Jam-packed weekends are truly what we at Harty’s are all about! If we are not travelling the length and breadth of the country for some of Ireland’s leading food festivals, we are schmoozing the hopeful Roses representing their counties at the Rose of Tralee International Festival, and sometimes we like to stay local and catch up with all our customers close to home.
In mid-August, we were delighted to be invited to the Rose Pavilion in the dome to meet this year’s Rose’s from all over the world and give them a little taste of our Tralee. We remained neutral and we’re not picking any favourites! However, we did enjoy the privilege of meeting a potential future rose, the real Eabha Joan from Eabha Joan’s restaurant in Listowel who proved to be a fan of our Chargrilled pepper jelly.
Then keeping with tradition, we headed up to Donegal at the end of the month for the fabulous and famous food festival, ‘A Taste of Donegal’. We love travelling around Ireland to these fantastic events not just to get our jelly into everyone’s bellies, but to catch up with dear friends, food producers and customers from afar. Every year we have made new acquaintances’ who turn into friends, advisors and product testers! The highlight of a Taste of Donegal this year for us was a friendly catch up with Irish Food Guide, Zach Gallagher who used our Ginger Pepper Jelly in his amazing cookery demo, giving us great ideas we must try for the Winter.
Staying closer to home in September we braved the expected bad weather for a Flavour of Killorglin, which took place in the old Boyle’s hardware store this year which made for many happy campers as we took refuge indoors and tempted passers-by with the delicious aromas of all the food on offer. We love doing local food fairs and festivals as it gives us the chance to catch up with long time loyal customers, test our new products on their wise palettes and maybe even attract some new Kerry heads to our range of jellies.
As always we would like to thank all the festival organisers of each event, the volunteers, producers, stallholders for all their hard work and customers for their continued support.
No rest for the wicked as they say, so we shall not rest this Autumn! With two new products hitting your local Supervalu shelves over the next few months, and plenty more food festivals to keep us busy we will have plenty more of our stories to share with you.