Deliciously Ella: how Ella Mills turned her personal brand into a global success

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. healthy products that have been very, very successful. So I wanted to find out from Ella, how did she go about building the brand and how did she turn that brand into such a successful business? Ella's a wonderful person who tells the most authentic and real stories about her experience. And I know there's a lot in this that you'll absolutely love. So here it is. Welcome to the show, Ella. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to have you. I'm really excited to have this conversation because I love, love hearing about founders and how they built their businesses and what goes into making the kind of success that you've made of your brand but maybe for anyone that doesn't know your story because it started your journey started in a relatively painful place I think for you didn't it and yeah tell us a bit about where it all began yeah of course and I'm so excited to be here because I think I've talked about my personal story a lot but not always so much about the building of the brand and the business and and our decision making around that so I'm excited to get into that but yes if we fast forward to the very very beginning so this is all the way back to 2011 I was a student finishing my second year at university I was living my best life and really out of nowhere I got very very ill I spent most of 2011 into 2012 in that hospital seeing endocrinologists gastroenterologists neurologists had MRIs ultrasounds endoscopies like you name it I tried it swallowed cameras I think the longest I spent in hospital any one time was 10 days I just no one could get to the bottom of what was going wrong and eventually I was diagnosed the condition that affected the functioning of my autonomic nervous system and speaking very colloquially it looks quite a lot like long COVID in the sense of nothing's really working no one's really sure exactly why or what to do about it and and it's quite invisible and so I couldn't control my heart rate properly so I would sit down and fine stand up my heart rate's 180 190 immediately you feel like you're going to pass out if you don't pass out uh I had very extreme chronic fatigue I was sleeping like 16 18 hours a day um I had awful I looked more pregnant then than I did when I was about seven months pregnant with my daughter it's just awful stomach problems and digestive issues uh chronic pain brain fog these allergic reactions to just about everything like you name it had it basically and I was prescribed this whole cocktail of different things to see if it would work I think at the peak I was on about 25 different medications a day and none of them worked they're all repurposed so no one promised that they would work but I had definitely held on to the assumption that someone else could fix my problem for me essentially and it'd be like having tonsillitis and taking antibiotics and you'd feel much better and it wasn't the case and I hit an absolute rock bottom with both my physical health but my mental health as well and then that was really where things turned around I think from that place I became started to ask questions like well is there anything else I could be doing surely there have been other people in similar positions something must have helped them and I turned to google as you should not recommend in times of medical emergency but I just started reading stories of people all over the world different ages sexes some acute conditions some chronic just a whole mixed bag but there was this common thread of people using facets of diet of lifestyle to improve their health and I'm super conscious we're sitting here today in 2025 and if you open Netflix or the newspapers or your podcast app you're going to see all sorts of conversations on the link between our diet and our health it's everywhere it's such a mainstream conversation but it was only 13 years ago and no one was talking about it and it felt very left field actually which is very odd when you think about it if you just be very reductive to say like what you put in your body would affect your body saying that felt like telling some people the world was flat which again is kind of really shocking when you when you think about it like that but I was really inspired but I couldn't cook and I didn't like vegetables two kind of pretty obvious obstacles yeah so I'm a very all-or-nothing person and I like if I'm going to do something I need to commit to it and I have to hold myself accountable and I'll kind of go in a hundred percent and the rest and so I started a blog and this was really the moment where blogs had kind of taken off and my friend said oh there's this great site you can use wordpress it's really easy it's free why don't you why don't you do it as like a diary on there as you try and change the way you eat so I did and my maiden name was Woodward and it's not got a great ring to it and the aim was to make things delicious so Deliciousiella was born and no one was really ever meant to read it which is really ironic when we sit here today that is very ironic isn't it however many hundreds of millions later it's so odd and and i think that's the thing that always kind of gets me it was last like this time last year we hit the mark of selling 100 million products and i just remember being like this was meant to be something that only my mom ever saw yeah do you think that's weirdly part of the success that you you entered it not knowing how it was gonna i think so i really really do i think it's because we built a brand before we built a business and we built this brand with no kind of financial motivations with this kind of real purity that is quite hard to do when you'll see a gap in the market you know this was like a really passionate personal quite evangelical I want to help change the world and I want to help as many people as possible and changing my diet did completely change my health it took about two years it wasn't it wasn't quick but I can I got my life back and I started thinking wait a second it's so easy to cook like this why aren't more of us doing it I want to make it more accessible and as I said I became quite like passionate maybe evangelical about kind of spreading the word of lentils and carrots and um and and I think that did I think it gave it this authenticity and this credibility that you can't pay for yeah I mean you're saying you sort of casually oh I did it without realizing anyone's going to read or listen at what point did you realize suddenly actually this has become something and what happened there um there are a couple of different points so i was really embarrassed when i was doing this i really lacked a lot of confidence growing up and then this illness had kind of taken probably relatively low self-esteem and made it fully rock bottom and i'd also showed no interest in cooking growing up i was an spectacularly average child like and i don't say that to be self-deprecating i just had never i'd never been this like like concerning failure that my parents were like, oh, what do we do with Ella?

6:54But I'd never excelled in anything I'd ever done, like academics, sport, like whatever it was. I was just so bang average. And I just therefore didn't have this, you know, my friends weren't doing things like this. It was a bit different. And I think I was a bit embarrassed. I did tell one person, I'm going to write a cooking blog and then being like, what can I do? Why would anyone ever read that? Like you don't cook, you don't write. This is so random. so I was quite kind of sheepish about it and I said okay well if 10 ,000 people oh sorry if I got 10 ,000 hits organically then I'll show my friends and family and I'll tell them what I'm doing and I did three months later the site had 10 ,000 hits and there was this map on the back end of WordPress and it would show like light up all the different countries and there was something like 25 different countries that people were reading it in and people started writing in saying I'm really enjoying the recipes I relate to your story and it was so validating I think having also felt so alone and so kind of lost at sea it felt validating it felt empowering I felt like my life had a bit of meaning back in it which I'm sure really sparked this like evangelical like I've got to spread the word of it so that was the kind of big moment and then about two years later the site had 120 million hits so it grew really fast and in that people started to ask you for things and there were things like cooking classes and supper clubs but we're talking about 12 people 15 people so it's pretty that wasn't when I thought oh we've made it that we sell those out because it was small number of people but people this is when apps were becoming a bit popular and people were like well maybe it would be easier as an app I'd pay for an app so I thought okay so I went out and found a developer and he built the code for me and I put all the recipes in it and we launched it and I'm pretty sure it's 2.99 and I put it out on our email list again like I wasn't I paid$20 on WordPress so that instead of being wordpress.deliciousyellow.com or whichever order that went in it was just deliciousyellow.com that's it that's all the money I had spent on this and I emailed out those people and put on the blog and I put on our Instagram page that the app had launched and it became the number one app on the iTunes chart the Apple chart which I was so naive obviously now sitting here today if we replicated that I'd be like, what?

