First the factory: Potatoes tumbling from machine to machine, being washed, sliced, fried, inspected, flavoured and bagged. Crisps pouring down chutes to emerge as supermarket brands or as Hunky Dorys, King or Tayto. Largo founder Ray Coyle agreed last week to pay 62.3m for the Tayto brands, but has made the crisps at the factory for nearly a year anyway.

The things you learn: A 'kettle chip' is so called because the gourmet crisps are cooked in kettle-like vats. Coyle put 12m into upgrading machinery last year. A camera-equipped gadget kicks crisps of the wrong colour off the line.

Bags not sealed properly are flipped automatically into bins. Box loading has gone fully automatic.

Then there's the chance to taste. In September, crisp lovers will get to pass judgment on Hunky Dorys Crackers, a 'healthy' crisp made from cassava. I already agree that the crucial "taste and mouth feel" are good.

Coyle's team is also working on 'pitta chips'. He got that idea from New Zealand. "We're looking at wellness, obesity options, " he says.

Healthy options account for only 12% of the snack market, but Coyle says they represent Largo's "biggest opportunity". The market for baked products such as pitta chips is growing by 15%20% annually, compared to 3%-4% for the overall snacks market.

That said, core snack buyers will probably be more excited by next January's launch of Hunky Dorys French Fries, which Coyle promises taste "exactly" like McDonald's chips when microwaved.

Once the Tayto deal goes through, expect the brand to be leveraged to launch new products. Coyle will have to keep using his imagination if he is to withstand the onslaught of Walkers on the regular crisps.

He couches his talk about Walkers very diplomatically, which is not surprising. Who would want to go to war with Walkers' ultimate owner, FritoLay? Then there is the Competition Authority to think about. The authority will have to approve the Tayto takeover, which is probably why Coyle stresses that Tayto is "a declining brand against a multinational player".

Tayto's market share has dropped from 85% 15 years ago to around 36%, as against Walkers' 33% and Hunky Dorys' 11%. In the five years since Walkers entered the Irish market, Tayto's share has dropped from 55%. Nothing C&C did stalled Walkers, which has a 70% market share in Britain.

"What we hope to do is hold on, with the support of the Irish consumer, to the market share we have, but we anticipate losing a little per annum, " Coyle says.

The business plan allows for losing 2% market share a year, though he is planning "innovative" marketing strategies.

You might wonder why bother to buy if the scenario is grim, but there were three rounds of bidding, the price was higher than expected and Coyle beat competitors including Jacobs Fruitfield, DCC, Tayto Northern Ireland and Close Brothers.

For his money, Coyle gets two good brands, Tayto and King, and extra distribution capacity. He is a specialist, while Tayto accounted for just 4% of C&C's turnover, he points out.

Anyway, scale is necessary to survive. Coyle bid unsuccessfully for Golden Wonder earlier this year. Was he disappointed? "Not a bit, " he says. "I was interested in it at a price. Golden Wonder is a purely own-brand business and is very sensitive to pricing."

Coyle's behemoth supermarket clients include Aldi, Lidl and Tesco and they are tough customers. He says the real money is in branded products and there is money to be made if you do it right.

Last year, Largo turned in a net profit of 1.3m on turnover of 55m, after writing off the machinery investment.

Coyle expects turnover of 80m this year and up to 105m next year, and is so busy that he is expanding his facility.

The target is 8% net profit.

The acquisition of Tayto marks a major milestone for Largo, which came from small beginnings in 1983, when Coyle opened a factory on land owned by his father. He made Thrift crisps for Superquinn three days a week with a staff of nine. If you take 30g as the average bag, Largo now makes more than 11 million bags a week between plants in Ashbourne and in Gweedore, Co Donegal. The company has 22 Irish growers supplying potatoes.

Coyle was once a grower himself, supplying Tayto and Perri, but ended up in £1.5m hock to the banks when the price of potatoes collapsed. In July 1982 he became the first in Ireland to sell a farm by lottery. Mike Murphy did the draw on TV. "I put the farm in Bellewstown for sale and was making £280,000 because it was a forced sale, " he says. "I decided to raffle it instead and sold 5,000 tickets at £300 a ticket."

Back in the black, he subsequently bought the Perri name, then launched Hunky Dorys in 1987. "I wanted a name that would carry into the UK and I registered Hunky Dory and Okie Dokie, but Okie Dokie never worked."

In 1996, he bought the old Sam Spudz factory in Donegal. "Everyone was let go before we bought it and we re-employed 19 people with the intention of closing it within a year, but it worked out well, " Coyle says.

Grant aid from Udaras na Gaeltachta helped get the show on the road. A staff of 260 now work in Gweedore, which accounts for over 40% of turnover.

Ashbourne employs another 240 people.

Forty percent of all Irish production is exported.

There is also a nine-year-old factory in the Czech Republic. "I had a bit of spare cash and a lot of second-hand machinery at the time, " Coyle says.

There is a newer one in Moldova in partnership with a former employee. The IDA and Enterprise Ireland still own 10% of the business, and Coyle bought back ICC's 10% stake some months ago.

The price of that, he says, is a "state secret".

Coyle is just back from Odessa where he was trying to do a distribution deal.

He enjoys the sales side of things, and if ever he misses farming there is comfort from his hobby of breeding buffalo.

In what turned out to be an excellent publicity stunt, he imported Ireland's first buffalo herd some years ago and now has about 270 of the giant beasts. "They can run up to 40 miles per hour, " he tells me, giving a (less than a minute) jeep chase to a two-ton bull to demonstrate.

He tries convincing me that he kills a buffalo every so often to flavour the Hunky Dorys. Yeah, right.

The Tayto acquisition is at the sober side of things. Coyle has just lobbed in planning permission for a wackier venture: the Hunky Dorys Indian Way on 70 acres beside the Ashbourne factory.

Coyle reckons it will be a great marketing ploy. He imagines bus loads of Dublin school kids coming to see teepees, totem poles ("we'll import them from Canada"), buffalo and other exotica . . .

and getting a tour of the crisp factory to boot. Definitely Wonka-like style.

CURRICULUM VITAE
RAY COYLE (54)
Newsworthiness: Buying the Tayto brand from C&C for 62m
Background: Meath potato grower turned crisp and snack maker
Personal: Married with two children (son Charles just finished his Leaving Cert and is driving a forklift at Coyle's Largo Foods before heading off for the summer)
Hobbies: Buffalo breeder. "I've started learning golf but I don't like it"
Interesting fact: First person to sell an Irish farm by lottery
LARGO FOODS Owner of snack brands including Hunky Dorys Factories in Meath, Donegal, the Czech Republic and Moldova Net profit of 1.3m on turnover of 55m in 2005