‘We need to take the gamble for the growers’: Cork wholesaler on changing trends 

Barra Sweetnam took his first foray into the fruit and veg trade by selling strawberries from a horsebox at the side of the road in Charleville when he was 12 years old.

His father had just “fired” him from his summer job at Fyffes in Limerick. 

After giving Barra an earful, he took a lift home from one of the Fyffes lorry drivers who talked about selling strawberries.

Later that evening, Barra and his father hatched a plan to buy some strawberries from a grower in Newtwopothouse.

“I’d buy 10 or 20 boxes of strawberries and sit at the side of the road selling them. The first year I made no money because I kept eating them, but then I made a bit of money, and I got over-ambitious. I started to sell to shops and supermarkets in Charleville.”

This is where the story of Allfresh Wholesale began.

Today, it is Cork’s largest independent wholesaler of fruit and vegetables to across Munster, selling mainly to restaurants and hotels.

Barra initially didn’t want to follow his father into the fruit and veg trade. But a young Barra had money in his pocket and no interest in completing the marketing degree he had reluctantly signed up to. Instead, he took jobs unloading potatoes for £20 a day and working in a meat factory.

His father asked him if he would go and work for a wholesaler, but Barra recalls: “I didn’t want to do it; the hours were brutal. He was gone before I got up in the morning, home late, and when he was home, he was asleep.”

But an uncle that Barra looked up to convinced him to take the job, and he never looked back.

“I loved it. Fruit and veg is an addiction! Trading, buying and selling - is an addiction. There’s no day in fruit and veg you wouldn’t find something interesting; something new or different to taste. Tomatoes are not just tomatoes; every day the size changes, they’re over-ripe, under-ripe, different flavours.”

Barra worked for Fyffes wholesalers, honing his instinct for attracting new customers, getting orders, learning prices and how to strike deals.

He started from the ground up, driving forklifts, brushing floors, repacking potatoes. There was no fast track, despite his father working there for many years.

A Kanturk man originally, Barra moved from Limerick to Tralee working as a sales rep for the Kerry Supervalu stores, where he met his wife and had two children.

“My father was always pushing us to work for ourselves. He never did it himself, so he was pushing me. Back then, the best place to open a fruit and veg shop was one next to a supermarket. At that time, Supervalu in Bandon had the highest turnover for fruit and veg in Cork; my uncle found a shop nearby and I started Allfresh then, 30 years ago.

“I loved doing the displays of our fruit and veg, but dealing with small orders wasn’t really doing it for me. I started wholesaling around Bandon to other shops and restaurants, and after the shop closed at 6pm, off I went to Clonakilty, Skibbereen and Baltimore dropping off orders.

“I was always better at wholesale. I knew the buying and had a lot of contacts from my time at Fyffes. I knew where to go for the right stuff at the right time.”

The business grew, with more customers in all regions of the county. Eventually, Barra closed the shop, and set up his first warehouse on Carrs Hill, Douglas, located in a farmers’ yard.

“We increased the fleet, and I acquired other businesses that were in trouble or closing. We kept growing, and after five years came to Little Island, and eventually bought the building in 2018.”

Having his own premises sparked a fervour for improvement that includes projects to make Allfresh Wholesale as environmentally sustainable a business as possible.

On the roof is a 90-panel solar array generating a quarter of the energy needs and returning 10% back to the grid. They have installed two large rainwater harvesting tanks, currently used to wash the trucks, but with ambition to use the greywater for flushing toilets. Two- thirds of the forklift fleet are electric, and there are plans to convert the delivery fleet from diesel to hydrogenated vegetable oil fuel.

But it is Barra’s vision on how to source fresh produce that has been making impressive strides on the sustainability front.

Initiatives to reduce food waste through discounted sales, charity donations, and animal feed for Fota Island Zoo mean there is zero food waste.

A ‘naked veg’ project has reduced plastic packaging waste by over 650,000 items in one year, and Allfresh are working with smaller market gardeners to increase Irish grown-not-flown fruit and veg.

In 2024, 100% of lettuce, pak choi and brussels sprouts, 41% of onions, and 25% of basil was grown in Ireland, with ambition to increase the range and quantity over time.

“I have been making changes for about five years,” says Barra, “but it all started with a customer,”.

That customer is Alex Nahke, the Executive Head Chef at The Europe Hotel in Killarney.

