The Happy Pear on growing a multimillion business empire

Gluten-free. Dairy-free. Probiotics. Wheat belly. Protein bars. Paleo. Quinoa. Juice cleanses. Dairy intolerance. Toxic sugar. Coconut water.

Everywhere we look today there’s a new revelation in food and nutrition, whether it’s a newly discovered super-food or a zany diet guaranteed to shed pounds.

It can be hard to tell what’s proper nutrition and what’s just a marketing initiative by someone trying to make money from food fads.

Into that maelstrom stride Stephen and David Flynn, the Happy Pear brothers, whose small vegetable shop in Greystones has become the hub of an ever expanding health food business.

For the identical twins, health food is no fad, but they understand why so many people have sought answers in food lately.

“In Irish society, where religion doesn’t have quite as strong a hold as it previously did, people are looking for different things to relate to and be part of and give meaning to them,” David Flynn says.

“I think food is one thing people can become obsessive with and become evangelical about.”

Their healthy eating – a plant-based diet eschewing meat and dairy – is not a cult, they insist, simply a way of fuelling themselves for the lives they lead.

Stephen gives an example.

“Me and Dave would swim in the sea most days and we do little bits with Snapchat,” he says, referring to the steady stream of pictures they post of themselves exercising or doing yoga or eating some giddily described nutritious food.

One morning, Stephen says, he decided to test their audience – which now numbers in the tens of thousands: we’ll be swimming at the bay in Greystones at 6am, they told their followers, so come and join us.

The next morning the brothers went into the shop in Greystones at 4am to make porridge and brew coffee and ready the shop for the influx of commuters from the nearby Dart station.

Stephen wasn’t so sure anyone would turn up: “I remember going in that morning and cooking porridge thinking there wouldn’t be that many people.”

“But I came out and there were about 150 people there and we all walked down the middle of the road to the sea – it was quite magical,” he says.

“Like a pilgrimage,” David ventures.

“Then subsequently we did it again and we had 300, then we had 400 people,” Stephen says, and word soon spread to people from Scotland and the US to enjoy the morning pilgrimage swim.

“There’s no money involved, it’s purely to try to get people to appreciate nature; simple things like a sunrise coming up.”

That does sound a wee bit culty, I suggest.

The two boys laugh uproariously, before David concedes the point.

“Well, there you go.”

The boys have been on their own journey lately, and it has been a lot more commercial than a morning walk to the water, they say.

“We were very idealistic [in the beginning] and I was kind of like: ‘I’m not so sure about capitalism,’” Stephen says, stroking his chin and adopting the pose of a young social warrior. “We were very utopian in our dream. I was genuinely adamant it would be a charity. This is not about money. We wanted to create a healthier, happy world, money is nothing to do with this.”

We were nearly called Flynners Fruit and Veg for Social Change – but it didn’t fit across the shop front

“Yeah, it was idealistic at the very start,” David says.“We were nearly called Flynners Fruit and Veg for Social Change – but it didn’t fit across the shop front.”

It was at this point they sought the advice that turned the Happy Pear from a hippy vegetable shop with a cumbersome name to a rapidly growing commercial brand. That advice came from their father.

“When we started, we wanted to start it as a charity. Dad was like, ‘Nah, you’ll regret that lads – try to change society from inside out rather than the outside in.’ He said, ‘You’re better off working within the confines of capitalism,’ ” Stephen says, recounting the essence of their father’s advice.

“So it was like, ‘Okay cool, we’ll do a normal style business.’ ”

Today, the Happy Pear is very far from the non-governmental organisation they originally envisaged.

Last year, it turned over close to €6 million a year (€5.7 million last year, a near 50 per cent rise in revenue, and Stephen expects a similar growth trajectory this year).

The boys have sold 100,000 books, they employ around 100 people, they’ve opened a new 14,000 square foot production facility, they distribute to nearly 1,000 shops around the country, and have just raised €1.5 million in fresh funding to start a process of expanding their own network of shops.

They claim only partial credit for this.

“Business is our background,” Stephen says – he has a BComm from UCD and an MBS from the Smurfit School of Business, while David has a business and finance degree from DIT - “but we kind of threw it out the window”.

While that’s probably a little bit of creative licence from two men aiming to cultivate a virtuous, non-commercial image, they weren’t lacking in expertise to fall back on.

