This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Five Farms celebrates Ireland’s cream history
By Georgie CollinsWhen it comes to growing his Irish cream liqueur brand Five Farms, founder Johnny Harte says it’s all about telling a story. Speaking to The Spirits Business, he shares plans for world domination by way of Glastonbury Festival.

First launched in 2017, Five Farms is crafted with single batch cream sourced from cows that reside at five separate farms located in County Cork, Ireland. The mild climate and abundant rainfall in the region result in fertile farmland for the dairy cattle, which are known as ‘happy cows’.
The eponymous five farms were chosen for their location on a single truck route. Harte explains that the functionality of this style of production is an idea that he had evolved over the course of 30 years working in the Irish whiskey industry. “I had an idea and a brand name for the product, and a feature of the brand was for it to have a secure supply chain. I needed to isolate a batch, because I wanted it to be identified from a certain region or area. But I wanted particularly an Irish cream,” he says, noting that this had never been done before with batch production.
“I come from a very strong Irish whiskey background, and I’m really aware of batch production, so this was something that was rolling around my head for a few years,” he explains.

Harte says that to begin with, he didn’t concern himself with the commercial viability of his idea, but instead first wanted to see if it was possible. “I set out to do everything that I believed was the right way to do this, without having the commercial baggage on my shoulders, because I’d done a lot of that before.”
He explains that his aim was to determine whether he could make “the best of the best, or the most superior or the most genuine. I didn’t know if when I got to the end if it going to be commercially viable or feasible, but in the process, I stuck to my principles and was a little bit of a puritan in the respect of doing it the right way.”
To further set it apart in the category, Five Farms claims to contain 10 times the amount of Irish whiskey than typical Irish creams, allowing for an intensity of whiskey flavour. Harte says that the whiskey is sourced from a distillery in County Cork, which was his stipulation for the spirit, and was “chosen on the basis of its quality,” clarifying that rather than using a pot still Irish whiskey, he instead opted for a triple-distilled grain whiskey.
Telling Ireland’s cream story
Despite his extensive background in Irish whiskey, Harte says it was the lack of storytelling around the Irish cream category that motivated him to create Five Farms.
“There was a story about Irish creams that had been hadn’t been told for a long time, if ever told at all,” he says, noting that the tradition and heritage behind the making of Irish creams was not a significant part of the marketing approach for brands like Baileys, even though they had been around for a long time.
As such, Harte felt there was an opportunity to celebrate the tradition and heritage behind the production of Irish creams. “In Irish cream, you’ve got the whiskey, but you also have the whole cream story about looking after animals, the weather in Ireland, the variations and cream prices, all these things that made it a tough business to work in.”
Furthermore, he says, “I hadn’t been told about the animal husbandry that went into looking after cows to make the milk that was of the right quality. That was all not said and not discussed. So when I created Five Farms, I wanted to tell that story as a celebration of Irish cream. I didn’t know whether the brand would be successful or not, but I felt that there was a celebration to be had.
“I’d done plenty of celebrations on great Irish whiskeys and their awards and all that, but there was nothing equivalent on Irish cream that celebrated the tradition of making it in Ireland to the extent that it should have been. There was just lip service paid to it.”
Harte says that the brand has been extremely successful, “far more successful than I anticipated, particularly in Ireland,” and some of that success, he believes, can be attributed to the brand’s storytelling. “I think that the story of Five Farms has been embraced by the consumers who have discovered it. And they like that story. I could say that’s brought an interest in the character. We’re a long way to go yet, but we brought to the public’s notice the quality that is involved in making an Irish cream. There’s a craft involved.”

A very consumable product
According to CGA data, the cream liqueur category grew by 29.8% in 2023. Harte believes the category’s rise in popularity is the result of it simply being a “very consumable product”.
“Irish cream has been on an upward trajectory, maybe it’s because it’s a nice and friendly product. And I mean them all, in that sense, not just Five Farms. It’s a feel-good drink, in alcohol terms. I also think throughout the year, it actually lends itself to cocktails that have substance to them, that are not just easy, throwback cocktails,” he says, referencing the popular Espresso Martini while noting that Irish cream is a product also suited to “any non-alcoholic coffee or a coffee liqueur”.
Furthermore, Harte believes that the Irish cream category does not sit within one specific demographic of consumer, but rather it transcends all ages, genders and backgrounds. “The spectrum of consumers is incredible,” he says, explaining that while exhibiting the brand at the Ideal Home Show before Christmas, he observed the crowd and specifically the consumers that purchased bottles of Five Farms and realised that there was not one single socio-economic or ethnic group that stood out. “The people who bought the bottles from the stand were all age groups, all walks of life, all ethnic backgrounds. I mean everyone. And to me, after being in this business for 35 years, that was the first time I ever saw that.”
World domination
Last year, Harte said he expected the brand to sell 700,000 bottles globally in 2024, creating €20m (US$22m) in revenue. At the same time, he revealed his plan was to reach shipments of two million bottles in the next five years, with a sales target of €60m.
In August, the brand secured a UK listing with Sainsbury’s, the country’s second-largest grocer, and to facilitate that deal, Five Farms partnered with Sazerac.
More recently, in order to aid growth, Five Farms featured on the UK breakfast show Sunday Brunch, which Harte says was hugely beneficial for its consumer awareness. “That exposure and presentation on that show has a huge benefit to the brand.” However, he says that due to the nature of the way the product is presented – to a panel of guests tasting live on the show – “you’re leaving it out of your control, because everyone has their own view on it, and that view may be negative, may be positive, and I think it actually is a coming of age for a brand that can go on that show and be critiqued by people there.”

However, the product was considered a success, which Harte says gave himself and the team “a lot of confidence that we’re doing the right thing. [On these shows] you get an independent and pretty opinionated view of the brand. I think we were extremely happy with the way it was received and presented and commented on. Will that impact on our sales? I would believe yes – that recognition and our story would have caught the taste of someone that day, and if that person had been going out to buy another cream liqueur and bought ours instead, that’s even better.”
On a more global scale, Five Farms has seen success in its core markets of the US and Canada, as well as in the UK and on its home turf in Ireland. For 2025, the UK will continue to be a main focus of the brand, thanks to its current momentum. “People are starting to discover Five Farms. At [the Ideal Home] show, 99% of the people who walked up the stand and bought a bottle had never seen or heard of it before. So that just tells us this market is huge.”
While Harte says that ultimately his aim would be for Five Farms to play in the same league as competitor Baileys, he doesn’t want to spread himself or the brand too thin. “As much as I’d like to travel everywhere, all the time, all around the world, I know that would be a mistake, because you need to help grow the brand where people have endorsed it.”
Having said that, Harte says that the brand has begun distribution in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where the response has been “very positive”, and last year, the brand saw “huge success in some outlier markets, one being Denmark, so we have to keep an eye on those fledgling markets to support them.
“You know, you don’t need to be selling everywhere in the world. You just need to be selling well in five or six key markets, maybe 10. But the most important thing, in my experience, is that you support the customers that support you. So they get the best product, the best price, they get all the new ideas, and we bring something new to the table every year, if we can. So that’s how we do that.”
Going forward, Harte shares what his real vision of world domination would look like: “It would look like me having a stand at Glastonbury for Five Farms, which has always been my ambition. Glastonbury was always this idea for the brand. We do the festivals here in Ireland – not so much the rock festivals – but we do all the farming, the flowers show, the food shows, and we’re always a big hit there. So there you go, world domination would be Glastonbury beside the Pyramid Stage.”
Related news