For most people food is one of life’s pleasures, but for those with swallowing difficulties (dysphagia) caused by medical conditions such as cancer, MS and Parkinson’s, eating can become problematic. Having worked in the aged care sector for 10 years, chef Niamh Condon had seen the problem at first hand. This inspired her to set up Ocras, which produces individually-portioned, texture-modified food for people with dysphagia.
Condon’s partner in the business is Siobhán McNulty, whose background is finance management in the hospitality industry. McNulty is an experienced entrepreneur with two start-ups already under her belt. The cofounders met through a Women in Leadership course and have been working on Ocras since 2022. The business, which employs four, will have its official launch at the end of September.
“I’d been thinking about the idea for about eight years but lacked the courage to do anything about it. Meeting Siobhán changed that,” says Condon, who also acts as a training consultant for dysphagia cooking in healthcare facilities in Ireland, and set up Dining with Dignity to train chefs in food modification for healthcare environments in 2019.
“Currently, 8 per cent of the world’s population (590 million people) have been diagnosed with dysphagia and lots more are struggling at home without a diagnosis. I never held with the view that those with dysphagia only need their food in purée form and that if they won’t eat the solution is to give them a supplement. As a chef, I hated to see them not enjoying their food and I also felt uncomfortable about the amount of waste. I felt there had to be a way to give people a rewarding food experience that looked better, tasted better and had a proper mouth feel,” Condon says.
To educate herself further about the finer points of nutrition, Condon studied food science at TU Dublin during the lockdown. “We subsequently got in touch with Teagasc and they were a great help with recipe development, as were Cornell University,” she says. “We got innovation voucher funding from Enterprise Ireland and great support from Cork North & West local enterprise office and the Leader programme. To date, we’ve spent around €350,000 between our own investment and outside funding.”
The company’s products are designed to be easy for facilities such as care homes and hospitals to use and either come ready to be reheated from frozen or to thaw and serve. The food has to be prepared to different levels of “softness” to suit the severity of the dysphagia condition and the product line-up includes bread, biscuits, scones, potato waffles and a range of vegetables.
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Ocras will train catering staff in the use of its products and one of its first customers is the stroke unit at Cork University Hospital. The company is making everything on site at its facility in Clonakilty and using a distributor for sales and order fulfilment.
“For the last while our focus has been on building up a stock of products and my intention is to train staff to be able to work without me so I can get on with other things,” Condon says.
“What we know from our testing is that the food sells itself once people see and taste it. It also frees up time for catering staff, it makes it easier for kitchens to comply with health and safety requirements, and it provides the chef with a choice of individual elements to which they can add their own flair, so we’re not taking away the opportunity for creativity,” Condon adds.
“It also gives dietitians scope to customise meals for their clients by adding something like a protein topping. Individual elements work better than serving full meals because with a full meal a person is stuck with whatever meat and veg is in the meal whether they like it or not.”
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