A keen sense of entrepreneurship is deeply ingrained in John Cunningham’s DNA.

As a youngster at age 10, growing up on a mixed 20-acre mixed farm in west Clare, he was cultivating lettuce and selling it to the local shops. He was, as he says himself, always looking for an edge and motivated by a fervent desire for financial security.

It was the start of a long journey that has taken him from that small farm on the western seaboard via NUI Galway where he earned a degree in engineering, through a series of jobs in electronics, carpetmaking and cardboard box manufacturing to co-founding his own company, Epicom Food Ltd, in Navan, Co Meath, which manufactures dairy and health food products, mainly for export markets.

Epicom today has just under 300 employees in three distinct business units: Epicom Ireland, a pet food contract manufacturing company based in Edgeworthstown, Co Longford: a 40,000sq ft premises that’s a single customer contract packing company producing petfood mainly for private label retailers in the UK on a very large scale.

Then there’s Epicom Services in Dublin, the main business of which is building out hardware integration for data centres, and thirdly, Complex Nutrition, a standalone food company based in the Navan Enterprise Centre offering contract manufacturing services to food companies. 

It makes high-end nutritional foods for the NHS in the UK and the HSE in Ireland, milk powder-based sports nutrition, children’s and seniors’ nutrition, in addition to specialised clinical care food products.

All the R&D and product development is carried out in-house, as well as all the regulation and compliance, the manufacturing, packaging and exporting – a complete end-to-end manufacturing solution for high-quality nutritional food products.

The ability to absorb hard knocks and remain agile are attributes John Cunningham and his business partner Tom McDonnell have had to learn over the years and it’s one of the ingredients that has gone into making Epicom the success it has become over the past two decades. 

Epicom, in fact, started out as a packaging company for customers like 3Comm and IBM in Dublin in the late 1990s but a combination punch of the dotcom bust in 2000/2001 and globalisation pushing everything to the lowest cost centres in eastern Europe and Asia saw that business come to a crashing halt very quickly.

“We had this contract manufacturing company with almost no customers and we lost 95% of our business that year in 2000,” he says. “And we had a decision to make: do we stay open or do we adapt. So, we adapted into fast moving consumer goods at that stage and we started doing work for the likes of Kraft Foods and Unilever, around promotional work like ‘buy one, get one free’.” 

New legislation around promotional marketing practices affecting the type of work the company was doing a few years later forced another pivot, this time into pet food. “We kept diversifying, and it was around this time that we started up the pet food business; we were contract packing pet food for C&D Foods in Edgeworthstown,” he recalls.

Within a few years, Cunningham was confronted with another crisis when the C&D Foods factory was destroyed in a fire in January 2006. “It was probably 50% of our business, we had about 30 or 40 people working in Navan on it. So, we lost 45 to 50% of our business overnight again. The upshot of that was that we ended up moving that section of the business to Edgeworthstown to help them rebuild the business,” he adds. 

Working with the Reynolds family, the owners of C&D, Epicom’s management spent the next 18 months to two years assisting them to get their factory back into production and integrating the Navan packaging operation into the Co Longford plant.

This is now a separate business within the Epicom Group called Epicom Ireland. And it has gone from strength to strength, currently employing between 180 and 190 people, working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

With the pet food business now gone from the factory in the Navan Enterprise Centre, John Cunningham and Tom McDonnell once again had to rebuild their own business in Navan. Fortuitously, around that time, a client asked them if they could manufacture food. 

“And our mentality is ‘we can manufacture anything. All you need to do is give us a spec’. They gave us a spec and we built our first food hall, a small food hall. It was supposed to be a small local enterprise supplying a couple of local SuperValu shops but, a few months into it, they won a Tesco contract and suddenly we had to have food standards and accreditations to be able to supply Tesco. And it grew from that,” says Cunningham.

Success begets success, according to the time-worn maxim, and soon a second client came along, and a second food hall was built in Navan, then a third and a fourth hall. The business took off and hasn’t looked back since.

Complex Nutrition exports its products all over the world, and in order to do that, it has had to achieve food safety accreditations for various different markets. The company now holds certifications for CNCA China Dairy and BRCGS, and is FDA-approved for the United States, all of which has taken a great deal of time and money. “We are exporting to pretty much every country and we have the accreditations to allow us to export to almost every country,” says John Cunningham.

The organisation of everything is done with forensic attention to detail. “We have everything systemised. Nothing is hearsay, everything is procedures, training, documentation all the time,” he observes. “The operators on the floor know the system, not just the quality manager. We have it broken down into visuals, measurements, KPIs to make sure the thing is done the right way. Not that it just passes an audit but that it’s actually done the right way, because if it’s done the right way it will pass the audit.

“The whole mentality has allowed us to tackle the most complex product specifications, regulatory requirements and audit requirements of any of the regulators.” 

The most challenging country in which to do business is undoubtedly China. “China is very different. The other countries are challenging too, but China is a whole new level of difficulty. We have had three or four false starts in China,” he adds. Since the zero-Covid strategy shutdown in February 2022, no business has been done with the country despite the fact Complex Nutrition had secured two major contracts there in the previous 12 months.

While China represents a huge opportunity for the company, current uncertainties have been amplified by geopolitical tensions. “There has been a massive changing of the guard there in the last 12 months and now that they’ve opened up again after Covid, everybody is not quite sure what to do. So, until they decide who they want to do business with, you have to wait – keep talking to them but wait,” he says. 

“It’s not simple stuff. Business there is hard. I like the Chinese people, they’re very nice – a lot like us to a large extent – but business there is tough, very tough.”

In the meantime, Complex Nutrition has turned its focus a bit more towards the US and Asia outside China, particularly Malaysia, where new opportunities await.  

Meath Enterprise’s ambitions to continuously develop its Navan Enterprise Centre has dovetailed with Epicom’s own expansion plans. The company began with one unit of 19,000 square feet which has now doubled in size. “It’s a substantial plant but the enterprise centre has supported us to stay here,” says John Cunningham.

As Meath Enterprise’s anchor tenant in the centre, Cunningham is also a vital cog in the ambitious plans for Navan to be at the centre of the Boyne Valley Food Innovation District (BVFID), an ecosystem framework which aims to unite cutting edge food companies based in the region with startup food entrepreneurs and smaller agri-food SMEs. The idea is to create a unique cluster that leverages inter-company linkages to drive innovation and growth.

A number of years ago, Cunningham and the CEO of Meath Enterprise, Gary O’Meara, were having conversations about how difficult it is for a small food company to make the jump into being a mid-size company, how difficult it is to get the regulations right, to build the right sales channels, to build the right kinds of relationships with customers.

“We thought if we could create a centre here that would gather up all that information and then share it with people so that at least they are not making known mistakes. The whole idea then is to help those companies across, to create a centre here that had finance, IT, marketing, sales, all those functions helping all those small companies who could get an hour of marketing, an hour of contract negotiations, maybe an hour of pricing, an hour of whatever, but at a high level and really good advice on an ad hoc basis,” he says.

A lot of food industries tend to work in silos, John Cunningham remarks, but he firmly believes there are learnings and experiences that cross over and apply to all companies working in the agri-food sector. “There are actually some crossovers that are very interesting and if you did it within the enterprise centre, wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing? We talked about the whole thing of training students and having centres for learning and having a whole culture within the place of learning and sharing and openness that would make it all-powerful,” he adds.

Covid set back the whole BVFID project by a couple of years but it is now full steam ahead once again. “And the whole thing looks like it’s going to blossom now,” he concludes.

Reporting: Ken Davis for the EnterpRISE Interview Series