70 years of age only. Those crisps must have been bad for him.
Is he the guy behind the Tayto brand?
I thought they have been around for decades?
Obviously not all Hunky Dory.
He has a great origin story. He used to grow the spuds for Tayto, then he basically went bankrupt after he lost the contract with them. Ended up raffling off the farm to pay his debts. Founded Largo foods and ended up buying Tayto a few decades later
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He was behind Hunky Dorys, which ended up buying Tayto. He sold it all off a while back.
Ray was young when he first set up his own farming enterprise, planting 12 acres of potatoes and four acres of vegetables, which he sold in the Dublin fruit and veg market. By the Seventies, and still in his mid-20s, Ray was making a lot of money; in fact, over £1m a year. Soon he was able to buy 800 acres of land and began to grow potatoes on an even larger scale.
By 1980, he was supplying potatoes to the company that was then making Tayto crisps.
“I never could have imagined back then that, one day, I would actually end up owning the brand,” he says. However, in 1981, things went terribly wrong for Ray. Along with many other farmers, they lost their contract to supply Tayto. He would subsequently lose almost everything.
“At the time, I owed the bank £1.2 m and had no way of paying it back,” he admits. “I wasn’t even able to raise enough money from selling my farm at the time,” he adds.
In what can only be described as a stroke of genius, Ray decided instead to raffle his farm. Selling 4,000 tickets at £300 each, he was able to raise the £1.2m and clear his debts with the bank.
He then looked around at the market and, realising that Tayto had 90 per cent of the Irish crisp market, he decided that there had to be an opening for a new entrant into the Irish snack-food market. And so, in 1983, he set up Largo Foods. A year later, he purchased the Perry brand and in 1996, he acquired the Sam Spudz brand when he bought out Donegal-based Irish Snack Foods. The same year, in a move to enter the UK market, he came up with the now famous Hunky Dorys brand. He had now cemented his company’s position as a significant player in the snack-food market.
In 2005, Tayto, which was then owned by C&C, closed its crisp factory and out-sourced production to Ray’s Largo Foods business. The following year, in a brave and courageous move, Ray bought the Tayto and King brands in a deal valued at €68m. The acquisition transformed the company.
In 2008, Ray partnered with German snack-food company Intersnack in a move that allowed the company invest in automation to further enhance efficiencies and maintain competitiveness.
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well he bought the farm today
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That C&C are some fucking disaster. They’ve fucked away some money selling good brands to buy bad ones
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Those things would make you go hmmmm
Think modern pentathlon (or some other event of that ilk) Olympian Natalya Coyle is his daughter.
Pentathlon is the ultimate rich persons sport, so it would make sense
“The Meath native is practically Irish royalty as her father is the founder of Largo Foods which produces Tayto.”
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That’s royalty in Ireland. Shur tis the Royal County
Is that another way to say everyone was made redundant ?..
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Billy Bingham.
Billy Binghamvady
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Thought he died years ago, tbh.
A vile bigot.
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Bad oul’ morning for Orangeism with Billy Bingham dying and BBC not showing the Twelfth Parade live.