Irish salad and herb grower, McCormack Family Farms, launched a new brand for their range of unwashed salad leaves and herbs last year and this week they have announced the launch of branded organic baby spinach into Lidl Ireland.
"We have been supplying organic spinach to the retailers for the last couple of years, it has been a slow build," said Stephen McCormack MD. "We have had to encourage retailers to lower the price of the organic spinach to make it more affordable for consumers, they did this and sales immediately went up and have continued to increase over the last 4-5 years. We are now supplying 5 tonnes a week to the retailers."
Lidl have now taken McCormack's full range of salad and herbs under the McCormack brand.
"We initially did a month's trial with Lidl which was a success and orders are increasing every week."
Now at this time of year, all the spinach is imported, but McCormack’s has just had 11 hectares of land certified for organic growing and will plant the first organic spinach.
"People have questioned trying to grow organic spinach in Ireland, why give yourself the extra pressure? But for us, it is important to put our produce in our brand. We will still import most of the year, but in June, July, August, and September it can get very hot in Italy and there is less supply, if the product is off the shelves for a few months consumers will buy something else. In Ireland we can grow the spinach here during those months, we will be the first farm in Ireland to grow organic spinach commercially."
For more information:
Stephen McCormack
McCormack Family Farms
Tel: +353 46 902 56 95
[email protected]
www.mccormackfarms.ie
