Cronan McNamara is the founder of Creme Global, an Irish firm with most of the biggest food companies in the world as clients. Here he talks about running a global business from Ireland and what more can be done to encourage entrepreneurship.
It’s nearly 20 years ago when I started working within the food safety sector. It’s funny while taking physics in college if someone had forecast the industry that I would be working in – I probably never would have believed it. However, the food sector is an exciting area; lots of data; lots of interesting work from agriculture to the finished product; issues ranging from shelf life; to food safety; to working on areas like the microbiome and DNA sequencing.
I always had an interest in maths, science and building things and so studied physics, because of the mathematical element and the real world nature of it. I also started to enjoy the computing side and followed with an MSc in Computing. After college, I began working in financial risk analysis, writing financial-risk software for derivative options pricing.
“Cash is king. We avoided investors, which I would recommend if you can.”
Later, I met my former professor, who at the time was working on a food-risk analysis project, linked with the Trinity Innovation Centre, which involved working with multiple partners across Europe. I then decided to go back and work on the technology, developing the next generation food-risk analysis system for Europe. It was delivered using web-based software, which was quite innovative at the time. This work became the genesis of Creme Global, which then subsequently evolved as a Trinity spin-out.
“Build your product as lean as possible, get something out onto the market, iterate and build on that.”
What was your first major project?
From a consumer and nutritional perspective, we were involved in an IBEC
