The revolution will be pear shaped

TWIN GOALS Dave and Steve Flynn of The Happy Pear spoke about the aims and benefits of their healthy-eating revolution during their visit to Westport last week. Pic: Michael Mc Laughlin

Neill O'Neill

IF you have ever chanced upon the Happy Pear twins you likely came away dizzy from the encounter. The Flynn brothers are, quite simply, positively buzzing with life. With their effervescent, outgoing and happy demeanour, they practise what they preach while spreading their healthy-eating and active-lifestyle revolution across Ireland.
They might be the Jedward of the health-conscious world, but their Happy Pear concept is also a clever and growing business empire, of which Stephen and David Flynn are the founders and face.
SuperValu brand ambassadors, the duo were in Westport last week for a display and demonstration at a customer appreciation night in O’Connor’s SuperValu in the town. It was a busy fly-by gig, but the twins also found time to take a swim in the nearby ocean with local food guru and Mayo News food contributor Redmond Cabot!
“We’re here doing a demo, celebrating healthy food and inspiring people to eat more veg,” Dave explained, with Steve chiming in across him. The identical twins talk so much and so rapidly, that this reporter found it impossible to distinguish which of them was speaking when listening back to the recorded interview. No matter – the message from both is uniform and clear.
“We are SuperValu ambassadors for the second year, and it’s great fun. We have lots of similar values to SuperValu and are trying to get the nation cooking more from scratch and eating healthily, through demos, creating recipes, shooting videos. We recently made a video where with one-hour prep time and spending €19.40 in SuperValu, we were able to make food for the whole week. That video is on Supervalu.ie.”
The pair, who radiate health, explain that they are vegans, and point out the cost advantages of the lifestyle: “If you think about it, meat or maybe cheese or even chocolate is the most expensive item in the average shopping trolley, it’s never veg.
“We are trying to start a healthy-eating revolution. We’re opening our third café next week in Clondalkin in Dublin [they already have two in their native Greystones]. We started the whole business to inspire people to eat healthier, be happier and be part of their community, and SuperValu has many similar brand values, so they are great to work with.”

Lifestyle business
The Happy Pear story began in the 13 years ago in Greystones, with the brothers having decided that a lifestyle change was needed several years previously. They switched from a ‘regular Irish diet’ to a vegan one and introduced other lifestyle changes, such as yoga at sunrise and starting each day with a 4.30am swim in the sea.
At 37, both have young families but they’ve managed to ensure their Happy Pear business, based solely around healthy lifestyle and vegan and vegetarian eating, has taken off on a meteoric trajectory. They now employ 160 staff
As Stephen and David are on the road a lot of the time and busy fronting the essential PR, television, cookery-demonstration and social-media sides of the business, their father stepped into the company as interim CEO after they secured a €1.5 million loan late last year. Another brother serves as their operations director.
The first Happy Pear cookbook – the twins refer to it as ‘the yellow one’ – was publisher Penguin’s first cookery book, and a huge success. Chefs who sell off the back of TV shows can expect to sell a couple of thousand copies they say, so Penguin went with a run of 6,000 copies expecting to sell it over ten years. To date, it has sold over 100,000 copies. The follow up book (the blue one) has also been a massive success.
The brothers were on a different career trajectory in the early 2000s before a lifestyle decision changed everything. As if to prove the popular belief that twins are often in sync, Stephen and David made that decision simultaneously, but independently, while on different continents. Dave had been planning to become a professional golfer in South Africa, while Steve was working as a snowboarding instructor in Vancouver.
“After college we were about 21 and had travelled and spent a couple of years abroad and ended up changing our own diets … We used to play a lot of semi-pro rugby and were total meat heads, but by changing our lifestyle and diet we felt so much better. We thought ‘This is deadly – there could be something in this’.
“But we work hard. It is not that we are just out having a good time meeting people; it’s like a duck swimming: it might look like it is cruising along, but under water the feet are going pretty quickly. We start at 4.30am and won’t finish until midnight, and we work seven days a week … We have been building momentum for 13 years now. It takes time and awareness.”

Real deal
On behalf of the sceptical, I ask if it is all a façade, a ruse to keep the tills in Happy Pear Land ringing, but the twins are adamant that they have been on a vegan diet for 16 years without missing their old ways at all. “When your whole life is set up to support you eating healthy, our bad day would be pretty much better than most people’s good day. We are surrounded by it.”
So do they ever let their hair down and socialise? “We both have young families, so life is a social life, and when you’re the face of your business, life and work is all a blur. This morning we had a swim at 5am, we have a friend who trains us in strength and flexibility, she did a session with us, and then we had a couple of meetings, and it was three-and-a-half hours to get to Westport. We meet people, do a cooking demo and will travel back home tonight again … that is work. So doing something social after that is the last thing we’re thinking of. We’ve been meeting people all day. I guess we really just love what we do.”
Some who lead active lifestyles may think they could not get by on a vegan diet, but the twins say look at Venus and Serena Williams, or Novak Djokovic.
“There are so many vegan athletes out there, one of our friends is among the top 25 fittest men on the planet and vegan; Nate Diaz [who beat Conor McGregor] is a vegan. Sure elephants, giraffes, rhinos and even cows and sheep are all vegans.
“In Ireland we tend to think it’s all about meat, potatoes and carrots on a plate, and if you take away the meat you’re going to become emaciated somehow. It’s not the case. We wouldn’t live this lifestyle if it didn’t genuinely work for us and make us feel so good.
“But you don’t have to be a vegan or vegetarian, it is about eating more whole foods. And look, if you have your burger, enjoy it – we’re all going to die anyway, you’ve got to do your best and enjoy life; you won’t get any extra marks for being pious and righteous.”
And with that, and ahead of their cookery demonstration that evening in O’Connor’s SuperValu in Westport, the twins and their boundless energy literally raced off to Red Cabot for that swim in the Atlantic – their second dip of the day – one on the east coast and one on the west.