From our spuds to our sausages, our beef to our beer, we Irish are well-known worldwide for our stellar food and drink offering. 

While Irish produce has long been regarded as unbeatable for taste and quality, it’s only in recent years that Ireland has also become synonymous with the health benefits and nutritional value of many beloved international foods  — specifically, of functional foods. 

Functional foods are foods that contain added ingredients which boost their nutritional value, such as Benecol or Super Milk. These type of products have become increasingly popular in recent years, largely thanks to clinical research organisations such as Cork company Atlantia Clinical Trials, whose tests can prove that such foods do indeed make a difference to our health. Since the company was founded in 2011, and thanks to their new Chicago clinic which opened in 2019, Atlantia has gone on to work with some of the world’s leading producers, including PepsiCo, Danone, Nestle and many more.

Barry Skillington, CFO and co-founder of Atlantia, believes the secret to Atlantia’s huge success within just its first decade of operation lies behind their stringent standards for each clinical trial. “We bring an unsurpassed level of expertise in how to run a trial to the gold standard, by following all ICH GCP regulations. That’s the standard used in most clinical trials for drugs and medicines, but we go the extra mile by using that same criteria for the testing of food and food supplements," he explains.

"We have a number of high profile clients who are naturally very protective of their brands, they’re cautious about doing anything that might raise an eyebrow and so they rely on reputable companies like Atlantia to carry out their research. We’ve built a tremendous reputation for doing exactly the right trial to the right standard every time. There’s no cutting corners, and our clients recognise that. When you do a really good job for a large company, they tend to come back to you.” 

The kind of trials that these many varied client companies are coming to Atlantia for can vary greatly. They’ve worked on everything, from testing whether a certain turmeric supplement could slow memory loss in older people, to investigating the effects of a probiotic on those suffering from anxiety.

“We trial every health area of the body and all manner of substances, like proteins, probiotics, extracts of plants, derivatives of proteins - a huge variety of products,” Barry explains. “That means every trial is unique, which both improves our offering that we can showcase to potential clients but also creates a nice environment for our staff because the trials turn over about every 10 months, which isn’t a very long time to be working on just the one thing. A drug trial, for instance, could take up to and including 20 years to complete, because there’s so many different levels you must go through for drugs, whereas food studies tend to be a faster burn. It allows our project teams both here in Cork and in Chicago to be constantly taking on new projects, which makes for a great variety in their work.”

 The staff taking on this wide range of projects consists of almost 90 people, with 14 of them based in Chicago and 72 in Cork. There’s a mix of full-time and part-time employees, as well as a mixture of some remote workers with others working in the clinics. Like most other companies, Atlantia has settled into this new way of working - including remote and hybrid work - as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, Atlantia was particularly challenged by the pandemic as they had expanded overseas just months before the first lockdown in March 2020, having opened their Chicago clinic in late 2019.

“We have a fabulous base in Chicago, it’s over 7,000 sq ft with 17 clinic rooms, waiting areas, offices, a reception, so it’s a really nice facility,” Barry details proudly. “However, we had just taken on the lease of that when Covid really hit in the US. Lockdowns came with it, and then there were also riots in Chicago downtown, all sorts of upheaval. The market shrunk dramatically as a result and has been quite slow to recover, but it really picked up in Q4 of 2022 and I predict into this year we’re likely to see equal growth level in the US as in Europe. Our main aim for 2023 is for the sales target to be equal in both markets.” 

The Atlantia team feel more confident than ever about setting new aims like this as a result of their emboldening endeavours during those Covid years, which saw them adapt in ways they never imagined. “The trial market was slow during Covid,” Barry confesses. “We had trials that we were finishing up, but getting volunteers for those into the clinic was the difficult piece. What we had to do, which proved very challenging at first, was convert some of the trials into more remote projects where we didn’t bring people in. 

"We instead collected their data over Zoom or phone calls, where we’d run through our usual questionnaires with them. We also set up a system where our volunteers could collect some biological samples at home and they would send them by mail to our labs. We had to find work arounds for a lot of everyday tasks, which set a slower pace than we would have liked — especially in the new Chicago clinic – but I’m delighted with how we’re bouncing back. We’re seeing strong demand already off the back of 2022 and many clients we would have spoken to are now committing to doing extensive research in 2023 and getting detailed proposals from us, which is fantastic.”

 Demand in the US market for the kind of data Atlantia can provide is so strong, in fact, that Irish academia is now being shaken up to better prepare graduates to meet the growing need. 

“We’re always hiring and constantly evolving. As we continue taking on more projects in both Chicago and Cork, the more project managers and teams we need,” says Barry. “We’ve just kept growing since the day we started ten years ago. A role at Atlantia is a great option for people graduating with nutritional science degrees that want to go into research, as we’re one of the very few employers for a lot of the bioscience degrees that offer clinical research capability. 

"Every year we take in a batch of interns who are given comprehensive training, and oftentimes we offer those interns full-time employment once their degree is finished. We’ve even contributed to the college courses, Irish universities have come to us to alter their course content based on the roles we offer, so that graduates are even more highly skilled when they come to us after college.

“The support we’ve had, and the kind of graduates that are coming to us now, is just testament to the great research ecosystem in Cork. Irish graduates are exceptional in that they have a really strong ethical ethos but also the capabilities that clinics like ours need. We’re really proud to provide opportunities where graduates can use that skillset on an international scale.”

Reporting: Irish Examiner