Their father Donal Flynn – who is the managing director of the Happy Pear, as well as a director – is a mechanical engineer by profession and is a former group director and shareholder of PM Group, Ireland’s largest engineering and projects business. He is also founder and chair of technology firm Nathean, and now runs his own consulting firm, Abbeycroft.

Their main commercial adviser is accountant Aidan O’Byrne, who was financial director and part owner of Batchelors, which was sold to Valeo Foods where he subsequently served as chief financial officer. He also worked at Irish Rail, Airtel, International Financial Systems, as well as being a founder and a director of food industry group Love Irish Food.

Meanwhile, they got help from Hugh McCann, who studied engineering with their father before going into accountancy, first with Arthur Andersen’s Dublin office and then teaming up with Apple in 1981. At Apple, he was responsible for a number of major Europe-wide strategy initiatives resulting in fundamental changes in the functioning of Apple Computer’s business in Europe, as well as working with Steve Jobs when he was in exile at NeXT.

He worked with the lads on “the soft side of the business, advising managing directors and chief executives about what motivates people, groups and teams”, Stephen says. “He came in and held two big sessions where we all opened up about how can we make the Happy Pear a better place to work.”

Such commercial nous and vigorous business expansion would once have troubled the brothers – who early on baulked at even having their products on supermarket shelves, seeing it as selling it out to the man – but they’ve made their peace with it, they say.

“We’ve realised our roles have changed significantly and I don’t want to run a company – I’m not good at structure, controls, order,” Stephen says. “I still find times where I’m like, ‘No, we should [do this], and my brother Darragh says, ’You’re jumping across reporting lines’ and I say ‘Fuck reporting lines!’.”

It seems like the company is changing virtually independent of them, they both point out.

“It was cool when it was just me and Dave in the shop here. You could really feel the culture and see everyone was happy and you knew everyone, but it was starting to change,” he says. “And I’d get to Pearville [the name of their production facility] and I wouldn’t know one, two, three, I wouldn’t know ten people and I’d be like, ‘Fuck, I feel really embarrassed. I don’t know our team anymore.’ ”

For the boys, it’s about being the public face of the Happy Pear, not the engine.

“I’m not sure I’m the boss [type]; I’m running around in my shorts; I’m not at all in that way inclined,” Stephen says. “But we’ve decided to focus on creating a culture that embodies health, happiness and community.”

“We’ve realised our main skillset is out front selling the dream,” Dave says. “We’re the crusaders out leading this charge.”

That dream is to turn Ireland from a country rushing headlong into virtually universal obesity into one with people eating nutritious foods and exercising regularly.

It is on that message that David and Stephen are at their most evangelical.

“We have a huge interest and passion for whole foods and everything we do is through food. We share our practical food expertise, through our recipes and prepared foods, to help make whole foods more accessible – we’ve learned a huge amount about food running our own cafés for over a decade and working in kitchens every day.”

“We’ve been doing a happy heart course for years and seeing the results of it,” Stephen says, with people “seeing their cholesterol drop by 20 per cent, people losing weight, blood pressure reducing; so I guess we’ve experienced and seen it so many times, just the power of food”.

It’s a message they want to spread not just to their customers, but to everyone.

Our message has always been very simple – just eat more vegetables more of the time

“We’ve a pilot project with local schools here to try to get healthy eating on the curriculum,” Stephen says, and they have met with the Minister for Education to discuss how they could help to get that programme built out to the wider national curriculum.

David describes the meetings with the minister as more of an open dialogue. “We still have to go in and meet him again. It was an ongoing dialogue about how we could work together rather than both of us doing solo runs in separate ways.”

So how would the Happy Pear go about teaching a child about food and nutrition?

It’s a simple process, they say, focusing less on the science underpinning the food – say, the fact that bananas are high in potassium and are good for energy – and more about getting children excited about understanding where food comes from and showing them how to grow their own.

“The engagement in eating an orange and taking the seed out [and asking], ‘Okay, how do I germinate this, how can we plant it, and grow it?’ – even that you’re suddenly connected in the sense of the orange I ate and now I can grow another one,” Stephen says.

As with their approach to business, detail is perhaps not their strong suit. Take the recent changes to the food pyramid, for example.

“I haven’t actually looked at it directly, but I know for us it’s all about eating the vast majority of whole foods,” David says. “You can fit in any kind of diet, whatever you’re into, but the vast majority has to be around whole food: fruit, veg, bean, legumes and whole grains.”

