About Ballymakenny Farm

Maria Flynn is passionate about her potatoes and the chefs she grows them for.

During challenging times growing mainstream potato varieties on the farm, Maria decided to pivot and grow heritage and speciality varieties not widely grown in Ireland.

When the pandemic closed restaurants Maria showed more entrepreneurial skill when she opened Ireland’s first drive thru Spud Shack. People pulled up beside her Spud Shack, put in their order and she would then place it in the boot of their car.

A few weeks later she packed and stamped 3 kilo bags of the different varieties and entered the retail market.

The Spud Shack is now a permanent feature on the farm and will soon be upgraded to a farm shop and tearoom.

Maria’s speciality potatoes, including the dazzling purple Violetta and Red Emmalie, remain favourites with leading chefs and continue to be grown on the farm by her husband David. Her entrepreneurial spirit and business acumen saw the farm feature in the Higher Level Business paper in the Leaving Cert in 2021.

Project Information

For the Spud Shack, we managed photography including but not limited to: capturing the texture and vibrance of the heritage potatoes, selection of dishes featuring the potatoes, David on the farm tending to the potato fields and portrait of Maria at her Spud Shack.

We set up a mobile studio to film award winning chef Conor Halpenny as he created a range of dishes featuring the different potatoes.

We created a marketing video specfically for Ballymakenny Farm, that focused on the heritage potato brand and USP’s. From this footage, we created shorter videos specifically for social media use capturing the energy and passion behind Ballymakenny Farm and the Spud Shack.

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