9:11This is so mega. Whereas at the time, like I didn't really fully appreciate. And obviously the app space wasn't as competitive as it is today. But equally, that's quite a feat to do with zero pounds. $20 was our kind of total spend at this point. And that was when I thought, okay, there's got to be something in this. Like what's the number one app in the UK? Apple App Store. That's wild. And I haven't spent a pound basically. as in like it was so yeah it just felt that that was a bit of a penny drop moment and at the same time I had pitched out a cookbook to um different publishers and one took it on and I started writing the book and again I had this really strange moment the book came out was meant to come out early January 2015 so about a year after the app and we actually sold out of books before the app before the book could be published because the community was so engaged and so strong and then it's really I'm not sure how this came about because I've never since ever been shown an interview ahead of time but I had done this big interview for You magazine and they sent it to me before it came out and this was when the publishers just moved the pub day because we had no books left which is quite an unusual thing to do and they had written this piece and it was a big interview and it was this journey from sickness to health and this new cookbook and the kind of personal story and the title was the Ella effect and I still remember reading it really clearly and thinking goodness me I feel like my life is going to change I think something's I think we've reached a tipping point I think something's happening here I don't think this is like a personal project for my parents kitchen anymore and sure enough it then became number one on the Amazon book chart again this is like any book in the world like Harry Potter and it was amazon's biggest selling book that year i mean again i look at it now and know what it means and i'm like oh my gosh number one app number one book on amazon it's eight weeks i think it did on amazon number one across any book i mean it was mad and then i was 23 and i was suddenly on like every radio show you know morning tv channel being interviewed i was so dear in headlights how do you cope with that i mean because you know i mean being in the public eye like that is quite a thing and the amount of attention you must be getting and people feeding about i mean good of course you know people like well good and bad you know there's good elements of bad yeah how do you cope with the sudden attention i mean it was so surreal like again i look at it now with the lens of experience and think like i just cannot believe that all happened it's so serendipitous like it just it's so hard to manufacture that kind of moment but i i didn't cope brilliantly i think partly because i just didn't expect this like this wasn't you know i remember talking to my mom she I was like, if you sell 500 copies, I'll be so proud of you.

12:00That's what mum's for, isn't it? So did it. And I just, you know, as I said, like I just wasn't a high achiever. And I think so many founders are high achievers. Or they're the people that like set up this business when they were seven and this business when they were 10. And they were, you know, might have been selling sweets, but they had this entrepreneurial spirit. And I didn't have that. Like I didn't, I'd never done anything of note. And so I think I just had no expectation of myself. and I don't think anyone around me had any expectation of me either and so it just felt surreal on every single level and also as I said like when I started cooking this way it was so kind of left field the idea that also you could take this and it be so kind of central to mainstream culture and media and landscape felt really odd as well and I I wish I'd enjoyed it more and I wish I'd felt more proud of it because at the time I just felt so overwhelmed so cripplingly anxious because it's that strange thing where like gosh by no means like was i am i saying like i was so famous but you were very relevant and kind of current at that time and suddenly you guys i know be walking down oxford street or walking through the park and people talk about you not to you or they'd like point and it was so strange and don't forget i was so young and I'd spent my the last few years really ill my self-esteem is really low and I think there was this just sense of like what is going on but equally it was so clear that there was this massive opportunity and obviously desperate to kind of fulfill something with it I love how you described not being an overachiever being the average kid in the class and some but like that doesn't happen your success doesn't happen by accident does it you must have put a lot of work and a lot into into building it surely to get oh I worked on it 24 7 like I was obsessed I mean I have been the whole time it was a real it was such a passion project because it had it delicious yellow changed my life it like gave me my life back in a hundred different ways and so and there was this amazing community and I was talking to all of them every day like I would answer every direct message on Instagram or every comment every blog comment like every email I was so kind of desperate to spread the word to help people to have this positive impact on the on the food landscape like I I so wanted it it meant everything to me and also I had had a few years of basic basic total isolation like I was so lonely I had no purpose I was so lost and this had given it back and as I said I'm all or nothing and so I had like dived in 300 % and I had it has it was all I did I just like so yeah I was it was 24 7 all I did was work on delicious yellow amazing I mean and it wasn't the it wasn't the only book you did as well you did got a good five or six books followed as well didn't it the first one yeah I think the one we've I've just finished writing one that will come out January and I think that's our eighth which is wow that's amazing yeah it's a lot any advice on I mean I'm sure some there's plenty of people listening they're going I really would love to do a book any advice on how to do given that you've had such success with books any advice on how to nail a book launch it's a great question I think it mean look I think it's really hard the world today is so much harder to launch anything in than it was when we started and I don't mean to be like a Debbie Downer but I think it it's just so noisy and there's so much free content and that didn't exist when when I started publishing and when we started building our community um you know it's the really early stages of social media and blogs and things like that and it was just such a different landscape and I think so I think for me it's always been it's always been this kind of guiding light of like is it actually useful like does this will this genuinely be tangible to someone's life and benefit it in a meaningful way because if it doesn't I think particularly now it's very hard to believe it has cut through and And I think that for me has always been the kind of guiding light of like, we could have licensed the brand to do infinite number of things and made a lot of money from it.

