20 Years of Cully & Sully
There is an old wives tale that many food professionals like to trot out to prove their chops.
“I learnt to cook hanging on my granny’s apron strings” they say, and it may be true and it may not be.
But what is true is the fact that a young Cullen Allen learnt about the food business through working with his granny, Myrtle Allen. In the early noughts, the two compiled, designed and published two books entitled Local Producers of Good Food in Cork.
And then Cully took it from there, establishing the food brand Cully & Sully with his friend, Colm O’Sullivan. Cully & Sully is an atypical food brand in a world where brands are often almost entirely fictional, created by megacorporations who select a name and an image suggested by some advertising company, then bash together some food concept to fill a gap on the supermarket shelves.
But Cully and Sully both do the heavy lifting. For instance, during the search earlier in 2025 to find the chowder winner for their Souperb Award, the pair had a day that began in Westport. The team (which we were a part of) then crossed the entire country eastwards to Rostrevor, but the lads had engagements early the next morning in County Cork, so they left Rostrevor late in the afternoon to head due south. Then, the next morning, they had to be in Cork city centre where we met them for the final visit in the awards. That’s a pretty murderous schedule by any standards.
The guys have been doing those heavy schedules for two decades now, and have produced a neat, funny book to mark 20 years in business. It has their classic recipes – the pea soup; the haddock and salmon chowder; the fish pie. These are dishes we know well, because our kids lapped them up when they were younger, especially the shepherd’s pie and the chicken and vegetable soup. We still own some of the ceramic dishes in which the original C&S recipes were sold.
The book also points out the many initiatives that failed along the way. There was the apple pie that failed to launch, the pub food that tanked due to distribution nightmares, the spectacularly misconceived puddings in handbags(!), the hotpots that came and went.
Regardless of the failures, C&S have always been about new initiatives, new ideas, and they drove those initiatives with the force of their personalities, even after the brand was acquired by the US conglomerate Hain, back in 2012.
Their engagement with various charitable communities – GIY; Chef Factor; Clean Coasts Ireland – means that Cully & Sully has always had a youthful, up-and-at-’em spirit, the twenty year old brand that feels like a toddler. They have always understood that making and selling food creates an emotional bond with the customer, and it’s this that has set them apart.
We have had great fun doing the Souperb Awards over the last two years, working with the cinematographer Joleen Cronin who filmed our seafood sojourns, and the enormous audiences her films found on social media showed just how involved people are with C&S. The winners in 2025 were the brilliant Melissa and Roisin from Feast in Rostrevor, whose chowder and brown bread are truly food for the Gods.
Cully and Sully: 20 years a part of the fabric of Ireland’s food.
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