"People thought it was a joke, " she tells me in the company's Rathgar location. "Aw, the husband sent you out to work. It wouldn't last six months, they said."

Nearly 20 years and five additional shops in south County Dublin later, cordon bleu chef Bergin has more than proven the begrudgers wrong.

She anticipated the trend of chilled ready meals before almost anybody else. Now companies like Greencore are eager to follow her lead on an industrial scale.

But Bergin's product continues to be made entirely by hand without any automation.

Beginning with staples such as shepherd's pie, the menu has grown through the years to include, in winter, wild pheasant with glazed apples and calvados or maple-mustard marinated salmon with dill aioli for your barbecue grill this summer.

In the early years it was a couple of hundred units a day. Now it's between 2,500 and 3,000 units a day. Staff has nearly doubled from just three years ago to 62 now, and the company scaled up the amount of space it uses for preparing food. In 1999 it had just 500 square feet. In 2001, it took possession of 1,800 square feet. Now it has expanded further, to premises with 5,500 square feet, giving it capacity for even further growth.

In 2005, The Butler's Pantry had a turnover of just under 3m, growing some 8% on the previous year and doing twice as well as the industry average. Revenues are growing on track at around 20% this year, Bergin says.

Now Bergin and fellow company director Jacquie Marsh, who joined as an equity partner in 2000 after helping to launch multinational retail brands here as well as a stint in Enterprise Ireland . . . where among other projects she helped set up Ireland's first salmon farm . . . are poised to launch Butler's Pantry as a national brand.

By the end of 2007, they plan to open four more shops in the greater Dublin commuter belt. After that, expansion will lead to openings in Cork, Galway, Kilkenny and possibly what Bergin calls a "like-minded" midlands centre like Mullingar. The pair reckon there is sufficient demand to support up to 25 retail outlets across the island of Ireland, including two in the North.

Simultaneously, they plan to open a shop in Britain in a London suburb . . . Wimbledon, Richmond or Notting Hill.

The trend towards convenience food, driven by smaller-sized families and a higher percentage of households with two earners out all day at work, looks set to continue. Indeed, convenience food has become far too popular, in the view of one of its early pioneers.

"On average, people will only cook a meal from scratch once a week, which is very scary, " says Marsh. "Going out, buying the ingredients, coming home, cooking them. Once a week?"

She shakes her head.

"The other six nights of the week they're going down the convenience route, which has huge implications. In a sense that's great for us, but there are convenience junkies out there.

The decision what I'm going to eat is now made much later in the day. In our parents' day there would have been a once-a-week supermarket shop and the menu would have been planned for the entire week. People are shopping three or four times a week now, people are deciding, what am I going to eat tonight, as a last-minute decision."

But the same demographic bulge, revealed in Ireland's census data, that is driving up house prices and crowding maternity wards wants to be able to cook at home . . . only to find that they lack the basic skills. Hence the explosion of celebrity chefs and cookery programmes.

"One of the reasons for that is that people aren't even taught how to boil an egg, " says Bergin. "You have a generation of women, who are mothers, family makers, who don't know how to cook. They don't know how to pass that skill to their sons or daughters coming up the line. So the chain has been broken in terms of preparing meals for the family."

The pair feel they are well-positioned to take advantage of the trends and to grow quickly. "We have the right management team, " says Bergin. "We have the capacity. We have a platform for growth."

The decline in insurance costs has been a boon for the business. Like most businesses, however, they have found it's been more than offset this year by skyrocketing energy costs, with the planned ESB rise of 20% and 34% from Bord Gais. "But we can't afford to let that affect the growth plan, " says Bergin. "We'll have to become more efficient in other areas."

"The biggest difficulty about the expansion plan is finding the right locations, " says Marsh.

"Footfall is key. The first location on Mount Merrion Avenue in Blackrock is right next to a wine shop. The right location at the right time, preferably close to a village centre, is key."

Bergin says that no matter how fast they expand, "we aren't using machines. But we are much slicker and efficient with our prep".

As Ireland's hunger for convenience shows no signs of slowing, Bergin and Marsh can count on our appetites to keep feeding their growth.