16:08And, but it's not useful. And therefore I don't think it has longevity. I mean, one of the things that I think is particularly impressive about what you've done is you've built the brand before the business. And a lot of people do the other way around. They build a business and they try and create a brand. But actually like if you take your blog, your blog then created permissions through the app, didn't it? And then once the app was successful, you got permission to then turn that into books. So it kind of compounds on, you know, it kind of builds on each other, doesn't it? A hundred percent.

16:33And actually that was both in terms of like the kind of community and having people to sell to. But it was also financial because each thing funded the next stage. And so, you know, when we launched our products, we didn't need to raise money because we had the money from the book sales, from the app, etc. And so it meant we kept control of it. But very clear to say this was an accident. like I didn't mean to create a brand you know so I'm always really conscious really easy to say I had this great strategy. Everyone's a genius in retrospect aren't they? It wasn't a strategy it was just this like passionate excitement and obsession with with what Delicious Yellow was and the community and and that then unfolded all of these different opportunities.

17:17Yeah I mean you were talking a bit earlier as well about how you kind of reply to every message and engage with everybody how have you managed to scale that because like you know onto your eighth book and you've got a podcast as well you know there's lots in the kind of media mix how do you manage the scaling up of it all yeah i mean i think we kind of haven't to an extent as in i don't think that's replicable as you get bigger and i think i've really struggled with that because i felt this such deep personal responsibility to every single member of our community and then it was actually my first daughter was born in 2019 that summer and that was the summer where I had to kind of have quite a hard look at myself of like this is not sustainable like I remember being up at two o 'clock in the morning or whatever it was breastfeeding her trying to reply to this like influx of direct messages and talking to Sarah in York about whether she could swap cashews for peanuts in this recipe and my husband just being like you have to stop like it's not sustainable and it really really wasn't and you know I think it's when you look at people often from the outside and you obviously you just don't get the full picture and I think it's really important to say like you know I built the business very much with my husband as well like we have had no life whatsoever you know we've got our children we've got two children um who are nearly five and nearly six now and they get a lot of our time a huge amount of it and work gets the rest and you know there was no there's no way to dedicate yourself to building a business and believe you can also do an infinite number of other things but when the girls were born you know I'd given a hundred of my hundred percent of myself to work and obviously that wasn't sustainable having two small children and that had to shift and I found that really really really hard I can imagine any I mean looking back any anything you do differently or any advice on someone else because it's a it's life-changing isn't it when you have kids and suddenly they are everything aren't they totally and they need world never goes back does it it's exactly and i don't know i don't know what the advice almost i'd give myself in retrospect was i think you know because really it was to let go a bit but then i think that's what built so much of the meaning in the company and i hope kind of gives it that little bit of magic and difference that lasts indefinitely.

19:40So I think it needed that obsession. Like I think it needed that desire to do that. And I don't think that can really be replaced by other people. Like, yes, of course we've got great person, customer service. And of course, like, you know, AI is coming into that now. And of course there's a practical element of, yeah, sure, you can double that recipe or it freezes really well. But you can't replicate the, I don't think you can kind of replicate that personal touch or expect anybody else to want to do it to the extent that you're willing to yeah and in a sense as well i i meet lots of founders and one of the wildest stories was the founder of a u.s um soda brand called poppy yeah and she she pitched to the sharks right yeah nine months pregnant yeah i so get that you know wild isn't it and i think she was as a third kid as well i was like that is insane you know yeah but I mean, I went back to work and I do not say this proudly at all.

20:34I say this like, I think it's reflective of the kind of insanity that takes you over as you're building a business. Like I went back to work when Sky, my elder daughter, was four weeks old. Like that's mad. That's a mad, mad thing to do. But I kind of felt, I mean, there's parts of it that you have to do. Like we're just not a big enough company. You know, we don't have investors. Like, you know, no one else can do parts of your job. Like you've built so much you kind of have to go back. But then there's bits of it that I'm like, I don't think I had to do all of those other things that I put pressure on myself to do because I felt this, yeah, this responsibility.

21:08Yeah, I bet. What's it been like running a business with your husband as well? That's an unusual dynamic. How's that been? Look, it's not for everyone. I think the number one thing to say is you've got to be fundamentally both completely the same and ultimate opposites, which is quite an unusual thing to be, which is what we are, which is like on the surface, we have the exact same kind of values, belief. vision, purpose and work, as I said, like it is our life and we've loved that. But equally, when it comes to what our day jobs are, we couldn't be more different if we tried. And that was, we met just after my book had come out about a month after it had come out.

21:43And I was kind of inundated with opportunities of things I could do with Delicious Cielo, particularly, particularly licensing it for things. And I didn't want to do any of that. Like I didn't want to, I wanted the kind of integrity of the company to always remain. And he was working in finance, hated his job, was one, he's one of those people that had always tried to be an entrepreneur and had that in his blood, which I don't, I think it was right time, right place, personal passion. And it was so clear, like he started asking me questions and he was like, well, what spreadsheet have you got for this?

22:15And I was like, well, I don't have one. I've got this piece of paper and it says we're doing really well um and so you know and again i don't say that to talk myself down i think you know my strength was the brand it was the mission it was the community it was the recipes it was like the essence of what delicious yellow is but you don't succeed having a great brand in the long run if you don't have a great business behind it and that was so where he sat and he loves business he loves building business and so it was such an obvious partnership ultimately of how i wanted this to reach as many people as possible he's desperate to kind of build a business and go of the day job and so we we started working together and obviously when you're little and you know as in like early on in your business and there's two people in a team three four five people you are always together and you're I don't know if that's sustainable forever like to work like that maybe it is maybe it wouldn't be but ultimately as we grow you know we've we've ended up doing completely different things and like whilst we used to go into the office most days together and come home most days together we would actually over time started seeing each other for like 10 minutes or we'd go and grab some lunch together but actually we'd be in like one meeting a week together so it's not like literally you're spending every hour together no we were when we started the first few years and that's that was amazing because it was such a kind of shared responsibility and excitement and And it's just like pure adrenaline, I think, getting you through that.

