from a health perspective. The next thing was, does it taste nice? So I reached out to local chefs and bakers and trialled the ingredients. The feedback was fantastic in terms of flavour.”

The Dooleys, who are from Athlone, Co Westmeath, began the business at a kitchen in Ferbane Food Campus. They produced a range of healthy snackbars and these are sold in a variety of retail outlets (along with online, biasol.ie) under the brand name BiaSol.

BiaSol still generates up to 80% of the business's revenue but Ruairi and Niamh are moving the focus to the ingredients space with the Circular Food Co.

That's one of the reasons they are taking part in Bord na Mona's Accelerate Green mentorship and business advice programme.

“The focus in Accelerate Green for us is to grow more as a kind of ingredients innovation solution provider to the food sector as a whole rather than just being a FMCG (fast moving consumer good). So that's the shift, and the long-term strategy of the company,” Ruairi explains.

Hence the presence of Circular Food Co's grain product in a spent grain loaf sold through Tesco, But they supply many other bakeries too.

The siblings say one way they keep their brother and sister relationship intact is by splitting the responsibilities in the business.

Niamh looks after operations and quality in Tullamore while Ruairi spends a lot of time on the road speaking to customers.

“That's our secret to success,” says Ruairi.

The Bord na Mona Accelerate Green GROW Programme aims to support Ireland's rising leaders in sustainability and climate action and is designed to empower early-stage enterprises, SMEs, and start-ups driving transformative solutions for a greener future.

It is run from Bord na Mona's premises in Boora, Co Offaly.