Nutrasy – Mini-Company Showcase

Q1. Describe the Company
Nutrasy is a recipe book tailored to people who have medically restrictive diets due to medical conditions such as Crohn’s Disease, IBD ,coeliac disease and lactose intolerance. There are a variety of recipes from starters to mains and deserts. At the end of each recipe it states what medical condition the recipes are suitable for. For the Crohn’s and IBD recipes it includes that these recipes can be based off of your specific diet. These recipes are not just for people with medical restrictive diet they can be for everyone!

Q2. How are you unique?
We feel that we are unique as we have not seen any recipe book that has recipes for people with restrictive diet. We have only seen recipe books that are gluten-free only or vegan only etc. We feel that medical conditions such as Crohn’s and IBD are very common but are not spoken about. We feel that there are no books suitable for people with these conditions even though they are very common conditions there are over 40,000+ people living in Ireland who have Crohn’s IBD coeliac disease and lactose intolerance. We feel that we made a unique product as we found a niche in the market for a recipe book suitable for people with medically restrictive diet.

Q3. How did you come up with the idea?
We were inspired to make this idea as Laura Ryan (myself) has Chrohn’s disease. I was diagnosed when I was nine, I was straight away put on a restricted diet but I could still have my usual meals. However, in second year I got very sick and my doctors in Crumlin hospital in Dublin thought it was best to put me on a very very restrictive diet that was part of a medical trial. This diet made me go back completely to basic foods such as chicken, potatoes, carrots – only basic foods. I found it very hard to come up with delicious nutritious and easy meals for dinner time. I would mostly every night have a roast chicken dinner and that was all. I wish that we had our book back then when it was such a hard time. So that is how we were inspired to make our book.

Q4. Where are you based?
We are in mini company in transition year from St Marys Secondary school Nenagh County Tipperary.

Q5. When did the company launch?
As part of our TY enterprise module we and and two other companies did a book launch in our local hotel the Abbey Court Hotel Nenagh as we wished to gain publicity on our books. The launch went very well and many people in Nenagh found out about our book and our are sales are going through the roof at the moment and we are gaining more and more followers on our Instagram page and Facebook page we are doing very well and the launch of a book was a great idea . We launched on the 5th of March.

Q6. Who are you target market?
Our target market are the people who are struggling with a medical restricted diet. I myself know how hard it is to come up with easy nutritious and flavourful recipes. We found the gap in the market and we have made a brilliant product that we feel would benefit people with medically restricted diets and anyone in general. Our book isn’t just for people with restrictive medical diets it is for everyone.

Q7. Tell us about your team
There are only two of us in our team. In my team there is myself, Laura, and my best friend Megan Dooley. We chose to go on a two-person team as I feel that Megan understands my condition very well. By being in a two-person team we kept the roles of different jobs easy to maintain. We could equally split the work we have to do and there was no troubles while doing this.

Q8. What are the long term plans for your company?
Right now we are going into the Griffith college student enterprise competition. We have been Shortlisted to be part of this competition. Nine companies have been chosen so this is a big deal for us. We hope to gain lots of publicity by taking part in this competition. For the future we hope to expand our business. We hope to make more books including more medical restrictive diet.

Q9. How can people get in touch with you?
As we are only a school mini company we are only small so we don’t have any website. However we do have a growing Instagram page which I will leave listed below we also have a growing Facebook page and Twitter page. If you would like to buy a copy of the book we have our email attached to these pages or you can private messages us on these social media accounts and we can send books to people who wish to purchase it.
Our Instagram is: nutrasy2020stmarys
Our Facebook is: nutrasy
Our Twitter is: nutrasy1

Our book is €10 with 15% of all profits going to CMRF Crumlin as they have helped me so much with my journey with Crohn’s Disease.