They’re big picture guys, they say, focused on what they describe as “the big hairy goal”. The average Irish diet – with so much processed, frozen foods, refined sugars and chemicals and additives – is plainly bad for health.

Ninety per cent of our diet is made up of animal foods and refined foods, with only 10 per cent made up of whole foods, they say, using broad figures to make their point. They just want to tip the balance back the other way a little bit.

It’s a good approach, and sensible, but the lads are business people and marketeers rather than food scientists, they point out.

While David has a certificate from Cornell after a six-week correspondence course in plant-based nutrition, theirs is the passion of the enthusiastic amateur.

“We’re not scientists or nutritionists, and we’ve never claimed to be, and our message has always been very simple – just eat more vegetables more of the time. Hopefully it’ll help people to be healthier and happier. It’s certainly worked for us!”

Even evangelists for healthy eating need to make money, and the boys are today balancing the need to create healthy food with the need to create food they can sell in large volumes and very far from their Greystones base.

Half of their revenue still comes from the shop in Greystones, while the other half comes from the food produced in the Pearville facility: and all the future growth is likely to come from those pots of hummus and plastic containers of soup.

So how do they balance those healthy aspirations with the fact that they’re now a part – albeit a small part – of the commercial food industry?

“We’re pretty clear on what our values are and what we stand for and it’s a constant balancing act between commerciality versus ideals,” Stephen says.

“Ideals are good ideas because they’re something we aspire toward and strive toward, but you can’t hang yourself with these as well.”

“When you employ more than 100 people, you’re accountable to keeping people’s jobs and you have to be commercially sensible as well,” he says.

It’s not an easy line to tread. Something as simple as making a pot of soup is now complicated with the need to maintain the soup’s shelf life as well as its nutritiousness.

There’s a big difference, they acknowledge, between making a soup range which will be sold on the same day in the shop and making a range of soups that will be cooked in huge volumes and poured into plastic containers to be shipped to thousands of shops, sit on shelves in supermarkets, be transferred from car boots to fridges, and then perhaps taken to offices around the country and reheated in microwaves.

“It’s a constant tweaking, tweaking, tweaking,” David says.

And while Stephen says it’s a fun process, it’s also fraught. On top of making sure that the mass production process doesn’t undermine the healthy nature of the product, they also have the intrinsic risk that a bigger, better funded multinational could just swoop in and do their recipe cheaper and on a bigger scale – producing that soup or hummus or pesto with cheaper labour, cheaper ingredients, and a lot more preservatives that can lengthen the shelf life and sell more food.

It is a risk, Stephen says.

“But what we’ve created is a brand that stands for something,” he says, pointing to their nearly 600,000 followers on social media.

“We’ve realised there’s a brand that people are identified with, and if the brand stands for quality, natural foods then people are more likely to pay a premium because they’ll say ‘Oh, It’s those funny twins who wear shorts. I like what those guys do. I think I’d like to see what this is like.’ ”

For now it’s about using that €1.5 million to build more shops in Dublin, and then further afield. They have plans to open three in Dublin this year, and have just taken over the Clondalkin Round Tower visitor centre.

They have also been working on a television show with one of Morgan O’Sullivan’s production companies, though this is moving a little slower than the boys perhaps expected.

They’ve also been back and forth to London to try and build their presence there – where they’re part of Jamie Oliver’s online video network – while they’re also making their first tentative connections with food industry figures in the US.

They haven’t ruled out raising more money, they say.

“One thing we’re looking at which I’ve started lots of dialogues on is crowd-funding,” says David. “And not just where you’re offering free T-shirts or free books, but crowd funding where you’re saying okay we’re going to put up 5 per cent of our company and raise X amount of money.”

But all of that is in the future, he says.

“It’s little steps,” he says. “It’s not an all or nothing. If it gets people to eat more porridge. Or it gets someone cooking soup once a week instead of eating a ham and cheese sandwich, or cooking something healthier for themselves and their family.”

“We’ve got a good few balls in motion and we don’t know which will stick and which won’t,” according to Stephen. “Gentle baby steps.”

“Life is a journey: it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Dave says.

“Full of the clichés today, Dave,” says Stephen.

They both laugh, before Dave pauses slightly.

“Thanks, Steve.” ■