Irish Women in Business: Sara Mitchell of Poulet Bonne Femme

For the latest in the new series of editorials on Her.ie on Irish Women in Business, we’re chatting to Sara Mitchell who, along with her other half, set up the first rotisserie chicken business in Ireland. Here, Sara talks about building the business from the ground up and how it felt launching the first shop in Avoca.                                                                 Food has always been an interest of mine. From a very young age I spent a lot of my free time cooking for friends and family but I never thought about working in the food industry. I feel really lucky that I am now and that I am surrounded by food and people with a real passion for food all day. I find this really inspiring and encouraging. My husband was made redundant in 2008 and we had just had our first child. It was proving almost impossible to find work back then so we started to look at new start-up business ideas. We looked into various ideas but Poulet Bonne Femme was the one that made the most sense to us and it was also the idea that took off first! We used all the money we had to custom build our first trailer (a kitchen on wheels) and opened in May 2009 in various farmers markets around Dublin and things have gone from there. In 2011 we opened our first retail shop in the Avoca in Monkstown, County Dublin. At the very beginning the idea was to get back working and to try and make a little money at the same time. Quickly we realised there was a real business growing and we invested everything we made back into expanding. We bought a second trailer three months after opening so we could do double market days and evening events. Poulet Bonne Femme has grown from a trailer at a farmers market to three retail outlets in under four years. That couldn’t have happened without a lot of hard work and sacrifice and some very loyal customers! At the same time it has been a lot of fun and we have met some really wonderful people. I suppose I always believed that it would succeed otherwise I don’t think I would have made it through the first few years, however when I stop to think about where we are now I am always surprised and delighted. I think the toughest time was probably the very beginning. Getting a business off the ground and the first few weeks of trading was very difficult but we had huge support from family, friends and loyal customers, and that’s definitely what kept us going.    There have been so many great moments but I think opening our third store in Avoca, Suffolk Street must have been my highlight.  It gave me a real sense of achievement expanding into the city centre and developing our product offering to include new meats and delicious salads. Poulet Bonne Femme is the only rotisserie in Ireland offering delicious, high quality free range meat directly from the spit to its customers to either take home for dinner, eat in a sandwich or salad for lunch or eat in the Avoca restaurants. I am very excited about the future of Poulet Bonne Femme. We hope to develop our current concession model as well as expand our product offering. There is so much to be done and we are lucky to have a wonderful team of people working with us to help us achieve this growth. For more information on Poulet Bonne Femme, check out their website here or Facebook page here. To suggest other great Irish women to feature in this series, please drop us a line to editorial@her.ie