Kilkeel Harbour in County Down on the east coast of Northern Ireland is a small town with a big fishing fleet, the largest in the province. It also has a big fish processing industry, including the biggest factory of its kind in the whole of Ireland, that of Rooney Fish, a 35 year old family business run by John Rooney, his wife and son that freezes, packages, prepares and cooks a variety of shellfish alongside some white fish, and sells it to consumers on the continent of Europe. The staple product is the langoustine, also known as the Dublin Bay prawn or more commonly as scampi (which just refers to the tail part); in fact a small variety of lobster correctly called the Norway lobster.

THE ROUTE TO SUCCESS
John Rooney is an unusual kind of entrepreneur but he has certainly earned that name. He has the touch. To hear him talk one would think it had all happened by accident when at the age of 23 back in 1975 he started out in the fish business, and it’s true enough that it was hardly the culmination of a carefully laid plan!

He admits that he was no fisherman and had no serious background in the business, though living in Kilkeel he had friends in the business.

“I was a jack of all trades,” he says. He started by training as a bricklayer, then became a car mechanic and also worked for a while as a joiner.

“I suppose you could say that I had a good background knowledge about anything to do with repairing old buildings or old vehicles.” A highly practical man, then, but without a clear career path until an accident to his foot prevented him for a while from working in such a physical way and forced him to network. Some friends in the Republic of Ireland persuaded him to buy fish on their behalf at the Kilkeel fish auction and to bring it to their factory in Wexford. “I put in a lot of hours doing that,” he recalls. “I’d leave in the middle of the night following the auction, which was at 7.30, return the next afternoon, then do the whole thing again the following day!” The experience was enough to convince him not only that the fish trade interested him but that there was money to be made from it. “I progressed to having a small premises of my own to fillet and smoke fish and pack whole prawns for Europe.” Purely by organic growth larger premises were required as the business expanded until now it is not only one of the largest but also one of the best equipped and technologically advanced fish processing plants serving European markets and turning over more than £10 million annually.

GROWING THE BRAND
The one advantage he had in the early days was that he understood not only how to market fish but had a background in construction and transportation. In the beginning, he says, he used to pack fish on contract: the products were sold under the brand names of his customers, which were a number of large supermarket chains in France. However he soon developed the Rooney Fish brand. This has become very popular in France, Italy and Spain, and today 90 percent of the factory’s products are sold under the Rooney Fish brand name.

Rooney doesn’t just sell prawns of course. In addition to langoustines the boats bring in scallops, crab of various sorts, periwinkles, razor fish, mussels, oysters and shrimps. These are brought straight from the quayside to the factory, prepared to the strictest EU quality standards and fast frozen at -130 degrees. Packaging is done to the customers’ requirements and can be any way they want it – gas flush, shrink wrapped, vacuum packed or, for fresh product, in trays. The product leaves the factory, says John Rooney, ready for the housewife to pick it off the supermarket shelf in France the next day.

Demand for Irish shellfish is not a problem – the products are very popular on the continent.

However this is a seasonal product, and in addition it is getting harder than it used to be to obtain stocks, partly because of increased EU legislation affecting fisheries, partly because of pollution and climate change and not least as the result of increasing competition from processors particularly in Ireland, Scotland, Holland and Scandinavia. “We have to buy whenever the product is available,” says Rooney. “If we have too much for the market, we can always freeze it because our products have a two year shelf life.”

Ideally the product is either shipped as frozen or fresh, but quite recently the business started to supply cooked product with a 14-day shelf life. “In the past we would supply whole langoustines and other shellfish to the people who cooked it for the supermarkets. But since we were already supplying the supermarkets direct with our frozen products we decided it would make sense to offer them a value added cooked product in various sizes of vacuum gas flush packs.”

COOKING UP AN ADVANTAGE
A new cooking line was obtained from a supplier in Canada at a cost of more than £500,000, giving Rooney an edge over the competition.

The logistics has to be coordinated to get it to the customers without delay, he adds. “We cook on mornings when we have a ship going to Boulogne. If we cook this morning we have it in Boulogne tomorrow morning, and it is distributed from there to the supermarkets. My part is just to get it to Boulogne – the customers have their network there to distribute it to the different retail outlets.” Since this was a new venture when it started two years ago, he adds, Rooney obtained the services of a French factory manager who moved to Ireland, bringing with him the expertise needed to run the cooking lines effectively.”

Rooney Fish has conquered the major markets of France and Italy, where it has a distribution partner Agrifish, based in Viterbo from where it supplies the entire country. Now it has its sights set on Eastern Europe and is already selling its products in Slovenia. It is a safe bet that the 23 year old John Rooney had little idea that his name would one day be selling langoustines in Ljubljana.