Food Marketing & Entrepreneurship

Placement Testimonials

If you are interested in developing your passion for both business and food, this is the course for you. It will enable you to pursue your interests and ambitions in the most important home-grown sector in the Irish economy.

As a student in this course, we aim to develop your creative, analytical, communication and professional skills. You will learn how to gather market intelligence, interpret data from multiple sources, identify market opportunities and communicate with target markets via social media. This will support you in developing a skill set that fosters leadership and innovation.

You will get opportunities to test your technical knowledge (in both business and science) through projects and work placement. Skills such as working with and for others, responding to briefs, working to deadlines, using initiative, communicating and presenting in a professional manner will also be developed. These transferable skills will form an important part of your armoury when seeking employment and advancing your career in both the food and non-food sectors.

The programme offers a unique combination of business and the food and nutritional sciences. Our graduates are ideally positioned to take advances in food and nutritional sciences and translate them into real business opportunities by responding to market trends through the process of innovation. Furthermore, the programme is built on UCC’s international reputation in food education and research and includes many lecturers who are internationally recognised in their field of expertise.

Throughout the duration of the course, you will have various opportunities to engage directly with industry and work on projects that will provide you with real life experience and useful employability skills.

BSc Food Marketing and Entrepreneurship programme's recent partnership with the SuperValu Food Academy

Current students on the BSc Food Marketing and Entrepreneurship were delighted to participate in a recent partnership with the SuperValu Food Academy Food Producers programme.

The Food Academy is a longstanding Musgrave initiative that helps develop and support emerging food & drink brands by giving producers their first step into the retail sector. The SuperValu Food Academy promotes producers and their products in Supervalu stores across the country in a manner that is creative, local, committed to quality, and sustainable.

Throughout February and March, 1st and 2nd-year FME students, mentored by 3rd and 4th years, gained invaluable experience from working closely with Food Academy producers, providing expertise and creative input in the areas of social media, marketing, consumer & product market research and packaging redesign. Significant business benefits were realised by SuperValu Food Academy producers, with increased brand awareness and social media engagement, new packaging developments and better consumer insights allowing for more informed decision making.

Students learned what it means to be a food entrepreneur and experienced the passion, creativity, challenges and joys that entrepreneurship entails. In addition, the initiative provided students with the opportunity to develop their communication, interpersonal, creativity, and networking skills while applying in-class learning to real-life businesses. Our Food Business and Development Department and the BSc Food Marketing and Entrepreneurship degree is looking forward to a continued relationship with the Musgrave group and the Academy.

Non-EU applicants are expected to have educational qualifications of a standard equivalent to the Irish Leaving Certificate. In addition, where such applicants are non-native speakers of the English language they must satisfy the university of their competency in the English language.

To verify if you meet the minimum academic and language requirements visit our qualification comparison page and refer to our International Office page for more information.

The skills acquired will ensure that our graduates can position themselves to find employment in the thriving indigenous food sector and exploit career opportunities within fast-moving consumer goods markets both here and abroad.

International growth will underpin demand for graduates in areas such as consumer research, product marketing, key account management, and supply-chain management not only in Ireland but worldwide. And with suitable experience, there is always the prospect of setting up your own business!

The most recent Graduate Employability Survey (UCC 2020 Graduate Outcome Survey) points to 96% of graduates being in full-time employment or pursuing further study within six months of completing this degree. Many of our graduates commence their careers on graduate programmes with companies such as Kerry, Musgrave, Aldi, Kepak, Bord Bia, and IBEC amongst others. Career prospects cover a wide range of functional areas including Brand Management (e.g. Kerry); Social Media Marketing (e.g. Tesco); Buying (e.g. Musgrave, Aldi, Dunnes); Key Account Management (e.g. General Mills); New Product Development (e.g. Musgrave, Kepak); Category Management (e.g. Danone); Digital Strategy (e.g. Google, Lidl); State Agencies (e.g. Bord Bia); and Supply Chain (e.g. Sodexo).

A variety of masters programmes in related disciplines are available to graduates of the programme.