Margaret Jeffares: I have brought charcuterie and salamis into Spain, and they have said, ‘This is better than ours’

When Margaret Jeffares walks into a hotel breakfast buffet, she does not want to be offered a glass of orange juice. “Instead, I would love every hotel in Ireland to say, ‘You know, would you like some cold-pressed Irish apple juice?’” says Jeffares, sat across from me in a quiet corner of the Shelbourne Hotel lounge.“I certainly don’t want to be offered Pellegrino.” While Jeffares feels strongly about the local origins of her morning beverage, this does not hold a candle to the unyielding passion she has for her business, Good Food Ireland, founded in 2006 to pioneer Ireland as a food tourism destination and to champion local ingredients. READ MOREHer motivation for starting the business, she tells me, came following an untoward interaction in Philadelphia in the early Noughties.“There was a key moment in Philadelphia at a tourist event and it was 2002, maybe 2003. A lady came up to me on the stand and said to me, ‘Is the food safe in Ireland?’“I nearly wanted to put my hand on my hip and say, ‘What do you mean, is the food safe in Ireland?’” laughs Jeffares. This short interaction was a key moment in driving her decision to establish Good Food Ireland. “I went back to my hotel that evening, and it had just stayed with me. This lady was perfectly right, and it was so relevant for her to ask it,” Jeffares explains, referring to the outbreak of foot and mouth disease here in the early 2000s. [ Ireland’s top cheeses, meats, butters and desserts named at Great Taste Awards 2026Opens in new window ]“I thought to myself that if I could get the seven million visitors going into the hotels, the restaurants, the pubs, cafes, cookery schools, everywhere, that are using Irish ingredients, we will create an economic opportunity for our farmers to produce added value products and market their produce, as opposed to trying to be a volume grower.”The lightbulb had been lit, and Jeffares went about using her background in business and tourism to establish Good Food Ireland. While the idea to connect Irish food and drink producers with the tourism hospitality sector may seem obvious now – it’s rare to walk into a restaurant that’s not gushing about their 100 per cent Irish beef nowadays – Jeffares notes that the signposting of Irish ingredients was a lot rarer 20 years ago. “There was no such thing as added value products in farming. Your farmers milked their cows, and they brought it to the co-op. Your apple growers grew their apples. Fruit growers grew their strawberries. There was no such thing as cider vinegars or balsamic vinegars from the apples,” she says. Alongside her raw enthusiasm, Jeffares’ simple yet effective idea took root with establishments across Ireland, which would become part of the Good Food Ireland collection for their use of Irish ingredients.“The Wild Atlantic Way had been there for thousands of years, but somebody just put a name on it, and now all of a sudden, it’s something. It’s the same with Good Food Ireland,” she says.Our farmers are gods, they are. We should be rolling out red carpets for our farmers and our fishermen“A well-known hotelier said to me early on, ‘You know, Margaret, I’m in. Count me in to Good Food Ireland.’ And he said, ‘We have been buying Irish food for 10 years, but we’ve never told anybody.’”Twenty years later, Jeffares thinks Ireland’s food industry has become a form of soft diplomacy and moved far beyond what she coins the “bacon-and-cabbage issue”. “Irish cuisine is ingredient-led,” Jeffares says. “It’s any type of cuisine because we’re an eclectic cosmopolitan country, so it doesn’t matter whether it’s French cuisine, it’s Indian, it’s Chinese, it’s any cuisine, as long as you’re using Irish ingredients as the primary core of that dish.” Jeffares recalls various trips abroad promoting Ireland through cuisine. While the Good Food Ireland website prepared me for tales of meeting Barack Obama, it had not prepped me for a Jeffares anecdote about travelling the world in 2009 to feed the crew of a boat called Green Dragon, as part of the Volvo Ocean Race. “We went, you know, from Qingdao in China to South Africa to Stockholm to everywhere, promoting Ireland as a destination. And we did it through food,” Jeffares says, reflecting on when the Irish and Chinese governments partnered to enter the international boat race, which helped launch Jeffares’ brand to a global audience. Irish oysters are popular in France, she tells me, and local cheeses go down a treat in the Netherlands.[ Ireland’s best ice-creams from makers that use Irish milkOpens in new window ]“You bring our Irish cheese into the Dutch market, and the Dutch people tell us, ‘This is way better than our cheese,’” she says. “I have brought Irish beef, like charcuterie and salamis, into the Rioja region in Spain, and they have literally said to me, ‘This is better than ours.’” There are issues, of course. She notes that the number of fruit and vegetable producers in Ireland has reached a “dangerous point”, with supplier numbers having dwindled over the past two decades.“Our growers need support, across both fruit and vegetables, purely because of cheaper imports,” says Jeffares, who endorses more transparent labelling of produce in Irish supermarkets so consumers can more consciously choose to buy local. Jeffares grew up on a dairy farm herself in Co Clare. “We had our Christmas dinner when Dad had finished milking the cows, so it was six o’clock in the evening,” Jeffares remembers, adding that she doesn’t think she could have done Good Food Ireland without her farming background.Until this point in the interview our conversation has remained in the oratory realm, but now, Jeffares points to the milk pitcher in between us. [ Keogh’s Crisps CEO Tom Keogh: ‘I rented this room off my dad and I bought a little fryer’Opens in new window ]“We pour a jug of milk into our coffee,” Jeffares says. “Do we realise the blood, sweat and tears that’s behind that?“Just that simple little thing of milk that we can all take for granted. There’s a family behind it. There’s feelings. There’s people. There’s positives, negatives, there’s a range of emotions behind that milk. “Our farmers are gods, they are. We should be rolling out red carpets for our farmers and our fishermen.”When she’s not running Good Food Ireland, or taking care of her prize-winning show horses, Jeffares can be found at home at her blackcurrant farm, the last commercial one in Ireland. When Ribena stopped sourcing blackcurrants from Ireland in 2013, Jeffares tells me, four out of five of the commercial blackcurrant farms in Ireland went out of production. “But we were the largest, and my husband and I, he certainly didn’t know how to do anything else, so we stayed with these blackcurrants, we invested further,” she says.“We had to create a market within Ireland, so we launched a brand called Mr Jeffares Blackcurrants. And yeah, it’s gone from strength to strength.”As Good Food Ireland celebrates 20 years, Jeffares thinks the brand itself has now eclipsed the collection of cafes, restaurants, hotels and other establishments that are Good Food Ireland certified. “A very good friend says to me, ‘Bloody hell, Margaret, you’ve ruined me. I can’t go shopping now. I’m picking up the bag of carrots to see how Irish they are.’”