Nestled at the foot of Slieve Martin and overlooking the shores of Carlingford Lough, a family-run chocolate factory is quietly making great strides with its business.
Nearynógs is the brainchild of Shane and Dorothy Neary, a business started in unorthodox fashion, centred on and powered by family.
Originally started out of a need to find a business that allowed them to take time to look after their sick daughter, it is now Northern Ireland's only bean to bar craft chocolate making company, situated in Rostrevor.
Read more: NI club for people with special needs celebrating 50th anniversary
It originated from Dorothy using an old family recipe to make chocolate fudge for a friend's fundraiser and evolved into creating chocolate for weddings, before eventually becoming a full business in 2011.
"One of our daughters became quite sick, she was two at the time and we had to go to Great Ormond Street quite a lot and local hospitals for treatment," Shane explains.
"So basically her doctors there told us we'd have to do something flexible for employment for the next 12 months as her treatment was going to be quite intense and quite random as to when she would need treatment.
"We decided to work out how much chocolate we would have to sell each month to make ends meet and we did that - I quit my job, we started making a business out of it."
It was a labour of love at the start, with inventive ways found to get the final product on the shelves.
"I wouldn't recommend this as a way to do business, but we got a few credit cards, bought some pieces of kit to get us started and found a supplier who would sell us cocoa beans," Shane added.
"They came in the post, didn't smell anything like chocolate so it was then a bit of an adventure in how to turn these sour smelling fermented beans into chocolate.
"We were using our oven in the kitchen at home, rolling pins and hairdryers to take the shells off, pillow cases and things like that, so the kids would be walking in wondering what was going on."
The business evolved when they were able to attract investment after a meeting set up by a mutual friend and, in 2018, they moved into their current factory in Rostrevor which has three commercial sheds and a house built on - allowing the couple to care for their daughter and run the business.
It is also the site of an old potato farm historically and was a location they had to work hard for over a year to secure.
The name Nearynógs is quite unusual and Shane explained that it ties together the family name with some memories from his own childhood that he looks back on fondly.
"We wanted it to call it something that meant something to us," he said.
"Neary comes from our family name which is Neary and in my childhood, my dad used to write these stories about these children called the Nearynógs.
"The nogs part comes from Tír na nÓg, which is a Gaelic word for the land of the eternally youthful, it's about these kids that go on these adventures into a Narnia-type place.
"We didn't realise it would become like a proper business, but the name just stuck."
Importing cacao beans from the likes of West Africa, South America and other far-flung locations brings with it ethical considerations and it is something that is important to the couple, with Dorothy recently returning from Uganda to meet some of the farmers they work with.
"We work with a lot of Togo cacao, I think it's really profound that what goes on is so far away, it might be there or it might be in Tanzania, we also work with cacao from Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua, Madagascar, but it's really important that we source from farmers that we know," she said.
"There's a level of trust and relationship there, it's all ethically and sustainably sourced and slave-free."
Shane reaffirms that commitment to making sure that the people they work with are not being exploited and said it was something they had to learn about early on and keep track of, as slavery instances can be a problem in some countries.
"It's just someone who works in the farm who's not in ideal conditions and they're not getting paid and that can happen very subtly and very quickly - but if the farmers have enough money, they will hire people because they understand the benefit of that in their communities," he said.
"It is a problem and it still exists today, so once we started learning about this, we thought we have to do something, we can't just do what everybody else is doing, we need to pay these guys what they're worth.
"It's a good symbiotic relationship, they give us a really good product and we pay them above market value.
"We've about 14 farmers that we work with and they're all doing really interesting things on their farms to benefit their communities."
Dorothy said that global approach to their business opens up the flavours they are able to create in their chocolate products too.
"Different flavour notes are pulled from different origins, so if I take a Madagascar chocolate for example, I might get really bright red, fruity notes, sweet fruity notes," she said.
"If I jump to Ecuador, I might get tasting notes more like caramel, a toffee, banana.
"Even different cacao beans themselves, have different flavours so if someone says they've tried cacao nibs and didn't like them, we say well different origins have different flavour notes, so it might be good to experiment a bit.
"I think I wasn't making chocolate for very long and one of our younger daughters was sick in hospital, so chocolate was a little bit like chocolate therapy.
"It was interesting and amazing to try out different origins and different beans and where it came from."
The business is thriving for now with tours of the factory available and the couple say they are keen to promote South Down as a hotspot for tourism, with various breweries, food tours and beautiful scenery to offer.
READ NEXT:
- Darkness Into Light sunrise walk to support Kilkeel mental health charity The Well
- Co Down woman opens up on debilitating migraines and breaking the 'just a headache' stigma
- Newry sunken boat removal linked to electricity power cut during GAA quarter final
- Hillsborough to get one of four specially decorated postboxes to mark coronation
For all the latest news, visit the Belfast Live homepage here and sign up to our daily newsletter here.
