Keelings Fruit and Veg Plant looking to ‘Grow’ Their Business

Fruit and Vegetable growers in St. Margarets

David visited Keeling’s Fruit and Vegetable growers, who are based in St. Margarets near Dublin airport, today Wednesday 28th April. On their site, you can see hundreds of acres of crops growing in the open air and in huge greenhouses. They crops include Strawberries, Peppers, Apples, Flowers, Bananas (Ripening) and many others.

Keelings are currently employing 700 workers from crop pickers to drivers and administration staff. The knock on affect of this business is that suppliers, who are all well known high street retailers, can avail of home-grown Irish Produce and sell at competitive rates to compete against other international non-Irish competition. They want to be able to employ more people.

David visited Keelings with a delegation from Fingal County Council to tour the facility and to listen to their future plans for growing their business. They currently operate under an Agri-business status. However, they propose to change this to Food Park which will facilitate the setting up of a specialist hub of crop-growing merchants and a focal point of food-crop production in Fingal. This will bring down excessive costs within the industry and make use of these valuable lands adjacent to Dublin Airport with excellent roads like the M50 and the N2/N3 that can help supply chains and connections with Dublin port.

These proposals will be brought before the next round of meetings for Fingal County Council’s Development Plan scheduled for September 2010.

I hope you find this information useful and should you have any thoughts on these proposals, I would be delighted to hear from you.

Check out the Photo Gallery of today’s visit and look at some of the Lovely Strawberries that I had the pleasure of eating!

David