Food data management specialist Nutritics has been named digital technology company of the year at the 33rd annual Technology Ireland Industry Awards. Founded in 2013 by brothers Damian and Ciarán O’Kelly, Nutritics helps hospitality and food service operators run safer, more sustainable, and more profitable businesses.
According to the judging panel, “Nutritics represents the pinnacle of Irish technology scaling globally. They earned this award by deploying a proprietary data engine and advanced sustainability analytics that are setting new benchmarks for transparency and impact across the food industry, proving that digital innovation can lead internationally.”
“What truly set Nutritics apart was their exceptional balance of innovation, discipline, and purpose,” says Una Fitzpatrick, director of Technology Ireland, the Ibec group that represents the technology sector.
“They have translated advanced technology into a proven model of sustainable, recurring growth, building a loyal international customer base and a highly motivated workforce, all while making the food industry safer and more efficient. The Nutritics platform captures and verifies complex data such as allergens, nutrition, provenance, environmental impact and cost from across a customer’s supply chain.”
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“Our core business is to help hospitality and food service businesses to be safer and more profitable,” says Nutritics group chief executive Stephen Nolan. “We take complicated information from the supply chain. We gather data and bring it into back-of-house recipe and menu management systems. Our customers can push that information out to consumers through websites and so on.”
The company supports a variety of subsectors in the food service and hospitality industry, including industrial caterers, hotels, restaurants and so on.
“Our customers typically tend to be large food service companies and hotel and restaurant chains with a need to be compliant with laws and regulations and who want to give their customers a great experience,” he says. “They already operate under a huge regulatory burden and there is a lot more coming.”
Customers include Wagamama, Nando’s, Compass Group, Cote Brasserie, Wetherspoons, Fullers, Aramark, Emirates, Patisserie Valerie, Starbucks and a host of other household names.
“We really got going when the allergen information regulations came into effect in 2014,” says Nolan. “Our solution enables these businesses to stay compliant with food law. Legally, many of them need to show allergen and other nutritional information on labels and so on. In other cases, restaurants have to display calories on menus. We support them with accurate and reliable data relating to the cost of products, their content, their environmental impact and so on. For example, our solution can calculate the exact carbon footprint of a company’s supply chain. They can use that to select products for climate impact, for example.”
It can also be used to improve the consumer experience. “If the business has a website, they can put all information there for customers to see. They can view real-time menu information and look for different options to suit them. It’s very much an end-to-end food data management system.”
Data quality is key. “The way we approach it is fundamentally different to others in the market,” says Nolan. “Traditionally, companies build the technology first and think about data later. We think about data first, and data quality comes first. All data goes through more than 30 checks before it goes near customers’ systems. If you don’t do that, everything is built on sand.”
The business is growing strongly, with 95 per cent coming from outside of Ireland, says Nolan. “About 70 per cent in UK, 10 per cent in the US, another 10 per cent in the Middle East, and 5 per cent in other markets. We continue to see a lot of opportunities in the UK market to support hospitality and food service businesses there.
“We are now turning our attention to the US. There are some very exciting regulatory developments there. For example, the state of California is mandating allergen display for restaurant chains with more than 20 sites. That opens up a whole new market for us. Allergen and other disclosure requirements will continue to evolve and open up new opportunities like that for us.”
He says being named digital technology company of the year has been hugely exciting for everyone in the organisation. “The Technology Ireland Awards are genuinely the World Cup of the Irish tech industry. There is no more credible award you can get. In the past, we have won the emerging company, the product of the year and other awards, and I’ve often thought how I’d love to win the company of the year award one day. This year was the first time we went for it, and it was a lovely surprise to win it. Everyone in the team was hugely excited by it. We’re really thrilled to be recognised and appreciated.”
