SHOP TALK IF I’D KNOWN THEN WHAT I KNOW NOW... SANDRA MCDOWELL, The Dairy, Gleno, Co Antrim, Northern Ireland
Our new industrial dishwasher broke last week. It will cost over £1,000 to repair and I can’t get the part because of COVID, so at the moment we are having to wash every dish by hand. Some days we have over 300 sittings. Running the farm shop, butchery and café has given me an appreciation for how hard people in hospitality work. I am very fortunate to have 26 excellent staff who all pitch in. This is partly because they know I would never ask them to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. When I opened The Dairy in April 2019 with my late husband Robert, we had no experience in this game. I had planned to learn all the jobs, from serving ice cream to making a good latte, but because we were so busy it never happened. I can still stack shelves and clear tables, though. I tell staff that if something is not good enough to give to their mother or gran, it’s not good enough for a customer. I think the way we treat our staff and customers and the fact we own our building have been key to surviving the last couple of years. We also own a hardware shop, which has kept us afloat. That shop, Dairyside Stores, was established more than 60 years ago by Alex and Agnes McDowell. When Robert and I took it over in 1987, our house was in the same building. I would be cooking dinner in the kitchen and people would think it was a coffee shop and walk straight in. The idea for a farm shop came from there. When we bought the nearby site that would become The Dairy, which dated back to 1914, we wanted to retain the spirit of the original business. We knocked the old building down and salvaged as much as we could. Old windows were used for dividers, corrugated tin lines the walls, and we even made a seat out of the old conveyor belt. During our first year, business boomed. Thankfully, with hindsight, we put everything we made back into the business. The problem, when COVID hit, was that overheads, such as utility bills, still had to be paid but the café was closed. At one point, we had 20 staff on furlough. Financially, we might as well not have had a second year. It’s not just COVID we’ve had to contend with. The price of everything has shot up with Brexit – from napkins to cooking oil. We’ve also had issues recently with short-dated products – presumably because suppliers have a backlog of stock. We’re still optimistic, though, and plan to start staging themed nights and hosting functions soon. We haven’t invested all this money into a business for it not to survive. Interview: Lynda Searby Photography: Rory Moore
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July 2021 | Vol.22 Issue 6
