Enterprise award for ABC Nutrition

SHANNON company ABC Nutrition took the overall prize at last week’s National Enterprise Awards, which are organised by the County and City Enterprise Boards.

ABC Nutrition manufactures and exports nutritional powders, vitamin capsules and spray vitamins to 13 countries, including France, Spain, Sweden and India. It now employs nine people and recorded a 50% growth in sales this year.
Willie Wixted is one of the founders of the company and he said the award is a great boost.
“What it does for us is give us extra credibility with our customers. We deal mainly with people overseas and when they look us up online now, they’ll see that we’ve won the National Enterprise Award. It’s a huge boost for morale as well, at a time when you don’t hear much more than bad news.”
The company began operations in January 2007 and he said it has been a success story to date.
“I had a food background and I’d worked in a nutrition company. Sean McNamara and Lorraine Gunning set it up with me and they had experience in this area as well. A Latvian guy called Atis Vitolins was involved too. The four of us got it going.
“We’ve gone from four employees up to nine now and we’ve one contractor as well. In four years it’s not bad and hopefully we’ll continue to grow. We have opportunities at the moment and I’d be very optimistic about the future.”
Their products benefit athletes and sports people. “We have our own brand in the Irish market called Complete Supplements. What they basically are is products that a lot of GAA and rugby teams would take. They’re to increase your strength, your speed or your stamina.
“The products are primarily based on dairy ingredients that we’d get in Ireland. We’d buy off Irish dairies and formulate them for whatever the requirement of the athlete might be, whether it’s energy or building strength.”
A number of household names have used products that were developed in Shannon, according to Willie.
“We’d have developed products for Rocky Elsom, the captain of the Australian rugby team. We’d have a world middleweight boxer in the UK Carl Froch, who we’ve done products for. A number of GAA teams take products. The Meath team two years ago would have been taking them and this year Benny Coulter, who played for Down in the All-Ireland football final would have been taking some of our products.”
He said there are several other areas of nutrition that the company is looking at moving into.
“We’re hoping to expand the sports nutrition side and there’s a few more areas that we’re looking at getting into. We do weight-loss programmes, which we sell through pharmacies in Ireland and the UK and we’re hoping to get into elderly nutrition, it’s in the pipeline. We won the Bord Bia small food business of the year award last year, so it’s a good progression to win the Enterprise Board’s award this year, which isn’t confined to any sector.”