US Edition 
Meet the six Irish brothers making 20,000 mince pies a day
Run by six brothers, Genesis Crafty has grown from a village bakery to a hugely successful business that stocks M&S with its mince pies
The idea of six sons in your kitchen, baking, is probably every mother’s nightmare. But this is the fate that befell Mrs Roberta McErlain. Admittedly, she had brought it all on herself by deciding to launch a bakery in the family home in Magherafelt, Northern Ireland. Previously she had run a mobile grocery with her husband, Joe, but when her fourth son arrived, logistics demanded a more settled existence.
She set up the bakery in 1968, with a bank loan that depended on her husband using the £19 he was making each week at the grocery to pay for a baker at £17 a week. Two more sons followed plus one daughter, and soon Mrs McErlain had not only a bakery, but also a growing workforce in the shape of her children, who were, they were told, ‘earning their keep’ by getting up early and sweeping, stirring and rolling.
‘We started when we got to nine, getting up at 7.30am to help bag things up,’ Brian McErlain, brother number two and now the managing director of the company, says. ‘It’s like being on a farm; you just pitch in.’ By 1973 the older brothers were rising at 5.30am. ‘We’d be lying in bed in the morning and you’d hear Mum’s feet coming up the stairs – “Your daddy needs you in the bakery.”’ In the long summer holidays the brothers became so useful that the bakery began to grow. Later, if the baker didn’t turn up for work, they baked instead of going to school.
The business really took off in the 1980s, and by 1993 they had moved out of the village and into the present factory site just outside the town. Six weeks after they moved, their old bakery was bombed in the Troubles. ‘The whole roof lifted right off…’ By now all the brothers were working in the bakery, getting up at 2.30am. They became a limited company in 1996 and – a tribute to fraternal harmony – worked out their salaries according to which job they each held, based on the national average for that role.
‘Once you accept the differentiation between jobs,’ Brian says, ‘it all works well.’ The brothers, who are widespread in age (between 37 and 54), are remarkably similar-looking, and remarkably slim too, considering they all continue to bake, making them hard to tell apart – especially when, as one usually is in a bakery, they are all wearing hairnets. It is like herding cats to get them to stand still together in one place to have their photograph taken, but eventually they’re pinned down beside a stack of baking trays: Adrian, the oldest, in charge of dispatch; Brian; John, number three, who started baking tarts aged eight and went to bakery college and who is now in charge of product development; Paul, number four, the sales manager; Seamus, number five, known as the dynamo, who manages the floor; and finally Damian, the operations director. Between them they have 22 children, three of whom arrived only in October.
And what about their sister, Joanne, how does she cope? ‘Oh she’s very feisty,’ they chorus, ‘six brothers, one sister... We think that’s about the right balance.’ Strangely, Joanne has elected to work in another industry altogether and is married to a man the brothers refer to as ‘Saint Noel’.
Today the Genesis Crafty bakery – come in for a cup of tea and a scone, as it says cheerily on the door – still sits in the industrial estate on the outskirts of Magherafelt. It covers 50,000sq ft of space, 23,000sq ft of which form the actual factory – or bakery as the brothers prefer to call it. And in many ways it is more bakery than factory. Genesis, a name arrived at by a trawl through the G section of a dictionary, specialises in products that are, given the numbers produced, as near to home-made as possible. The recipes are simple and homely, often based on cakes and biscuits consumed by the McErlains as they grew up, and are almost entirely made by hand using local flour, butter, milk and eggs.
The McErlains employ 239 staff including a commercial director, Melvyn Bacon, who is not a brother – inhabiting a role not dissimilar to that of Bill Nighy’s manager in Love Actually times six – and make 150 products altogether: biscuits, cakes, pancakes flipped by hand on a hot plate, astonishingly good scones and a wonderful soda bread.
But at this time of year it is mince pies that are top of the agenda. In the run-up to Christmas they will produce 20,000 a day, with 25 to 30 people per shift working on them. ‘Made by hand’ has many connotations and interpretations in the food industry but in the Genesis Crafty bakery it pretty much means what it says. The pastry is made in a hopper and rolled to 1.5mm by a machine, but the rest – cutting the pastry, fitting it into moulds, smoothing the filling (sultanas, raisins, currants, kirsch-soaked cherries, roasted almonds, armagnac and cognac) – and putting on the lids is all done by hand. Though the egg-wash finish is squirted on by a machine, the final sugar topping is sprinkled by a person. And when the pies emerge at the end of baking, they look almost like the ones you might take out of your own oven – certainly near enough to pass them off as your own.
Genesis Crafty began supplying Marks & Spencer with mince pies in 2012. And this year they are also making a range of mini mince pies with a cranberry and orange filling and three different toppings: plain pastry; stewed cranberries with a strip of candied clementine; and chopped brazil nuts, walnuts and hazelnuts dusted in gold lustre. Nigel Lennox is the lucky chap who cuts up each clementine into 22 pieces, weighs out 9g of cranberries and nuts and places them on top of tiny mince pies, barely 4cm across. He has been with the company for 25 years and he still doesn’t like mincemeat.
The success of the Genesis Crafty bakery has meant expansion not only in the amount of products they bake, but also in the site. They are in the process of building a new canteen and development room, and have opened a shop in Magherafelt. This year they were given six Great Taste awards, and, having spent a day eating their products, it is not hard to see why.
Mrs McErlain died in August, aged 76, leaving her sons to carry on in her absence. ‘She was the driving force behind the business,’ Brian says, sadly. ‘She had a very good sense of taste. You’d say, “Here, Mum, taste that,” and she’d tell you exactly what was good or bad about it. Her last day here was the 30th of May, but before that she was in here all the time. She worked non-stop from beginning to end; she never really retired.’ She has left an impressive legacy of excellent baking and six dedicated sons behind her.
- Handcrafted Cranberry & Clementine Mini Mince Pie Selection, £5 for 300g, and Handcrafted Ultimate All Butter Mince Pies, £4 for 165g, made by Genesis Crafty, are available from Marks & Spencer (genesiscrafty.com)