“Alex has been a customer for 20 years, and one of the straightest people you could ever meet. I’m absolutely mad about him, and every time I meet him, he puts ideas in my head.”

It started with moving over to hard-wearing returnable plastic crates for deliveries and kicked off the Naked Veg project by convincing Barra to move away from plastic-wrapped packs of mixed peppers to zero plastic mixed boxes.

“We sell a lot of mixed peppers, and the cheapest way to buy them is in three-packs. We now buy them in loose and mix them ourselves. We haven’t done prepacked peppers in three years.”

In that time, Allfresh has sold the equivalent of 97,680 three-packs of peppers – all plastic-free.

“It’s not rocket science, but it does take a little bit of effort,” says Barra. “That got me looking at other things, like bananas. We’ve given up plastic-wrapped bananas and we pick loose bunches for orders now. Some get more than a kilo, some just under, but a bunch is roughly a kilo.”

From turnips and celery to strawberries and apples, Barra is increasing the array of produce sold without plastic packaging grown in Ireland or abroad. But there is also a wish to see more so-called ‘wonky veg’ accepted by retailers, restaurants and hotels to drive down food waste.

“The amount of waste is crazy,” says Barra. “Go to Spain or France, you’ll see marked tomatoes and different shaped courgettes, and it doesn’t bother them at all. In Ireland and England, we don’t like off-sized veg. We look for perfection.

“It’s changed in my lifetime. I remember selling off stuff that wasn’t good enough for the supermarkets, and they were cheaper. But now, nobody wants anything that’s imperfect.”

Barra has witnessed the rapid decline of Irish growers, particularly those specialising in a vegetable grown at scale. But what’s the alternative?

At Allfresh, Barra is exploring flipping the odds and working with a combination of large scale growers and smaller market gardeners. The twist? That Barra takes the financial risk, rather than the grower.

“The market gardener-type grower, like Dripsey Castle Organic Farm or Cork Rooftop Farm, traditionally are not our suppliers because they can be competitors and they only have what they have for so long. But now some smaller growers are coming to me because they want me to handle their distribution.”

Getting quantity is an issue, but Barra works with growers by advising them what and how much to grow to match demand.

“It’s a learning curve,” Barra admits, “but I want to develop and work with smaller growers. I can talk to them and say grow more or less of something next year. That’s one way of improving.”

With commercial growers, however, there is more urgency.

“In my lifetime, I would say more than 50% of commercial growers in Ireland are gone. The whole industry has been undermined in my eyes as supermarkets keep pushing them down on price,” explains Barra.

“From the time a grower rents lands, pays for seed, puts it into the ground, harvests it and gets paid by one of the big multiples, 12 months have passed.

“No-one is in the veg growing game to get rich. They are working on tiny margins and it’s a high risk business.

“What we should be doing as wholesalers is taking the gamble on for commercial growers. If you grow broccoli from July to December for me, I state the quantity of boxes I’ll take and give a fixed price for that period. I’m now taking more of the gamble than the grower,” says Barra.

“If the crop is a bumper one, my job is to find the markets for it and move it on for the grower. It’s very market-driven, and I like doing that. Trading is in my DNA, it’s what we Sweetnams do.”

As the last independent wholesaler in Cork of its size, Allfresh Wholesale knows its market, product and customer inside out.

Making change that produces real, sustainable change right across the business means more to Barra than simply posting some values up on a webpage.

Barra recently completed a Diploma in Sustainability Management and Allfresh recently released their first Sustainability Report. He has also found his voice online, posting regular videos on TikTok, Instagram and LinkedIn showcasing the produce and the Allfresh ethos to do better for the environment - and to be a changemaker for the wider sector.

“When the big dog barks, the small dog bites! Everything I will do; the bigger boys have to follow. Half of me as a competitor says I don’t want the multi-nationals I compete with to follow me because I want to be the leader, and I don’t want them having my principles. But for the benefit of everybody, of course I want them to follow me. What I have to do is keep ahead of it.

“We’re making these changes because we want to, and because we believe in it. Five years ago, I was very slow to promote what we were doing because I knew as fast as I’d do something, they’d follow and then I’d have no advantage. But since completing the diploma, being more present on social media and finding a voice for what I believe in, I’ve gotten a lot braver. At least I can say, I was there before you!”