Irish rugby player Cian Healy and some of the Dublin footballers are now consuming the product.
Louth footballer Conor Grimes laughs when it’s put to him that he’s fuelling some of his competitors but he’s fuelling himself too.
He and his wife Jayne set up Spoonful Botanical three years ago, having been inspired during a trip to India, and their product has grown to the extent that it’s now stocked in over 400 health stores in Ireland, with a move to the UK on the horizon.
The product itself comes in jars, has a chutney-like texture and can be added to porridge and yogurts and protein shakes.
Initially, Grimes developed the joint-support product for his granny, who suffers with arthritis, but it has gradually become a staple of sports performance nutrition for high level athletes.
“It’s a joint-support product for joint-pain,” says Allianz ambassador Grimes.
“We developed the product originally for my granny, who had bad arthritis and she started getting great results,” he explains.
“Recently, the likes of Cian Healy on the Irish rugby team and Dublin GAA players have been posting about it on social media of using the product – unbeknownst to ourselves, we hadn’t really gone down that route.”
“But it’s between heavy training sessions that you’d take it. It’s a food based product that you can incorporate into their diets every day to help with inflammation in the body.”
So what is it?
“You just take one heaped teaspoon of it every day so take it straight from the jar, have it with porridge, with natural yogurt, people get creative with it, and it’s a joint-support product – full of root herbs and spices, turmerics, ginger, cinnamon, black pepper.
“We produce it here,” he explains of the product which doesn’t trouble sports drug regulations.
“by bringing in all the roots of all the spices, grinding them down and then fermenting it – so it’s really good for the gut health – and then we blend it down into like a chutney and you just take a spoonful of it every day.”
“At the moment we just have the one product.”
The Louth half forward says that, once the inter-county season finishes up this year, then they’ll be focusing on the UK market.
“It’s been completely flying for us, it’s just taken off. We were on Nationwide a couple of years ago, which was a massive break for us. We’re looking at the UK at the back end of this year – they’re really interested in the product as well – so once the football finishes up, I’ll be able to get over and back. It can be hard to juggle the two at the minute, so the UK will be on the back-burner until the GAA season is over.
“We just have the one flavour at the moment so it’s all about developing that.”
Allianz, the proud new sponsors of the GAA All-Ireland Senior Football Championship, released the third episode of its ‘Write Your Own Story’ series, which features Louth footballer Conor Grimes.
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