Shay's Story

My dad loved food. Not in a passing way — the man was put on this earth to feed people.

He was the life of every room he walked into. Loud in the best possible way, inappropriate in the most loveable way and absolutely convinced that any occasion — no matter how ordinary — was worth celebrating properly. If there was food involved, Shay was involved. And if Shay was involved, you knew it was going to be a night.

He trained as a chef when he was young and carried that instinct his whole life. At home, at a BBQ, at Christmas — it didn't matter. Whatever he cooked, people asked the same question — what did you put in that?

He always had an answer. Just never the full one. Sometimes because he'd thrown things together on instinct and couldn't fully retrace his steps. Other times because he simply wasn't handing over the secret sauce. That was Shay.

Food was in his blood. His family had been blending spices long before it was fashionable — a recipe that found its way into sausages and onto Superquinn shelves in the 1990s is as good a place to start as any. Three generations later, not much has changed.

Shay was always ahead of his time. In the early 90s he was batch cooking and freezing family meals before anyone had a word for it. Later he launched a group buying scheme years before Groupon made it mainstream. He reverse engineered a salt and chilli seasoning years before spicebags were a household staple in Ireland. He had ideas that were always just a little too early for the world to catch up with.

And then, after he was gone, he finally went viral.

That's Shay. Always one step ahead. Even at the end.

When he passed, he left behind something none of us expected — a moment that stopped the world and made millions of people smile through their tears. If you haven't seen it, watch it above. That was him. That was exactly him.

He also left behind his recipe book. Handwritten, page after page of barely legible scrawl — a lifetime of flavour captured in a notebook that only he could fully decipher. We're still working through it.

Spice Man Shay is my way of finishing what he started. We're launching with three of his premium Irish spice blends built for the fire, the feast and the people around your table — made in his spirit, not in his memory.

It took a legend to get us here. Now get cooking!

— Shay's daughter