Macamore Buffalo Farm

Buffalo farming

Liam Byrne, a 4th generation farmer and his wife Sinead started their water buffalo farm in January 2016, with a view to bringing something unique and natural to the Irish Market.

To date Macamore Buffalo Farm has focused on local and regional supply. This has provided the opportunity to develop logistics of slaughter, butchering, packaging, branding and supply chains. This has been a development and learning period which has enabled a strategic review to assess growth, scalability and profitability of the Macamore Buffalo Farm.

Developing a Strategy for Growth and Innovation

A strategic review commenced and a series of facilitated design workshops were conducted by Design+ to scope and frame the existing resources, capacity and expertise in the company. These workshops captured the existing state of play and processes which Macamore have developed in order to analyse problem areas and barriers to growth. Follow on workshops for Ideation were conducted to identify new opportunities for innovation and growth within the company.

The findings from the strategic review highlights that Macamore have established logistics of high quality product delivery. However, it has been identified that local and regional supply in Wexford is affected by seasonal trends (summer- primary trade). The local and regional supply has also been based on multiple small orders which are less profitable to deliver /supply. In order to address this, the Dublin market was identified as one potential higher value, non-seasonally affected target market.

Macamore are now supplying Donnybrook Fair and Ardkeen Stores as next stages of development. In developing the Dublin market larger volume and quicker turnover, the company can begin planning for NPD and next stages of growth. The follow on Ideation workshops were designed to capture possible ideas for NPD and areas of future development. Multiple ideas were captured and evaluated including destination site, expansion of onsite shop and a series of new products. Many of the ideas required additional capital investment and expansion. Evaluation using strategic design tools identified the most viable product for development. This provides opportunity to develop own recipe and create entirely new product by Macamore Irish Buffalo. This opens sales to new markets, doesn’t require investment in additional stock and is a smaller product with higher value per kilo.

The Macamore Buffalo Farm & Design+ Technology Gateway partnership

The workshops have provided insight into existing state of play, identified means of stabilising revenue and identified a new product area for development and future company growth. A strategic roadmap has been created which provides the steps to implementation, time scales, resources required, critical factors and milestones.