The 'a-ha moment' that led to Healthy Nibbles...

I am committed to the goal of enabling healthier choices and providing an opportunity for people to make a positive lifestyle choice by building a business with strong foundations, robust principles and recruiting a team of skilled people who have similar goals and ambitions.

But how did I get here? There were actually two 'a-ha moments' that led me to developing the Healthy Nibbles brand, both very personal and different. The first was several years ago. It was 3am and I was sat at the bedside of my terminally ill father Feeling hungry, I trundled off to the nearest vending machine to see what I could find and it was full of the usual culprits. Family-sized bags of sweets, crisps, none of which were things that I wanted to eat at the time.

It really stood out to me that in an environment where people are trying to improve their health ad wellbeing, the importance of nutritional value was not being thought of at all.

The second 'a-ha moment' came through my work as a brand and innovation consultant, where I spend a huge amount of time in other people's offices. I found that in those environments, nutritional wellbeing was not being considered. They are high-pressure environments. There's an awful lot of long hours as a consultant and companies were not providing healthy options for their employees. This obviously meant that you had to leave the building to go and buy something or bring your own snacks and on those busy mornings, there were many times where that was forgotten and I was left with unhealthy alternatives.

What sets Healthy Nibbles apart from other mindful snack companies? We're an award-winning healthy snacks service for corporate and community. We deliver this service through vending, office boxes, white-label box solutions, wholesale and some new product development work for specific clients through employee nutritional consultancy.

Our vending machines have been developed with specific goals in mind. They are connected to the internet; they're 100% cashless; we have a wheelchair user display option; they provide nutritional and allergen information prior to a purchase being made. People using the machine are able to search the product range based on their dietary needs and profile.

Healthy Nibbles has snack boxes that are delivered to companies ranging from a small office of five employees all the way through to delivering 20000 snacks across 500 boxes to 500 different locations throughout the country.

I would also say that our product range is something that we're really proud of. We have over 350 products listed currently and they meet all the major dietary requirements and we're constantly evolving that offering.

We've tried to make sure that our products are price sensitive too because we want healthy options to be truly affordable, and affordable to the masses. That is really really important to us.

I believe that what sets Healthy Nibbles apart is our passion for making healthy choices readily available and our desire to make a tangible difference with the companies that were working with.

This is just the beginning of the Healthy Nibbles journey, so it was a privilege to be recognised at the recent Women's Enterprise Scotland Awards, where I picked up the Award for Emerging Business Leader 2019. The entire Healthy Nibbles team is really excited for what the future brings so watch this space..!

Sara Roberts is the founder of Healthy Nibbles and is a WES Ambassador.