Do you have fussy eaters at home? Has the dinner table transformed into a battlefield? Well, Irish woman Samantha Forrest may have found the answer.
A mother of three, and the Director of Engineering for a Pharmaceutical company, Samantha decided to add a little more to her plate (pardon the pun) in 2020 by creating Fussy Food Plates, a range of story-led items that help turn dinner time into play time.
With 16 years experience in STEM, Samantha told RTÉ Lifestyle that she was busy juggling a high-powered career and raising three little ones, when an operation on her gallbladder stopped her in her tracks.
It was during her time in hospital that she says she finally had time to "put pen to paper" and tackle the biggest hurdle in her life: getting her children to eat.
"Nobody told me that children don't eat," she says, reminiscing on her early days of parenthood.
"I did not know that there was fussy eating, that was a whole new territory for me to explore. I had my first two children in quick succession, there were 15 months between the oldest two, and we would have great fun in different areas of the home - we're joking, laughing, playing - and then when it came to eating, I had stress in my stomach from thinking about what I was going to get these kids to eat."
With a background in STEM, the entrepreneur says she had a great understanding of the science behind nutrition and knew exactly what she should be feeding her little ones, but keeping them at the table was another story.
"I was going against everything I believe," she admits. "I was pandering to them, I was feeding them food I didn't want them to eat... I just thought, how are we going to make this fun?"
The answer, she soon discovered, was story-telling. Designing a blank face that was ready to be 'dressed' with food, Forrest designed a plate that would encourage her kids to touch their food rather than immediately push it away.
Even if they didn't eat everything, the plates encouraged her kids to interact with different types of foods, whether it was to create a mashed potato beard, cabbage hair, or spaghetti earrings.
"They were enjoying creating fun faces, I was exposing them to foods that they didn't particularly like before, and they weren't eating in a pressure environment," she says.
"It's going against what we learned as children," she adds. "The rules of 'don't play with your food' and 'if you don't eat it, you're getting it again'.
With the plates going down a treat with her own children and young relatives, Forrest decided to dive into completing her research and developing her designs. In 2022, while on maternity leave with her third child, she decided to take the leap.
The first delivery plates came when she was 36 weeks pregnant: "I was standing there with a huge bump thinking, oh my God, what have I done?"
Thankfully, since launching in 2023, the brand has been a huge success. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Samantha got approval from celebrity chefs like Donal Skehan and Lili Forberg, as well as the incredibly popular British influencer Mrs Hinch, who showed the plate to her four million Instagram followers.
"She actually shared it four times, so I was absolutely delighted to get the genuine backing of someone like that," she says.
Now sold across the globe in territories like South America and Australia, Fussy Food Plates has added crinkle cutters and 'press and pops' to their website.
In a short space of time, she has found a great community of parents and carers all trying to cope with their fussy eaters: "We went from zero to 12,000 followers in 13 months, so we have a really great and supportive community," she smiles.
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Not one to slow down, Samantha is now working with her local enterprise office to obtain a grant to develop an online course for parents and guardians. She hopes to educate adults in understanding the dynamics of fussy eating and share tips on how to navigate it.
"Fussy eating is so complex," she explains, noting that some children may find food interaction more difficult if they are neuro-divergent.
"We teach our kids to swim, we teach our kids to ride bikes, but why are we not teaching them to properly understand what they're eating and why they're eating it?"
For more information on Fussy Food Plates, visit FussyFoodPlates.com.
