Andrew Lynas, 44, is managing director of his family’s business, Lynas Foodservice. His grandfather started the company in 1951, as a fish shop in Coleraine, before his father expanded the business to selling frozen foods to restaurants, cafés, prisons and hospitals across Northern Ireland. Andrew took over the business at 27, growing its portfolio further to the Republic of Ireland and Scotland, as well as expanding the product range.

In addition to its traditional customers, the company also supplies brands such as Pret A Manger, Caffè Nero and KFC. It had sales of about £200 million last year. Andrew is now working out the impact of Labour’s reset deal with the EU, which should see the removal of border checks on most British food exports to the EU.

Brexit made everything more complex and more expensive

No one thought through the practical implications of Brexit. The past five years have been us, as Northern Ireland businesses, from flowers to trees to food to everything in between, figuring out pragmatically how to make this work.

I now have a customs team, a department that I didn’t have before. It’s just added increased cost and complexity.

The reality of Brexit was we always knew there was going to be a border somewhere. We obviously really didn’t want it north-south, probably east-west was the better of two evils.

The joke I always find is there’s loads of paperwork to bring goods from Great Britain into Northern Ireland, but we send goods to Scotland every single night on the boat and I don’t get paperwork [that way]. All this paperwork going one way and none going back.

We had a 30-year relationship with a supplier and it changed overnight. And then the rules kept changing. At least the Windsor Framework [reached in February 2023] gave us some level of clarity.

Supply chains had to change, sometimes it made the products better

We had to move away from British suppliers. If we didn’t move away from them we increased paperwork, increased order frequency, lead times, and it just became a hassle getting goods.

For example, Parma ham comes from Italy but it then lands in Great Britain. Then when it goes into the Republic [of Ireland], Britain is treated as a third country. We couldn’t make that work with tariffs and duties.

When one door closes, another door opens. We had to stop working with that prosciutto supplier, so we then went to an Irish supplier. Now we’re actually going directly to Italy, which has actually got us a better product.

Sometimes by being forced to look at another door, you actually get better supply. You get more direct supply of the product. We had the same supplier year after year, so maybe it has forced us to look outside the box a little bit.

Storage had to increase and customers lost out

Part of it is just carrying more stock. We used to buy tuna and we didn’t need a container’s worth at the time. There’d be someone in England who had a big warehouse and they’d buy ten containers and we’d buy five pallets at a time. We couldn’t do that any more. So we had to buy a container direct from Indonesia, or from wherever it was in the world. So that’s more cash out, that’s more space taken up.

We probably carry, on average, half to three-quarters of a million extra stock because of Brexit. That’s just a financial hit that we have had to take.

That was a huge workaround that a lot of businesses did. And because, historically, we brought goods up via the Dublin port, we would use more Irish consolidators and more suppliers. So the irony is that it actually made lots of businesses in Northern Ireland more European.

One of the other lessons is that the Northern Irish consumer, and I would say the wider Irish consumer, has lost out. It costs more money from customs declarations, to veterinary certificates, to extra stuff, which has to be passed on.

The future is brighter

I’m really positive about the EU trade deal announced in May. I think the direction of travel is really good.

Everyone now thinks, “this is all great”. But it’s at least 12 months away from being in legislation and probably 24 before we actually see how it pans out.

It looks great, but we’ve also now made the changes in our processes. We don’t just want to switch back either, because we’ve now built new relationships. So it’s not as simple as people are implying. But it is good news.

Northern Irish businesses can handle a lot

You can lobby to your heart’s content, but sometimes you’ve just got to get on with it. I genuinely think businesses across the spectrum have been incredible. We have dealt with the Troubles. We have dealt with lots of different issues in this small part of this island of ours, and I think we have just got on with it. It’s amazing how pragmatic and resourceful we have been. We just got our heads down and we cracked on and figured it out.

The biggest thing is that you will always find a solution. When you lose 85 per cent of your business in ten days, like we did in Covid, you will survive anything.

Andrew Lynas was talking to Niamh Curran, reporter at the Times Entrepreneurs Network