New Innovators

Safe Food Healthy Business is a new food safety education app aimed at food businesses worldwide developed by environmental health specialists Emer Murphy and Michael O'Rourke.

The idea for the app was born in August 2012 when Murphy was reviewing the high number of food business closures in Ireland and around the world due to serious breaches of food hygiene regulations.

“We started looking at the food safety apps already on the market and could see major room for improvement,” Murphy says.

“There were a lot of gaps so we spent several months building up a list of absolutely everything we thought an app of this type should include to be of real help.

Best practices
"At the heart of the app is a wide range of best practices for food handling. These include what rules apply when setting up a food business, food allergy management in your business, information on all the latest food alerts worldwide and how to tackle key health issues such as a food poisoning outbreak, pest control and guidance on E.coli management.

“There is also a directory of food safety consultants. The main app is free but we charge €10 to download HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control points) templates.”

The development of the content and software took about six months and the app was launched in February 2013 via the iTunes store.

Murphy says finding someone to build the app was the biggest challenge. “We self-funded this project and our budget was tight and we were getting quotes running into serious money,” she says.

“We spoke to about 10 companies in Ireland but couldn’t afford them. It was also very difficult to tie people down on costs. Neither of us has a technical background so we were on a steep learning curve.”

'Horror stories'
"It was quite intimidating especially when you hear horror stories about ideas being stolen and so on.

"We did a huge amount of research on overseas developers and eventually ended up with a guy in India who has been great. Our USP is that there is no other food safety app offering what we are offering in terms of content."

The cost of developing the app worked out at about €10,000 and since it launched it has been downloaded across Europe and in the United States, Australia and Asia with localised content.

So far there have been more than 10,000 downloads with about 500 downloads of the paid element.

“Any money it make will be ploughed back into expanding the content as our primary aim is to make it as good as it can be.

“We have another few ideas in our heads. The biggest deterrent to developing them at this point is cost,” Murphy says.