23:41But I don't know if that's completely sustainable. And as we've grown, and I think you need to have autonomy, don't you? And I think ultimately you get autonomy by having different remits and having different strengths. And I think it also is that sense of, you know, divide and conquer. Like you can do more because you're both, and you trust each other implicitly to go and do what your job is. Now talking about turning the brand into a business, around 2015 is that when you started actually creating your first product that law am i right i think at starbucks that's certainly where i first came across you was the energy balls in starbucks were very different as a you know as a kind of concept so how did you go from kind of you know creating recipes building a following on that kind of thing then to having a product that's uh in some of the biggest retailers in the country yeah so to the beginning of 2015 that's when the book came out and that was the moment that we went kind of from yes a big community but online and niche and um if you didn't know about it you'd never heard of it into the kind of mainstream and that was when we started talking about actually like let's take this opportunity and let's run with it and let's build something and so we um and then we launched the products early 2016 so and starbucks was our first customer after whole foods which was again very surreal i know a little bit about i spent most of my career in fmcg so i've been selling to everybody i say starbucks is probably the hardest customer in the world to get into because the range of things they sell are tiny right it's obviously their own brand isn't it and then there's like about five other brands in the whole thing how do you convince someone of that size so this honestly this was i think this kind of was a really fascinating moment and but for me we're looking back on it in the journey which was that we had so matt and i again we've always been very my husband very kind of keen on like what are we good at what do we not good at what do we know and what do we not know and we were like right we've got the brand covered we've got the kind of financial side of it covered through through him but like neither of us have ever worked in this industry and so we were like well we've got to hire someone who's going to be brilliant and so and as I said I didn't have a huge amount of confidence Matt was much more confident at this point and he was like well innocent were the kind of best in class at this I mean at this point in time and so he was like well let's look at the best person there that we could hire and so he was straight on LinkedIn and found this guy who was head of innovation at Innocent at the time and sent him an email and he was like hey my wife and I started a company like don't you desperately want to quit your great job and come and get involved and he did and I still like he's still like he's a friend and he's a great guy we worked together for a long time and I always look at it And I'm like, I cannot believe you took the job.

26:21Like, I remember we met him and I was just like, there's no way he's going to come and join. But again, it was the beauty of the fact that we had built this brand and he could see it. They had talked about it in the innocent offices and this is really disruptive in food and it's a different way of cooking and people are talking about it. And I think for him, he was like, this is a really interesting opportunity to kind of jump. And now he's been CEO of lots of food businesses. And so actually I think it was an interesting career move for him. But he came to join and he said just what you said about Starbucks and but Matt was like well no because our aim is to change the food landscape like why do things have to have so many ultra processed foods in you know let's do it differently let's scale up with 100 % natural ingredients and the way to do that is through snacking because that's how you get front of store and build that visibility and if we're going to do that and we really want to change the way people eat it's not necessarily at this point about being kind of back of store multi-pack in your big retailers this is about being very kind of incidental purchase when you're out and about and getting people to switch their habits around so we need to be somewhere like starbucks i was like lol you know we like have a blog and a cookbook like good for us three-man band here and so um and lots of manufacturers wouldn't work with us because we wouldn't use flavorings and mulchifyers so they either said it wasn't possible or it was too expensive and so we eventually found a manufacturer and so matt again was on linkedin and he found the I think it was the MD of the UK business and just tried like 10 different iterations of his name with dots you know wherever at starbucks.com.co.uk etc and one of them got through and Dan was you know who came to work with us was very like oh you know cautioned here that these are really difficult people to work with from his experience he had an email back 15 minutes later would love to meet you guys can you come in next week and again we were like geared up for this really hard meeting and we arrived and they had goodie bags for us and it was like when can we stock it we'd love it next month and we were like we don't have any stock but obviously you're there and you're like we'll do it of course we'll do it yeah absolutely and then at the same time we had opened a cafe again as a way of kind of bringing community together and we were taking it to a festival um and so we were then there the next day and i still remember it we sold 1.5 tons of avocado toast in of the avocado to go on the toast in under 24 hours because again healthy The eating had just taken off, but there wasn't anyone else doing it there because it was so new.

28:43And we had this line and people being like, why is it sold out? Meanwhile, you're in the back, like desperately trying to contract manufacturers, packaging, sure, Starbucks, sure, we can do this, no problem. We'll launch next month. And so that was the other moment you asked earlier, like, when did it feel like something? That was when it also felt like something where it was, you had this just never ending queue of people for the food we were making. We were talking to Starbucks. We were about to start our first production. We met Waitrose very shortly after who agreed to take it. And again, this was the whole beauty.

29:12Like we had a brand, we had consumers to sell to. There was nothing like it in the market. It was a white space opportunity where it was such a trend and it wasn't being served. We had a brand to serve it. And that was why we kind of did throw ourselves at it. We really did work seven days a week, 24-7, like no days off for the first five years. I think we canceled something like 17 attempts at a holiday. because you've just like when those opportunities come like the only thing you can do is run with it yeah and if you don't someone else will yeah it's i mean it's so true i mean getting into starbucks is is a one in a million shot isn't it it's just one of those things it's also an amazing brand build it's like literally i mean you talk about shop windows isn't it but which is what we wanted shop window you get in terms of getting people to try um did you like manufacture and get it in in a month i mean that's i think it was like seven weeks they gave you a little bit of wiggle room Yeah, we did.

30:02We got it in. And so, yeah, we got it in, which was extraordinary. And that was so surreal. Like, just, and again, yeah, the moment was like, there must be something in this. Like, when a company like that has such open doors and gives you a goodie bag, you were like, okay, we're not mad to quit our jobs and to go all in with this. There's something in it. And presumably the MD knew who you were and had presumably read the cookbooks. Exactly. And we had just been everywhere for those like six months all over the press. And there wasn't, it was really, we were really early mover in this space. And so I think it was like they could see this trend coming for natural, healthy.

