Irish entrepreneur on a mission to make frozen pizza healthy

Emi Takakura grew up between Dublin and Tokyo and credits this cross-cultural upbringing as the inspiration behind her interest in food innovation. Even as a little girl she was experimenting with food ideas and started baking and selling cookies at the age of seven. She founded the hot chocolate company Spoond in 2021 and is about to launch a second food venture, Slice of Life, offering a range of nutritious, calorie-conscious pizzas with half the fat of conventional versions.

“Our aim is to ‘healthify’ the outdated frozen pizza category without any compromise on taste,” Takakura says. “Our USP is that we are the world’s first high protein, high veg content pizza – the two benefits that consumers seek out most in ready meals. The crust is veg and protein rather than a traditional bread dough. Our pizzas contain three of your five-a-day recommended vegetable servings and our 10-inch pizza has 550 calories, which is 31-40 per cent lower than existing products at the same weight.”

Takakura has a background in the food and drinks sector. She has an international BComm with Chinese studies from University College Dublin and started her working life as a finance intern with the Kerry Group in Shanghai. She then spent time with Jameson in Japan and subsequently worked as new product development manager for Gem Pack Foods in Ireland.

Takakura began teasing out the concept for Slice of Life in late 2021, and the product has been in development since with the assistance of food innovation expert Dr John Collier, the company’s head of product.

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“It’s been difficult to create a product that tastes really good and comes with this many health benefits, but all the tester feedback has been incredibly positive,” she says. “Apart from the time spent on the product, we have also invested a lot of time in the branding, because once you’ve made a healthy product that tastes amazing, you have to be able to communicate that on the box.

“Sustainability is also really important to us,” she adds. “All our veg is grown in Ireland, we source all of our other ingredients from Irish suppliers and production has been outsourced to a small company here. Our packaging is 100 per cent recyclable and we’re aiming for net zero by 2030. Our sustainability and marketing strategies were both developed by branding expert Matt Bentley.”

Bentley is a former marketing director of Green Isle Foods, whose remit covered Goodfella’s pizza.

Investment in the business to date is about €120,000 between personal and family funding and contributions from Dublin City LEO and Enterprise Ireland. Takakura has also recently been through the Bord Bia/Teagasc Foodworks accelerator, which is aimed at food companies with export potential. “We are not actively looking for investment at this minute but are open to talking to potential backers and will be looking at a funding round in the new year to drive our growth,” Takakura says.

“The plan is to launch in Ireland with three flavours to begin with in the coming months and entry to the UK and the Netherlands markets will follow. Globalisation is one of the key pillars of our business strategy as with the relatively small population in Ireland, we have to look through a global lens. Caulipower [a US-based food business making pizza crust from cauliflower] reached a half a billion dollar valuation by year three, which shows the scale of the global interest in healthy pizzas and that’s the market we’re aiming for a percentage of.

“We know from our research that consumers are still looking for healthy ready meal options with no taste sacrifice and our typical customers will be young professionals struggling to eat healthily within the current ready meals category and parents who love the idea of getting ‘hidden’ veg into their kids in a product they enjoy,” Takakura says.