Paula is passionate about food and leads multiple Irish and EU food projects within Momentum.
Her focus is projects that support a better and more sustainable future, through improved entrepreneurship, food business support, and empowering educators across the food sector. Paula is a life-long learner herself and recently completed a Postgraduate in Innovation and Enterprise development with Trinity College Dublin, as well as a Green Belt in Lean and Six-Sigma project management.
Paula’s interest in food began at a young age and after her BSc. Food Science from University College Cork, she travelled the world to expand her knowledge and experience. After returning to the West of Ireland she owned and ran a busy health café for almost 18 years.
SUSTAIN: This was Paula’s first EU project to work on and will always be special to her. The aim of this project is to empower food service SMEs with innovation, knowledge, and skills to introduce healthy, affordable products to market, thus boosting their competitiveness and contribution to a healthier society.
Pioneering Innovative Food for Seniors: This EU project’s main objective is to provide an open-source training programme for Food SMEs in the commercialisation of innovative appropriate and necessary food products for the growing Senior market.
Cook it Forward: This project is aimed at culinary businesses, Vocational education organisations and their students to encourage and enable collaborative work that will result in innovative ways to lift the culinary traditions, ancient recipes, forgotten regional ingredients and traditional cooking techniques to 21st century demand.
Paula has recently commenced work on 2 other exciting European Projects, Ethical Food Entrepreneurships and Housing Care…so watch this space!
From Co. Clare, but living in Galway, outside of work, Paula loves to experiment with food and create new dishes for her young family. She cannot function without good quality coffee and is enjoying her renewed interest in tennis with a bunch of great friends, which tends to be more social than competitive!