30:43It wasn't, well, it wasn't really served. And we were the kind of the brand of the moment, which is why, as I said, it was a sense of like, we have to throw everything at this because we won't be the brand of the moment next year and someone else will be, you know, no one's that relevant forever. but that was our kind of year of core relevancy and if we didn't capitalize on it we wouldn't be here today it's a good lesson in taking the shot isn't it as in when something like that happens just putting everything into making you know making it work and going for it because i mean you know anyone who's not supplied those kind of retailers there's a lot in terms of shelf life you need logistics and pricing and you know managing stuff it's very it's a very complicated thing to do um managing your supply chain getting it's not easy to make natural ingredients in the way you're trying to do as well no no yeah what are the challenges you had to overcome to actually get it on the shelf the biggest challenge was just that most people wouldn't make it for us because everyone was like well not going to do it without flavorings i mean the energy ball for example like the core product was a market was graze and they had like 20 to 25 different ingredients and then we were like we're going to make it with four five six ingredients and you know people were just like why what a waste of time and money you know like we can make it so much more efficiently by adding these ingredients and again this like evangelical passionate like know the integrity of the brand I don't care that most consumers don't care you know I don't care that they'll never read the back of packet like we are doing it differently we are building a genuinely 100 % natural brand and we will never compromise on that and and we've kind of stayed so true to that which i'm so proud of and obviously today the landscape is so different i mean there was a stat very recently showing almost 14 million consumers in the uk are trying to move away from ultra-processed foods like now i think we're so lucky we've spent a decade learning how to scale up natural products we know how to make them without flavorings without emulsifiers without stabilizers most companies don't as you said it's more expensive we've kind of got all those structures right now consumers want it and now we can just fly which is really really exciting but to start with it was a huge amount of pushback of like what is the point i can imagine your innocent high is quite inspired actually because it's it's very it feels very similar to what innocent did in soft drinks which is my background where everything is preserved and long shelf life that kind of thing and innocent went into no it's got to be fresh it's got to be nothing but the fruits and yeah you know it's going to run out in six days exactly whereas in the supply chain in soft drinks it's usually nine months or 12 months so it's a completely different game you get yourself into yeah no they were the kind of like absolute like heroes of of the day when we were starting and exactly that we looked at them felt like they had been so disruptive and so different so you started with the energy ball right and now you've got a whole portfolio of cereals and energy bars so how do you decide where to go from that initial incredible success that you had day one how did it build from there um it was a mixture it was either recipes that our community absolutely loved um or it was things like for example our oat bars which are now our most popular range that actually came about from a request from Tesco's um who wanted us to make them so that was the following year that was 2017 and they wanted us to make them for them and then again like we as we said you don't always see the kind of reality of how what it what it takes to build a business what actually happens behind the scenes so we did this for Tesco couldn't have been more excited obviously Tesco's you know biggest retailer in the country and it was a complete failure they um they didn't sell they came out of market i can't remember exactly how long but say like nine months later you know tiny rate of sale but we we again we were looking at that category and being like there's nothing else without emulsifiers stabilizers blah blah blah we're going to do it and we're going to revisit these we're going to reformulate them we're going to redo the packaging we we believe that there was something in this but we didn't get it right first time so yeah tesco got rid of them and um they were kind of yeah a failure rebuilt them relaunched them and we made 25 million of them last year really yeah so the product you'd had withdrawn out of tesco yeah yeah has become our biggest yeah and it's like if you you know all the supermarkets we're in like in say spruce we sit right in the main aisle all of the big cereal bars and they're like the top of the category i I mean, because of them, Delicious Yellow this year is the UK's fastest growing snack brand.

35:02Amazing. Which again, like it's, so it was a failure. The product that's kind of capitalized in success. This is what no one's talking about because like I have so many conversations with entrepreneurs and like behind every success is a ton of failures, but you just don't hear about them, do you? No, I mean, goodness me, so many failures. Like there's so many things that we got wrong and so many products that didn't work or we've reformulated and all the rest of it. And I think the thing is, is that now it's so easy to sit here today and like open book, like lots of things didn't work. Those products, you know, complete disaster.

