Innovator who steered IFSA and CATEX to the centre of Ireland’s Foodservice Sector.
Thomas Prior House is an appropriate venue for a session with Drewry Pearson. The elegant Ballsbridge building dating back to 1880 and now a Clayton Hotel, has been the subject of many developments while Drewry has devoted his distinguished career to change and innovation.
He begins by relating a childhood in a Dublin Quaker family, school in England and then Trinity College Dublin where he graduated with a Business degree. ‘I began with an accountancy qualification at Craig Gardner, now PWC. A period with the building firm Healy Homes followed before he decided that his future lay in developing his own business. The young entrepreneur engaged in a startup business handling and providing treatment for pharmaceutical residues. In 1996 he formed a business partnership with a long-time friend, Sean Moran that led to egg packaging ventures before a meeting in 1997 set the course for the future.
That meeting was with Martin Coughlan, a talented and creative engineer, who was making a major impact on the Irish catering equipment market with an innovative water boiler manufactured and distributed by his company, Marco Engineering. Marco had also developed the ‘Easy Brew’ coffee brewer which was a market disrupter due to its unique electronic system and affordable price. It established an initial market share when it was widely distributed by Bewleys Coffee Company to its hundreds of coffee shop, canteen and restaurant customers and was growing rapidly in popularity within the Irish foodservice sector.
When Martin decided to retire in 1998, he found a willing buyer in Drewry Pearson and Sean Moran. ‘I recognised the Marco product range had great potential and immediately began to develop sales in the UK’, he says.
Marco was an immediate success in the UK catering equipment market and Drewry was soon developing markets in Europe, the USA and worldwide.
Selling and promoting Marco products entailed exhibiting at catering equipment exhibitions overseas and in Ireland and it was this activity which introduced Drewry to the Catering Equipment Association and CATEX. ‘John Walsh invited me to join the Board of the CEA and what I found was an organisation whose principal activity was to run a trade exhibition every two years primarily for members and their customers’, he recalls.
The CEA had engaged Expo Events as event organiser for CATEX in the mid-1990s and from 1997, the lead role managing CATEX was filled by a young executive- Garret Buckley.
When Drewry met Garret, something happened. They shared a vision for CATEX which went far beyond its then format- a bi-annual gathering of the entire hospitality sector in which equipment importers would be joined by food producers, technology companies and service providers. They would invite participation from the wide hospitality family, including chefs, bartenders, waiters, hoteliers, restaurateurs, café owners, industrial and institutional caterers, educators, recruiters- and the newly-emerging community of baristas.
It did not come to pass immediately, but the Catering Equipment Association had already moved forward with a ‘Hospitality Week’ and a new exhibition in Cork. It had also hosted a meeting of EFCEM- the The European Federation of Catering Equipment Manufacturers, also held in Cork during that city’s tenure as ‘European City of Culture’. Links were also forged with CESA- the UK equipment suppliers’ body and with the EU lobby group ORGALINE.
The move towards a new era for CEA and CATEX gathered momentum in 2006 when Drewry was elected chairman, but just when plans were nearing fruition, the Irish economy all but collapsed in the banking crisis of 2008.
The CEA was faced with a choice of curtailing its activities or going ahead with the next CATEX, and urged by Drewry and Garret, with the lead of Julie Caves, the then Chair, it was decided to stage the exhibition in the midst of a major business downturn. Garret’s newly formed company, Evenhaus, was selected to operate the exhibition.
‘We realised that people in the industry wanted to know what was going on and what the future would hold. They wanted to come together to share experiences and to learn what the industry had to offer’, Drewry says.
Their courage was justified. CATEX was a huge success with numbers of visitors well up to precrisis levels, and although exhibitors were fewer, there was much to see and learn.
This re-energised CATEX also brought a significant development of CEA which was renamed the Irish Food Service Suppliers Alliance (IFSA) which reflected the changing membership which now included food suppliers, tech companies and several other service providers.
CATEX was now also an exhibition with a significantly broader offering, reflected in new competitions, not only for chefs but also sommeliers, servers and a large contingent of baristas who responded to the involvement of the European Speciality Coffee Association. Incidentally, this involvement also led to Garret and Drewry bringing the World Barista Coffee Championships to Dublin and organising the Coffee Association’s annual exhibitions and barista championships in many European venues from Gothenburg, Sweden, in the north, to Rimini, Italy, in the south, since then.
Chefs have always been an integral element in the success of CATEX. IFSA (and CEA) have hosted ‘Chef Ireland’, organised by the Panel of Chefs from the inception of the exhibition, but there was a growing feeling that chefs might also welcome more on-going gatherings. Research conducted for IFSA revealed that Ireland has more than 20,000 professional chefs most of whom were not part of any chef organisation. It was decided therefore to launch ‘Chef Network’ as a forum for all Irish chefs. The project was funded by IFSA and member sponsors and it immediately began to attract members who now number in excess of 5,000.
‘Chef Network’ has been a platform for chefs to meet, exchange views and experiences (and maybe a few recipes) and to work towards enhancing the public perception of the profession. Already it has developed the highlysuccessful ‘Open Kitchen’ which gives members of the public (of all ages) an opportunity to experience what actually takes place in a professional kitchen. There is also a website with a Members Forum.
IFSA were also instrumental in supporting the recent launch of Ireland’s World Skills Event which now attracts over 30,000 students and showcases 35 national apprenticeships from cookery to cyber security. Held over 3 days at the RDS , this event promotes skills and apprenticeships as a real career choice and with no surprise bearing in mind whose working behind the scenes, is built around a national skill competition format.
‘We have come a long way’, says Drewry ‘but we continue to look to the future. CATEX 2025 will focus on sustainability in our industry as we move towards an era of greater environmental responsibility’. CATEX always acts as a glimpse of the future for our sector.
In that future IFSA looks forward to being refreshed by new visionaries to lead the Association, its members, and the industry for the benefit of all.
As I leave Drewry and Garret , I can’t help recalling the old adage , “you get out what you put in “– and this pair seemed to have enjoyed the journey.
