Leonie Lynch attended Hospitality Expo, a trade show at the RDS in Dublin last week, to encourage more hoteliers and restaurateurs to put Juspy on their menus.
If all goes to plan, guests could find her protein and collagen powder by the kettle in their room, alongside the teabags and coffee.
It’s an indicator of how mainstream functional foods have become.
All food is of course functional, we need it to live. But food products that come with additional benefits — from inducing sleep to banishing anxiety — are forming an increasingly tasty business sector, worth more than €250 billion globally, and growing.
Lynch, a Pilates instructor, developed Juspy as a post-natal recovery drink. Now she markets it to “busy, tired women who, like myself, were drinking too much coffee and eating too much chocolate”, she says.
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Juspy can be mixed into a shake or baked in recipes, and contains only natural ingredients, each selected to provide a particular function, such as marine collagen to aid joints and ashwagandha, a plant, to reduce anxiety.
Best of all, she says, “it tastes like a Kinder Bueno”.
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She launched the product in 2018, which turned out to be “five years too early”, she says. However, over the past 12 months, the market has caught up.
“It was only at WellFest last year, a health festival, that people started noting the word ‘collagen’ on my packs. The term ‘functional foods’ itself only recently started to pick up.”
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Yet in other markets the notion of “biohacking” — making small changes in diet to help with everything from brain function to longevity — “has become a whole cult. It’s massive in the States”.
Mary-Thea Brosnan, founder of Kerry Kefir, has also seen significant growth in the past year. The revenues for her fermented milk business last month were double those of January last year.
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Brosnan, a former optician, set up the business as a result of her experiences with irritable bowel syndrome.
“It was a nutritionist in Dublin who talked about kefir for IBS and I just thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ll try anything.’ I’d done all the diets by that stage. Within one week of starting to drink kefir it completely transformed my digestion,” she says.
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So successful was it that in 2018 she decided to buy kefir grains, the starter culture, and ferment the live, probiotic drink herself.
“I’m still using the same grains I started with. As a real live culture I have to feed them with fresh milk every day. It’s like having a pet,” she says.
She believes she developed IBS because of a surfeit of antibiotics as a child. “It wiped out my microbiome but there just wasn’t so much talk of probiotics at the time,” she says.
She sells Kerry Kefir locally through SuperValu and health food stores nationwide, and via an online subscription service. “Sales are on an upward trajectory. We are now planning to expand our production facility,” Brosnan says.
Ill health similarly prompted Fergus Kerrigan to set up Ethos, alongside Amy O’Flaherty.
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In 2018, while working as a business consultant, Kerrigan suffered a nine-month period of chronic fatigue and headaches. “It catapulted me into the world of health,” he says.
A functional medical practitioner, an alternative to a traditional GP, diagnosed him with “leaky gut”.
As well as cutting out dairy, “which it turns out I was hugely intolerant to”, and cutting down on sugar, a big part of the solution for him was cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychoactive ingredient derived from cannabis, also known as hemp.
“I was importing it from the USA and felt there was an opportunity to grow hemp here, to do it all, end to end, in Ireland,” Kerrigan says. He and O’Flaherty set up Ethos in 2019 to offer a range of CBD-based supplements, teas and oils.
This year he is focusing on stress. “After three years in business, we recognised that at the core of our customers’ health issues — be that poor sleep, inflammation, weak immunity or anxiety — was stress,” Kerrigan says.
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Ethos has launched a new drink, Resilience, which includes vitamins, nutrients and adaptogens, such as herbs and mushrooms, that are believed to help with stress, energy and cognitive performance.
The company sells online and through 250 health stores and pharmacies, as well as retailers such as Avoca and Donnybrook Fair. It also exports to the UK, Spain and Malta. This year Kerrigan hope to sell through supermarkets, as wellness products become more mainstream.
There are challenges. “You have to be careful about your claims,” he says, pointing out that Brussels has set out a list of health claims that can be made about health products.
Another issue is that local enterprise office supports are not available to CBD-based businesses.
On the other hand, demand is growing. “The pandemic helped grow awareness of health massively,” he says.
There is significant opportunity for products that focus on gut health, according to James Burke, manager of the Dublin Food Chain, a producer network.
“That notion of food as medicine is growing,” he adds. “We are at a much earlier stage in this category than the US or other markets, but we are seeing many more cases of products in which science and food are combined.”
Bord Bia has a tender out for research into gut health opportunities. “Consumer interest has been piqued but they still have a lot to learn and, in a world awash with health claims, proliferating gut health products and microbiome messaging risk adding to the noise and confusion. As such, there is a lot of opportunity, but a lot of challenges prevail,” it says.
That tallies with Catherine Mulcahy’s experience. She launched Your Beauty Tonic, a marine collagen nutraceutical, in 2012. Three years ago she stopped. “That’s the problem when you are a first mover,” she says, explaining that it took too long for the market to catch up. Today she is a consultant for a number of businesses in the wellness space.
She advises start-ups that functional foods require extensive customer education, which in turn requires a marketing budget.
It includes ensuring customers understand that such products are not a quick fix but take time. “It’s not like a topical product you can see immediately. You have to communicate that to customers, to ensure they stick with it. It also has to be affordable enough to enable them to do that,” she adds.
For Lynch of Juspy, gearing up for Future Beauty Show in March, as interest grows, so is the competition. She adds: “People are saying, ‘Let’s ride this wave, because it’s going to be huge.’”