35:38But you have to be really careful what you say at the time, because it's not appropriate to often talk about these things publicly. You know, you don't want suppliers to be concerned. You're going out of business. You don't want your team to be concerned. You know, if they think there's too many things going wrong, they'll be like, well, is this viable anymore? and I've always kind of been really really conscious of that but I think because these things aren't things you can talk about as they're happening um for those reasons I think people sometimes think they don't happen that's very true what have been the which of the sort of failures have kind of like hit you the most what have been the sort of maybe the toughest moments for you I think there's sort of one like complete obvious standout so when we as I said when we started we opened one cafe and then two more so we had three one was more of a central kitchen with a very small thing attached to it and one was our first one it had 16 seats it was teeny it was completely unsustainable so we opened a much bigger one down the road at the same time as we launched the products and we weren't clear which route we would take essentially in terms of hospitality or products it was very clear to both of us very quickly that hospitality required really needed us to raise money and we really didn't want to do that we didn't want to bring anyone else in at this point because what we were doing was really different and as I said like when we talked to manufacturers they weren't really willing to not use certain ingredients etc and it was not trendy and it did we just we didn't want to bring someone else in and the products were absolutely flying and the the sites we had always opened them with this belief that once we got to four sites it would be as a kind of total operation break even at six sites it becomes profitable so all the sites were profitable at site level but you we need by three you need some ops managers and things like that so we knew this this wasn't a like oh my gosh we're going bust moment and the products as i said we got into starbucks to waitress to sainsbury's to tesco it's like we were just flying i think we were in almost 5 000 stores a year later and so we made the decision like we're going to close the sites this just doesn't make any sense they're taking up a huge amount of time a huge amount of money we're going to keep the big one and we're going to turn it into a restaurant and then the teeny one with 16 seats scrap it central kitchen we then don't need it anymore because we're not going to be supplying lots of sites let's close it and in a very british like let's cut down and put anyone back to size if they're succeeding the presser just had this field day with it and it was the whole thing was like ha here's this young girl who is annoyingly privileged just we don't like her anymore she's had too much success look she's failed and it was this very bizarre celebration of this failure that wasn't a failure it was a really conscious decision to choose one side of the business and cut the other but keep the biggest sight of all and it's so anyway and they wrote like I got a call from the CEO of Morrison saying like you guys going out of business oh no and we hadn't so then all our retailers were you know because you didn't mention the products the articles didn't mention the products once it didn't matter that we'd gone they made this they made the connection between the they basically were like now we're going well the whole the whole all the articles were like they felt closing down they're closing down oh no and and that was the biggest like obviously also it was so tough like we made lots of people redundant it was a horrible it's a horrible thing to have to do anyway like and but you don't succeed in business if you don't make decisions like you do pivot as you go and like that was an important decision for us to make like it wasn't plausible to scale that fast to fundamentally different operations like you look at it so they got to huge size before they went into retail like you can't do them both at the same time it's not a sensible decision and that was what we decided to do and so yeah that was that was really difficult because there was this huge pleasure it felt like people were taking in a failure that wasn't really a failure and it put us really on the back foot so you know when I said like you we can't really talk about things that are going wrong as they're going wrong because that was such a great example like we were really transparent about what we were doing and people were like ha what a failure what a disaster told you so she'd never make it which was really interesting that is isn't it i i you are you are i do wonder if that's a british thing uh and i know i work with a guy who um launched a vitamin water drink and then went to the us and uh launched a nutrition nutrition subscription business i'm really successful and i remember him saying to me he said i'm loving la and i'm like well of course weather's good yeah you know and he said you know what the moment i landed everyone asked me about my business and everyone wants me to succeed and they just assume it's going to be a wild success you know whereas whereas i fly back to the uk and i see people and they just the default assumption is like i must be going wrong you know we kind of talk we talk ourselves down yeah i think we do because it's kind of our society which is really odd and we desperately need more entrepreneurs and we desperately need more people to start businesses but we don't yeah is that when you're starting I think people are like, yes, good for you.

40:50But then I don't know if we're as receptive as things get bigger. The moment something goes wrong, I said, ah, I told you so. I knew that was going to happen. That was it. I knew she was a moron. It's kind of the general sentiment. So that was really interesting. That was hard to recover from, actually, because the sentiment was they're a complete failure. And we're like, whoa, whoa, no, we're going so fast. How have you, you know, you've obviously made lots of decisions. You go, how do you manage the kind of the risk and return? Because you need to invest in the business. you need to hire people and grow so how have you kind of managed that balance between you know taking the risk like opening opening you know outlets versus you know because it that's quite well i think the thing that sort of helped in lots of ways is like we we didn't have external capital and so we had to live within our means and if you have to live within your means you can't make that many decisions and interestingly again like in the earlier stages i think a lot of our team found that very frustrating because this was the moment like 2017 of you know zero percent interest rates everyone was raising so much money and spending so much money on ads and you know all sorts of amazing events and things like that and we were like we've got five pounds on instagram you know we just didn't have any money to spend on marketing none at all and so you know we couldn't do all of these things that other brands were doing and because we were like no we have to live within our means if it's not profitable we can't do it so we said no to a lot of things and I think that was such a different way of operating whereas obviously now again the world looks so different and all of those businesses are scrambling to make themselves profitable because now the expectation is you should be profitable and you should live on those profits and spend accordingly in our industry so it feels like there's been a huge huge change and so we're like oh well we're practice at doing that that's great and it's kind of normal now and that's that's really helpful but to start with it was really hard but I think it has taught me quite a lot in terms of again every industry is so different but I think if we're looking at our industry I think there's it's a kind of ego boost of spending huge amounts of money on above the line and all the rest of it feels really good like it's so cool but I don't know how much it always does in terms of genuinely meaningful business growth and you know we when we we sold delicious yellow last year and we had a smaller brand plants that we spun out of it and it's tiny comparatively and it's really new and we've got a team of four people and you know you're on a kind of zero spend drive essentially as you know in startup mode and the rates of sale are absolutely extraordinary you know we're top of the category and and we didn't even post on social media for six months because we were you know figuring we were rebranding and all the rest of it so in the time that we didn't post on social media and we spent literally zero pounds we just kept growing and the rates of sale are kind of top of the category all around and we're most incremental brand in the category and all the rest of it and I don't know I just I kind of keep coming back to like actually I think there's there can be a bit of fluff in it and I'm not saying it all is god it's not you've got you know to build a brand you've got to be doing things but I think it's it did teach me something because I would be envious of those brands to be honest when I was I wish we could do this.

44:02I wish we could have this amazing stand at this trade show. And it was like, oh, it's just like this big, tiny table. And actually I look at it and I think some of those things obviously pay off, but I think a huge amount of them don't. Well, I think what you've done incredibly well, though, is you've built your own media channel and you've got your book, you've got your blogs, you've got, you know, we've got podcasts as well, right? And you basically built your own brand and your own media channel. So you can talk to, what, tens, hundreds of thousands of people every single week. Yeah, exactly.

44:31And we can talk straight to them, which is absolutely amazing. Yeah. And they're a captivated audience. They buy into you because they care and they want, you know, they want to eat better and they want to follow what you're doing as well, which I think is huge. Yeah. The rate of sale thing is really interesting because I know in my career what I've noticed is like that is the moment of truth, isn't it? The moment the product's on the shelf and also whatever it does almost in week one is how it will do. You just know it's one of those instant feedback things, isn't it? You go, right, where am I ranking in the, you know, in the rate of sale charts?

45:00and it will be that. It will be that, I totally agree. And obviously, you know, you'll climb a bit because, you know, implementation will get better and you'll do a good promo and things like that. But I agree, like, definitely for us, things that have started at the top generally stay at the top and things that have started at the bottom generally come out of market after a little bit. I think, I don't think we've had anything that, yeah, after a month isn't performing that suddenly becomes this massive performer. You know, obviously I said about the Oat Vals earlier, but we scrapped those, we rebranded them, And we reformulate that they were quite different when they came back.

