IT all started on the family farm many decades back, when as a young lad, John Concannon had the job of feeding the suck calves and he thought to himself, ‘surely there has to be a better and more efficient way of doing things’.

A little seed was sown in the mind of John Concannon and years later he was the talk of his native Kilconly and Galway when he famously appeared with Gay Byrne on a December Late Late Show edition in 1987 to coincide with the launch of his multi-bucket feeder for calves.

While the late Gay Byrne might have zoomed in on the funnier side of the invention, this was a landmark moment for JFC and John Concannon – he had been launched on the national stage and as with all the best success stories, the rest is history.

Back in his first year of the multi-buckets, annual  turnover at JFC was a very modest £18,000, but by year three of the business opening, this had shot up to £120,000 and as new products came on stream, employment levels and turnover continued to grow.

Last Friday at its plant on Tuam’s Weir Road, JFC, officially launched a €25 million expansion programme to incorporate its new HQ as well as a state-of-the-art Research and Development hub.

However, as John Concannon told the Connacht Tribune, as in all walks of life and business, it hasn’t always been ‘plain sailing’ and he remembers a time back in the early 1990s when interest rates ‘went crazy’.

“That was a really tough time in business and especially so when capital was needed to expand. Interest rates were coming in at 14 to 15% and I remember a monthly rollover interest rate of up to 25%.

“I remember doing a deal with ICC [the Industrial Credit Corporation] where we got the interest rate down from around 15/16% down to 11% and that meant a lot to us at the time, but it was still money costing 11%,” said John Concannon.

‘Constant innovation’ is a phrase used regularly by John Concannon who now employ 165 people at their Tuam plant as well as nearly 600 more at their outlets in places like Poland, Belgium, Holland and Germany.

Pictured:John Concannon (centre) with his wife Patricia and children Miriam, Jonathan, Damien and Colin at Friday’s launch of the new JFC plant.