Entrepreneur stories: NOURYSH

Isobel Collini and Richard Tyler joined Launchpad in September 2022. They are the founders of NOURYSH a digital family cooking platform. We caught up with Isobel to find out about their Launchpad journey. 

Tell us about your business idea

NOURYSH is a platform designed for busy working families to empower them to eat well and build good food habits with their children. The idea came from a sense of the growing backlash against the mass industrialisation of our food industry and the harm ultra-processed foods are doing to our health. We believe that understanding whole foods and cooking from scratch is the best way to ensure good nutrition.

Wellness is a fast growing sector, and diet is one of the most impactful ways to improve your health. We see a gap in the market where families with young children are offered very little in regards to convenient meal planning or recipe box services, and we aim to create a useful product where the free resources give parents the confidence and headspace to cook at home regularly.

Eventually we want to provide insight and guidance around meal choices to give parents the tools to achieve their dietary goals; whether that’s to eat more veg, reduce the amount of meat, or simply get off the junk food.

How have you been validating the idea and what has been the feedback so far?

We are building our free content and community with a newsletter, blog and Instagram including family friendly dinner ideas, recipes and fun family activities. We’ll be launching a Facebook page soon too where we’re looking to launch Q&As with food educators and chefs in order to help us explore and understand the market further.

We’re still working on developing the tech that will allow us to offer the Premium NOURYSH subscription service of meal planning that will create the same convenience of meal kit brands, but at supermarket prices. It’ll be more sustainable, more flexible and will work out around 50% cheaper than HelloFresh.

What skills do you both bring to the team and how are you working together?

We’re both pretty chilled out but happy to put the hours in. My professional background is in strategy and planning for premium fashion brands and I have a Mathematics degree, whilst Rich has worked in start-ups and is a business grad. We’ve found it pretty straightforward to split up the workload. I’m focussing on product strategy and marketing whilst Rich works on network building and tech development.

What is the focus for you over the next few months?

We need to continue to build our community and finalise the brief for our website build and launch plan.

What have been your highs and lows so far?

The journey has been full on, but it’s amazing to look at what we have done since starting from nothing in October. Each time we discover a new competitor in this space can feel like a real low initially but this is an incredibly dynamic market, and a lot of the new ideas and technology coming through are really exciting so it’s great to feel part of that.

What would be the one bit of advice you’d give to someone thinking of starting their own business?  

Remain flexible, roll with the punches and seek out people and activities that keep you in a positive mindset. Oh, and “don’t ask, don’t get” so on that note please sign up to our newsletter to follow our journey at nourysh.co.uk! 

Visit the NOURYSH website