45:32And how do you make decisions then on like, how do you test to make sure that what's going to be supplies? Tesco is going to work in terms of product because you've got a big product range now. How do you kind of pick the winners? We've really whittled down the range actually over the last few years. And I think our sense was like to start with innovation was everything. And it was this sense of like, let's try everything and we'll see what works. And like, don't be afraid of failure. Like there's lots of products that have come out of market quite quickly, but we switched, you know, we got the space.

45:59space we got the footprint and we switched them in for something else which i think's been really helpful and now it's actually like no we've got our core range and it's working really really well and let's just really double down on that as opposed to chasing endless innovation and like you say do you know i remember i worked in um in in juice and like i could literally walk anywhere and tell you what order things sell based on flavors you know i mean it's like right you want the orange and passion fruit at the top you know exactly the rhubarb will be at the bottom yes something because you just know because because like people have preferences for certain taste profiles you know of course don't change you know and they really don't change and i remember early on someone saying like you can't change the way consumers operate like you just can't like they'll shop where they want to shop in the way that they want to shop for the flavors to your point that they want to shop and i think again what we've also seen obviously kind of existing in the world of health and wellness that has boomed like there's no tomorrow over the last decade when we started to now there've been so many trends you know it's been extraordinary and we've seen so new brands kind of come and goes they're like and they're huge because they're so trended and then the next year it's another trend and it's so cyclical and instead we're like no we're just going to stay in our lane we're going to focus on things that taste good at the right price point at the right price um the right place in store and actually again like i think the longevity of that is higher albeit tempting to to jump on trends you know we've seen it in in our space in the kind of meat mimic category it's everything and now it's nothing yeah i like i think it's jeff bezos that said this the tell me what won't change in the future and i'll build a business on that yeah you know because you're right you've got to balance kind of as you've innovated with kind of plant-based food but also making sure you deliver what you know people want totally and like our best flavors you know apple and raisin and peanut butter yeah you know yes we've you know we've done it a little bit differently in the sense of like the formulation with the ingredients that we use versus the convention as we said without using ultra processed foods but the flavor profile is the flavor profile that people like and are comfortable with and when we've got funkier flavors they just can't beat yeah apple and raisin yeah i totally agree it's funny actually in my day job at system where we had this um phrase called uh 80 familiar 20 new yeah and we've actually measured like i think it's something like 60 000 different bits of innovation and we've measured how people respond emotionally to them and the optimum mix is you want to do about 80 happiness and about 20 surprise so it's good to have a bit of surprise as in oh this is plant-based i didn't realize but then you need to offset that with oh yeah it's apple and raisin i know what that's going to be like kind of thing if you mix both if you go like it's plant-based and it's kind of you know wildflower from some remote island or something then they go what on earth is this it's too much to kind of comprehend i love that 82 i hadn't had it hadn't yeah heard it in that way i totally agree with you and i think exactly our 20 was like it's 100 natural it's palm based that's novel that's different that's your 20 right and then the rest of you just go and i know what i'm getting with granola exactly yeah it's an oak bar i don't think you know as we said we've done all sorts of innovations all sorts of funky things but our oak bars are our best sellers follow bar granola totally in fact i've met some tech people and they were saying the equivalent phrase in tech is called Maya, which is most advanced yet acceptable.

49:13And most tech does most advanced and they don't do the yet acceptable kind of thing. It's actually, you know, as most of us who are not kind of massively into tech, we just need something that's a little bit different to what we have today. But if you make too big a jump, then people just, you know, and that's why you have so many brands, I think that are too early, you know, we say before their time, because they've just too ahead of that curve. Totally. And look, I think, you know, a huge amount of success was right time, right place. And we were right time, right place. and we threw everything at it.

49:40And I think there's so much in that, be it like being the right place for social media's early days and the blog's early days. It wasn't equally no one else was really sharing these sorts of recipes. So we had such a first mover advantage. And I think it changed everything. You also, I was going to, because this year, you sold the business last year, didn't you? Yeah. But you've now pulled a brand out of potential insolvency, didn't you, with all plants as well. What was the thinking behind that? I'd love to keep going. Yeah. Do lots of different things. You're not going to take us some time off and sit on a beach somewhere.

50:13No, I don't think, not yet, not at the moment. No, I think it's, so yeah, so we had this plants brand, which is actually with Deliciousie Ella, like the core recipes in the books and things like that had always been savoury. It was like quick stir fries and salads and things. And actually, but because we started in snacking to this point of getting to front of store and, you know, all the eyeballs on you, it was quite hard in store to transition Deliciousie Ella away from snacks and cereals into savory food and so we had this opportunity with waitrose back in 2023 to launch a natural plant-based brand for them basically so we created this brand plant with waitrose we developed it but it was for waitrose and we launched 50 products in six months 50 yeah it was honestly that's a logistical nightmare it was so strong again and do you know what we were saying with opportunities like we were coming out of covid as a brand that had always been brand first and very like team focused we completely lost our mojo like there felt like no momentum that had all gone during covid and we desperately needed something big like a big moment to get it back and so when we got this opportunity and obviously developing 50 products and getting them to launch in six in six months with literally three people doing it it's kind of insanity it was like we need this we need a moment we need something that's special and so we we ran after that we obviously did not expect all 50 products to work but um and they didn't some have been amazing successes some rate of sale of zero basically and they've gone now but then when we sold deliciousiela matthew and i bought the plants brand out of there which was so excited about because this natural plant-based feels like a very underserved underserved part of store on the back of the Meat Mimic kind of collapse.

