Two enterprising Saudi women launch ‘Nourish’ healthy food for children

BY SHAHD ALHAMDAN JEDDAH — Living in a community where most of the kids hate healthy food, and schools rarely provide nourishing meals motivate two Saudi females to run ‘Nourish’, a business that promotes nutritious eating style in a fun way. ‘Nourish’, which was officially launched last month, provides healthy lunch boxes and meals to schools in Jeddah, caters to birthdays and have a healthy snack line for individuals, and sell a Friday basket that includes almond milk, granola, healthy Nutella and super pancake mix. Ghazal Kaki, who has a bachelor of art in interior design and an MBA in project management, and Sondos Baksh, who has a bachelor of science in management information system and undergoing an integrative nutrition course, decided to make a change in the students’ lives after observing the children’s bad eating habits at school. Speaking to Saudi Gazette, Kaki said “under a healthy lifestyle, goes many branches. We went through it all till we decided to specialize in kids, mainly. Our goal is to spread health awareness among the new generation and make it easier for mothers to feed their children healthy meals. We also aim to establish a name in that field – focusing on your kid’s health, when in school.” Kaki started to distribute Nourish products in her childhood school, Al-Hamra School. “The business aims to distribute our products to all schools around Jeddah at first.” “We started in October 2016, thinking about the market and what does it lack. We have salads, healthy wraps and guilt-free dessert. We add super-foods to our products, and always cook with no saturated fats or refined sugar,” she added. Although they started studying the market in the last quarter of 2016, she said that one of the struggles that they are facing in running their business is that the healthy ingredients are more expensive than normal ingredients. Therefore, their prices are a bit higher than normal products in the schools. Kaki remarked  “healthy food do cost more, for this reason, our prices are a bit higher than normal food which wasn›t very pleasant to many. We honestly want to help in building a healthier generation and we are targeting all the society.  Our vision is five years from now we want to be supplying many schools, supermarkets, and kids events.”