My name is Philip Masterson and I’m the owner of Lean Bean. This is a little bit about how we got started. It was 2015, I was 25 and working in Dublin’s city centre when I started taking an interest in fitness and nutrition. I spent a large chunk of my day at a desk and was finding it quite hard to find places to get healthy meals for lunch. In the early days I used to snack on chocolate protein bars, cereal bars and the likes which were marketed as ‘healthy’. As time went on, I learned what I was snacking on was in fact full of processed crap and high in sugar. It was here the idea started for Lean Bean. I wanted to provide actual healthy food options to busy people. I spent 2 years working on a business plan and opened in June 2017, in Citywest Business Campus. I come from a business background in retail and studied business in college (NUIM) so had some business knowledge but lacked experience on the food side of things even though I have a mum who is a fantastic cook. While I was working on the business plan, I worked in the hospitality industry but more on the coffee side of things. I then enrolled in a food business course in Ballymaloe Cookery school with Blathnaid Bergin and happened to be sitting beside Emily Allen (Darina Allen’s daughter) for the course. It was Emily who drove home the message of the importance of using the best whole ingredients for my business concept explaining to me this is where the flavour and nutrition comes from. And never to buy in prepped food as they have been dosed with additives which are there to prolong their shelf life while they are stored and transported before reaching a restaurant and ultimately the customer. So here we are, we have a great team of people working in Lean Bean today whom without, Lean Bean wouldn’t be here today and we’ve had some fantastic people work for us who have moved on, to whom I will always be indebted to. I hope to have many more Lean Bean’s in the future, for now, I hope you try us out.