wonder which Parnell is? Perhaps both?)
Parnell is whippet-lean, tall, easily five nine or ten, and her fitted white coat is pristine. She looks rich. Probably because she is.
The success story of Parnell’s International Grocer is familiar to Irish people. Back in 1996, Jessie Parnell, a fresh-faced 26-year-old from County Galway was just home from a holiday in Vietnam. A passionate cook in her spare time, she decided to recreate gỏi cuốn, a dish she’d fallen in love with there. But it proved impossible to source most of the ingredients in Dublin.
‘These were pre-internet days,’ she reminds me. ‘Ireland wasn’t multi-cultural the way it is now. If they didn’t have the stuff in Super-Valu or Dunnes, you simply couldn’t get it. I saw a gap in the market.’
It’s everyone’s dream: sitting at your kitchen table and coming up with an idea for a killer business. All the best ideas are simple ones, but maybe you need Parnell’s dynamism to act on it.
‘Around then, Irish people were starting to travel to the Far East, places like Thailand and Japan, and sampling what my dad would have called “food with notions”. I felt they’d want to start cooking those cuisines.’
So how did she set up her business?
‘I was working for a food export company, I’d met a few key people, so I knew where to source products.’
At the time, she had two years under her belt as a salesperson with Irish Dairy International.
Parnell getting a job with IDI was no mean feat: back then, their biggest customer was Saudi Arabia, who had a policy of not negotiating with women. In light of this, IDI had been reluctant to interview her.
But, according to Aaron Dillon, head of HR, as soon as Parnell walked through the door, he knew she was special. ‘Full of energy and optimism, very much a team player. Always smiling, always sunny.’
(Photos from the time show a healthy-looking young woman with fair hair, freckles and big teeth. You couldn’t call her beautiful, but she was bursting with vitality.)
‘Not everyone liked her,’ Aaron Dillon admitted. ‘The word “pushy” was used, but I reckoned she’d go a long way.’
Two people who did like her were two men who began working for IDI that same year – Rory Kinsella and Johnny Casey, her first and second husbands respectively.
‘That pair made a great team. Rory was the solid one and Johnny had the charm,’ Aaron Dillon confirms. ‘Both brilliant at their job.’
And both in love with Parnell, if the rumours are to be believed.
Parnell won’t be drawn on that. But, as Johnny Casey has been quoted as saying, ‘I was in love with her for her entire marriage to Rory’, it’s probably safe to say that they are.
Parnell drew up a business plan for her proposed business, which she cheerfully admits was a fiction. ‘I did a five-year projection,’ she laughs, ‘but I had no idea if I’d survive the first month.’
Nevertheless, she must have talked a good game, because she got a bank loan.
‘In fairness, in those particular days,’ she reminds me, ‘banks were very keen to lend.’
In late 1996 in a small shop-front on South Anne Street, Parnell’s International Grocers opened their doors for trading. Much has always been made of the look of the store. Over the lintel, the old-fashioned mirrored sign with curlicued gold-leaf lettering looked simultaneously novel and as though it had always been there. Instantly, it guaranteed confidence.
Inside the store, Parnell featured recipe cards and cooking demos. The staff was knowledgeable about what to cook with those adorable little jars of Saigon cinnamon or Burmese salt-cured anchovies.
Of course, Irish customers paid a hefty premium for the privilege of buying these ingredients, which could have been picked up in the markets of Birmingham or Brick Lane for a tenth of the price.
Parnell is unapologetic. ‘I was paying the carriage, the Customs duty, and I was taking all the risk.’
From the very moment it opened, PiG (as it quickly became known) enjoyed a brisk trade. From today’s vantage point, it seems a no-brainer that Parnell’s International Grocers would be a success – a newly sophisticated population, richer than at any other time in their history.
But Parnell says it was nothing of the sort. ‘I’d given up my job to work full time on getting the business off the ground and my flat was my guarantee for the loan. I could have lost everything. I was petrified. It’s an audacious thing to set up your own business. Plenty of people would have