Fighting food allergies before it was fashionable built Narelle Plapp a $5m business
If it seems food allergies are more common than they used to be, the latterday success of a business like Melbourne’s Food For Health is proof you are right.
Hospital admissions for severe allergic reactions have doubled over the last decade in Australia, according to the Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy, and food allergy now occurs in around one in 20 children and one in 50 adults.
However, when naturopath Narelle Plapp began selling allergy-conscious muesli from the back of her car in 2005, the word “anaphylaxis” (the medical name for a severe allergic reaction) was far from the household term it has become.
“I lost a niece to anaphylaxis while I was still at school, and that sparked my passion for spreading awareness about food allergies,” Plapp says.
“Non-sufferers need to be educated as much as people who have allergies, because cross-contamination is one of the biggest problems.”
As the business of fellow Melburnian muesli-maker Carolyn Creswell boomed in the second half of the 2000s, Plapp’s higher-priced niche product struggled for traction beyond health food stores.
“I’ve never made excuses for being a premium product,” she says. “It’s expensive to make things that are genuinely healthy as well as gluten-free. For instance, not having glucose in our muesli bars presents a manufacturing challenge.”
The early years were tough, but Plapp says they meant she was in the right place at the right time when Woolworths finally came knocking.
“As the increase in food allergies got more press, the major supermarkets started showing some love to the health food category,” she says.
In 2011, Woolworths invited Food For Health to participate in a direct-to-store trial at two Sydney locations.
“They would buy a handful of each of the three SKUs I had at that time – I remember the first order was $80 – and if it had sold enough at the end of three months they would range it nationally.”
Plapp lost money on the trial itself, as her business was then still at the point where she dispatched the product via Australia Post. However the currency of claims like “gluten-free”, “nut-free” and “dairy-free” had by then risen to the point that the trial was successful, and within a year Food For Health was ranged nationally in both Woolworths and Coles.
Food For Health turned over more than $5 million in 2014-15, and returned to profit after three years of reinvestment to expand the product range and meet the capacity requirements of the major supermarkets.
“I used to be one product in, one out, with the majors but now we’re at the point where we have eight SKUs and they are giving us incremental distribution,” she says.
With Western diets high in processed foods a major contributor to food allergy, Plapp has also found export markets for her mueslis and muesli bars in countries with large expat populations.
She credits two Austrade-subsidised trade missions for helping to build this part of her business, which now accounts for 7 per cent of revenue and growing. Dubai is the offshore territory where Food For Health sells most, through the Spinneys supermarket chain, for whose newsletter Plapp writes regular diet advice, and explains some of her more exotic ingredients like slippery elm, amaranth and teff.
Source: Business Review Weekly, Michael Bailey, July 28th 2015
Originally published as: Fighting food allergies before it was fashionable built Narelle Plapp a $5m business
