Chef forced to give up career on health grounds now cooking up a storm with her own business

Joanna Neeson was told she had to give up her career as a chef...that prompted her into starting her own business

Jun 25, 2023

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For over 20 years, Joanna Neeson plied her trade as a chef. Originally from Dublin, the mother of five boys has been living in Cookstown, Co Tyrone, for longer than she ever did in Ireland’s capital.

Joanna and cooking are synonymous, it’s something she did from the age of 10, but with a young family and a devastating health prognosis, her time as a working chef was sadly cut short.

“I remember going to the hospital and was told I had osteoarthritis in both knees,” she explained. “The doctor said I had to give up my job and I was gutted – I've been cooking since I was 10.”

Joanna was the eldest girl growing up and did a lot of the cooking at home.

“Whenever you came to our house I was in the kitchen baking, so it was very hard to give that up. I think when you're working in any professional kitchen it’s like your family.”

Joanna, who had worked at a local hotel for eight years after moving to Co Tyrone, lost that family, because of the stress it placed on her knees. She attempted to return on a part-time basis but the pain was just too much to handle.

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Caring for her five boys may have always been Joanna’s main priority – but there was always a sense of wanting to do more with the skills she had cultivated over the years as a chef. She knew she had so much more to give to the industry, which is why, when her youngest boy turned one, she returned to university in a classic case of it’s never too late to try new things.

It wasn’t a quick-fire three year course either, for Joanna studied in the little spare time she had, and completed her degree in food technology – part-time – over the next seven years.

Food technology deals with the methods and techniques involved in food production, processing and preservation, something which Joanna admits “really opened my eyes”. The course was the planting of the seed that would later become her business.

“When I was working as a chef I liked teaching people how to cook,” Joanna continued. “When the juniors came in I like taking people under my wing and showing them how to do things, so I kind of had that in me – I just love to see people flourish. I still wanted to continue to do something with food but not on the physical level I was operating at before.”

In 2016, Joanna got her legs straightened and plates inserted in preparation for the eventuality of having her knees replaced, but instead of allowing her arthritis to hold her back, Joanna used the time to study and work on putting together a business plan, even if becoming a business owner wasn’t necessarily her plan.

Following completion of her degree, Joanna underwent a post-grad in Business Communications. She then took part in the free Step Up to Sustainable Employment (SUSE) programme with the Northern Regional College in Magherafelt. She had it in her head that she would use her degree to get a job somewhere in the food industry. Where, she wasn’t sure.

“I only went to get my CV and I ended up staying for about three months,” she laughed. “I did loads of different courses while I was there. I did a cookery programme in my local area as part of one of the modules. I could see that people didn’t really know much about cooking – I kind of saw a gap in that market.

“People are just buying processed food and they don't know really how to cook so that's where my idea kind of came from. When I went to do the SUSE programme, to get a job, they also had an option for the Go For It programme – I then signed up to do that.”

The idea for her business – WYSE BITES – was formulated during her time on the SUSE programme. It soon became apparent that working for someone else was not going to cut it for Joanna – she was bubbling with ideas.

“On the course we were talking about getting jobs and applying for interviews, and I wasn't really interested in that end of it. I was more interested – I kept asking the girl to give me more information – on the Go For It programme. I was just more interested in working for myself.”

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The name and logo for WYSE (What You Should Eat) BITES was the brainchild of Joanna’s youngest sister – a graphic designer by trade. The rest of the business – all Joanna!

Before launching in 2019, Joanna also completed a free six-week Inspire to Innovate programme at the Dungannon Entreprise Centre. After that she started to organise her own workshops, hiring halls in the local area and helping out with various sports teams. Her marketing was, and continues to be, done through social media and word of mouth.

And word of mouth led to an opportunity to get into local schools, which arose through the National Lottery funded Soft Project, based in the Mid Ulster area. The project focused on the needs of children in schools, including food sensory, particularly for children with additional needs.

Joanna knew she was perfectly placed to deliver, and as a result, developed her own Food Sensory programmes around the needs of individual schools.

“I wrote a four week or six week programme dependent on the school. If there is a child in the class with a particular need, they would have taken me in to work with the whole class rather than just go with the one child, or two children, that had the issues.”

However, the pandemic ended the work within schools but Joanna was able to offer her sessions online and did a lot of one-to-one with parents and their children.

Joanna admits a return to schools still looks a long way off given the nature of wholesale budget cuts across the board, and while she understands the focus on children’s mental health, she is a firm believer that “eating right is important for wellbeing too”.

She adds: “This is a lot to do with mental health because it is affecting children's health and with that, their mental health; it's trying to convince people that food is important.”

Four years in and there have been plenty of obstacles thrown Joanna’s way. The biggest learning curve has been discovering that you have to pretty much spread yourself very thinly in a start-up business.

“For me, realising there's nobody coming to rescue you, that you're on your own and you're responsible for everything that goes on in your business, that's one of the big learning curves. When you're working for someone else, it's not so much your problem.”

It’s a pressure some entrepreneurs love – others loathe it. Joanna is somewhere in between.

“Sometimes it's hard when you're always worrying about where the next meal is coming from and how you're gonna pay your bills but I'm very, very optimistic. I know there's a need for what I do, I can see there's a need for it and that it will get better. The business will grow.”

Joanna says she would love someone – or a team – to come on board with her to help build the business because of that need.

While the hope is to employ others, Joanna, to date, has sought other support from the Mums at Work network – set up by mother-of-seven, Sinead Norton. That particular network has been invaluable for Joanna, who says she saw the group on Facebook one day and decided to reach out.

“I have to say, the amount of support I have got from this group is unbelievable. I wouldn't have got where I am today without the group, that's being honest. Anytime you need any help, you just put it into the group and somebody has an answer for you, or helps you, we're all in the same boat.

“I think there are a lot of women out there that are working in a job they don’t want to be in; there’s so much opportunity out there for them too.”

The main thing for Joanna is the love for what she is doing – the joy she gets every time – and she urges others to find that passion and to challenge themselves.

“For me, the best part is when something clicks with somebody, when they're cooking, they're like, ‘this is so easy, how come I never did this before’. And when I see a child that has never eaten pineapple, or tomatoes, and the parents are all clapping – that's the best part to be honest.”