My Career: ‘My IBS led me to develop my bread..it goes global this month’

Name: Karen O’ Donoghue

Age: 39

Lives: In the Sheeffry Hills of Mayo, from Carrigrohane, Cork.

Job title: Founder of The Happy Tummy Co.

Salary bracket: I use my salary to bear the brunt of mistakes made in the company, and so it really depends on what’s been happening month to month. A baseline salary right now can be anything from €40,000 to €54,000. It’s been fluctuating for a while.

Education background: UCC Commerce and French

Hobbies: Sea swimming, hill walking with my dog Éabha, writing, hosting, spending time with my partner and friends over home-cooked food. This is the year I get back playing instruments, I swear!

Describe your job in five words: Bread as medicine, change creator

Describe yourself in five words: Kind, driven, mischievous, curious, sensitive.

Personality needed for this kind of work? One that is indefatigable! No commitment issues.

How long are you doing this job? Since 2014.

How did you get this job? I developed a low carb, high fibre fermented loaf to replace all the bread I was eating in 2014. I’m completely obsessed with bread and all carbs to be honest, I thought the only way out of my debilitating IBS would be through the carbs I consumed.

The Happy Tummy Loaf came about from 18 months of obsessive scientific research and daily recipe testing throughout 2013 and 2014 in my home kitchen in London. At that point, my unmanaged IBS had begun to wreak havoc on my mental health and my period health was getting worse. Committing to the idea that food had the power to change everything about my human condition saved my life.

After attending UCC, where I studied Commerce and French, I moved to Dublin to work on the EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards. I’d lost my mum to cancer and, grief- stricken, sunk all my time into the programme. Inspired by so many entrepreneurial stories, such remarkable and quirky people, I left the programme after three years to pursue my own voyage of discovery.

After a quick stint in Shenzhen, which I didn’t enjoy, I headed to London in 2011 and immediately found a new world there through The Actor’s Centre in Covent Garden. I loved producing the TV show for the EOY programme and wanted to explore writing and production in the TV/film world in a more meaningful way.

After getting two short films into The Cannes Film Festival, I realised I was missing the realism and actuality of making sh*t happen. Hollywood was never something I wanted. My righteous nature longed to do something that might leave the world a better place so I jumped back into start-up culture, managing a restaurant and developing meal kits for a London based start-up that hoped to make it easier for people to cook a wider repertoire of cuisine. All the while, my IBS was worsening.

Maths and science were my better subjects in school and so the research side of things and developing mathematical equations that would become recipes came easy to me as I learnt to bake from my mother at four years old.

Eighteen months of connecting the dots between several research papers a day had landed me on the loaf itself and, after years of going to the toilet only once a week, I now went every single morning after just three days on the loaf.

I never intended the loaf to become a company. At the time, I considered studying to be a dietician, but to be honest, I thought, who else has the time to wait another four years before they can eat this loaf and alleviate their symptoms for good?

From the time my mum first got cancer, I knew that one day I wanted to create a brand that stood for preventative medicine.

The Happy Tummy Co. began as The Happy Bread Co. after a talk I gave in Shoreditch House in East London a long time ago now. Over 200 people told me if I were to turn this loaf into a business in the morning, they’d pay any price for it.

I hustled hard over the next few months, building my own website, figuring out how to set up a business in the UK and run something that felt like it was going against the odds. The loaf quickly became known as ‘the magic poo bread’ throughout the UK and by 2018, I’d made enough of an impact to be named the UK’s Gut Health Specialist of the year. That same year I was made a judge at the World Bread Awards.

I set up the lab bakery in London and later moved operations to East Sussex where I taught people fire baked breads. At the end of 2020, I made the move to come back home to Ireland.

I set up The Happy Tummy Co. in Mayo, inspired by my parents’ love story, which started with a camping trip on Achill over 50 years ago, having never visited Westport or knowing a single person here. Following a gut feel and a big chunk of madness, we’ve been operating for four years now and going strong, launching globally this month.

Do you need particular qualifications or experience?

A strong desire for cultural change! A want to change the way people view food and to see food as preventative medicine.

Describe a day at work:

A typical day has changed considerably since training the crew here in Mayo how to make and bake the Happy Tummy Co. way.

I used to begin my days at 4am doing everything from dough prep to baking to packing to customer service to accounts to teaching to hosting supperclubs to marketing.

After years of early starts, the crew are now doing those and I get to rise between 6 and 6.30am. The first thing I do is look at the bakery schedule for the day ahead as that dictates how it is going for the majority of the team and our revenue.

The schedule informs where to spend my efforts. I’ll eat a breakfast of soaked porridge with fermented nuts and an aeropress coffee at home or else one of our fermented teff scones with raw cheese, eggs and avocado. If I’m writing a newsletter, I’ll write that from home before heading into the bakery at noon. Then it’s straight into problem-solving with my manager and focusing on what’s the day’s priority. This can change drastically.

I split my time between working in the lab bakery and I also do one on one consultations with clients each week. I can be on the road a lot when we’re launching with a new coffee shop customer around the country, or working on collaborations. One day every month we hold a bakery class to teach customers how to make fermented bread in our Bread as Medicine course.

Most of my time now is spent on new scientific research and supporting our community, and trying to nurture the team so I can step into new educational work.

How many hours do you work a week? 60 +

Is your job stressful? How? Rate it on a scale of 1-10: I’m not naturally financially savvy so I find the money part stressful. But I am proud to have, from the start, run a profitable business, without major loans and any investors.

Taking responsibility for people’s wellbeing has become much more challenging in a time when the cost of trying to do so is at times debilitatingly high.

Working in a cost of living crisis can raise the scale of stress to a 10, with inflation affecting the cost of ingredients and packaging.

Succeeding in communicating how important good food is for our body and soul can at times feel like the fight of my life, but at others, a big win. It depends what kind of day you find me on!

Do you work with others or on your own? It’s all about community. I really feel that first and foremost, our customers are trailblazing the future of health and my job is to support them in that mission. The Happy Tummy Co. has been collaborating with some incredible coffee shops throughout the island of Ireland for a while now and the founders of those businesses have been incredible in sharing the load of the mission.

We have just partnered with Bretzel Bakery in Dublin (who bought Arbutus Breads in 2024 ) to scale up operations so we can launch our gut health signature bread, The Happy Tummy Loaf, internationally. We’ve developed a beautiful partnership with Bretzel’s managing director Dymphna O’Brien, who has supported the move to go global with our work.

Best bits: Seeing the real health benefits of high fibre diets in our community and the radical emotional, mental and physical uptick in people who have upped their fibre intake on the journey with us.

Worst bits: Hearing people complain about the price of good food.

Advice to those who want your job? A decent wage for each team member has to be one of your main starting points. The food industry is made up of too many people on sh*tty money. This has contributed greatly to the real price of food, the real price of health being utterly undervalued and disengaged from. So if you’re setting out to change the course of the health landscape through food, then taking the wellbeing of your team seriously should be prioritised too. Team welfare impacts the work. And when you’re a start-up, you’ve got to try harder to come up with ways that achieve this when you lack corporate money.

Any other comments? Change starts small. Start by soaking your porridge overnight in milk, your nuts in water to hydrate them. These are tiny changes that can result in huge health benefits. They really can change the course of your human condition forever, and the life you give birth to.