52:01But we've always really admired the All Plants brand and it went into administration around the same time that we were taking plants into its own company. And the two just felt like they had very similar values, very similar community of people. And so actually they make more sense together to really try and be a kind of powerhouse when it comes to plant-based. And so we had the opportunity to buy the trademark. So we did. and we're currently redoing our packaging and things to really try and bring the two brands together but it's it's really exciting and it's performing really well well what is it because i mean um plant-based has kind of gone through a bit of a i mean like you know a bit wild isn't it like it's the biggest thing and it's not some of the businesses are you know kind of like valued like dot-com businesses and it's just been a wild journey isn't it i mean what's where where's the kind of market out and what do you think is going to happen next and that's been so interesting for us to watch you know we were saying a minute ago about not jumping on trends obviously we're a plant-based company and everyone's like well this is what's cool right now like why aren't you making meat mimics we're like because that's the antithesis of what we're about like we're natural plant bases this is about more almonds more carrots more lentils this is not about mimics it's not who we are we're not going to do it but i felt like we were in the industry very uncool at that point very irrelevant and that was quite challenging and you know that again the temptation to jump on these things is there because it's um it's an obvious opportunity but it would have been so against our brand standards again for longevity it's just not the right thing to do and i think we always felt this would come around because ultimately it's still ultra processed food and so for the vast majority of people who just want to eat more veg and you know vaguely flexitarian if you're going to have a meat-free meal you probably want it to be like aubergine and carrots it's not not a mimic because it's not as healthy you know it doesn't necessarily taste as good anyway and so so yeah it's been a complete boom or bust the category is in horrendous decline and it's so fragmented you've got so many tiny brands selling very very random things you've got seven different plant-based bacons or whatever it is and it's just it's it's just the category needs such a huge overhaul which all the big retailers are now doing which is really interesting to talk to them about and be a part of but there's such an obvious opportunity for those people who just want simple natural plant-based food and and that's not really being served which is obviously what we want to do with plants and all plants yeah i mean that's something i love about the the books you've written as well um is how you focus on making it easy as well i think in all this innovation people forget that the the best chance you got is to make it easy for people to be healthy right and that's something i think you've absolutely nailed in kind of because it's eating healthy can be hard i mean like i did the zoe thing my man i was like you know it's hard yards just to do research and think about it and plan and get ingredients and it's really hard for sure and people are so busy and generally quite overwhelmed and so i think i've always taken the approach and it was honestly the foundations of delicious yellow which is like for anything to be sustainable it has to be enjoyable and i think enjoyable is two-pronged it does taste good obviously when you're talking about food but also has to be achievable like it has to fit in your life and i think you know the average person in the uk does 126 fad diets in their lifetime really quite something yeah and you know i'm on about six you've got a way to go that's insane it's mad isn't it and you know and it's because they they don't last like you know you're gung-ho for a week and then life gets in the way and you're like this is not sustainable well, I cannot keep this up, which is, again, it's like, if it doesn't taste good, if it's not easy, everyone's going to give up on it really quickly.

55:43And again, I think that, you know, obviously we've got decades to go and, you know, the business isn't that old, but 10 plus years in, I think I would say that's the ultimate testament to the brand. It's like, it just tastes good and you understand what it is. And I think that people can sway into all sorts of other things, but they always come back. Yeah, so many parallels to my drinks experience because I've done so much research in my career on what makes a drink, Sal. And number one, it doesn't matter what category, it's got to taste good. And this is why I can go to any kind of cafe, any shop, and I could rank the products and go, that's the highest seller, that's the lowest seller, just because, you know, taste is the primary motivator for everything.

56:23It's got to taste good, and then you'll come back to it. Yeah. Maybe to round us off then, as I've got a fellow podcast host on the podcast, congratulations on the podcast success, by the way. and um you've talked about some lots of hot topics as well on the podcast so what what's it been about and uh what are the kind of hot topics you've been covering well as we were saying the world of health and wellness has kind of exploded in the last 10 years or so and it's been for me it's been a really interesting and i think to me now really frustrating watch which is like it's great that people are talking about health and wellness but we're a situation in the most reductive terms where like 99 plus percent of the uk population know they shoot their five a day the most recent research that came out a few weeks ago shows one in five of us manage it and it's one in 10 teenagers like if you want just like the basic fact of how poorly we collectively eat i think it's that obviously again like almost one of five people 80 their calories come from upfs 90 percent of people don't even have fiber like we're really struggling and the nhs is kind of collapsing under the weight of it also i think for me i feel this again this never-ending sense of passion to really try and make a difference in it but i find it so ironic that the world of wellness is so enormous in a trillion dollar industry and where it's being sold every powder and gadget and gizmo under the sun and people are so tempted by all of these quick fixes and yet nothing's clearly working this gulf between the conversation that's happening that all sorts of fancy things that are being sold and our day-to-day habits is so far removed from one another it feels very ironic to be honest and i think for me the podcast and i do it with a friend of mine rianne and lambert who's a brilliant nutritionist it's like what's going on in the news you know whether it's the zempick whether it's the new government plans on obesity you know trends cortisol whatever it is and try and break them down for people like what's actually going on here what's this study actually about what's relevant to your life and what can we park yeah there's a lot of parking i bet there is and the last thing i find really difficult is like there's so much fact and fiction out there and it's just like navigating through this particular diet oh it's all about this and then it's suddenly about that and then what you thought yesterday is no longer true and it's like it's really really hard to navigate well almost 98 percent of the information nutritional information on social media again this is relatively recent information is either misleading or wrong and goes against the um british public health guidelines and it's and i think lots of it's misleading versus kind of fundamentally wrong but it's the world of social media that we live in now because of the algorithm changes that tiktok kind of ushered in it's all clickbait everything's clickbait and everything's virality and nuance doesn't have virality you know eat a few more vegetables but don't worry if you eat a mars bar it doesn't have virality and so the problem is is that gets lost and as a result because it's such an important kind of financial stream for so many people it has to be like this is the three things that will kill you this week that doesn't help anybody eat better but it does create virality and so i think that's the problem is so much information has become conflicting dogmatic extreme because that's what creates clickbait and that's what therefore succeeds on social media and nuance doesn't really do that which is a shame it is a massive shame and and look that's also why podcasts so cool right because people will sit and listen for 45 minutes to an hour yeah really understand the nuance exactly i think you know the success of podcasts in the last few years i think has hopefully provided a channel by which that nuance can live yeah well listen congratulations i love hearing your story it's just absolutely delightful to hear and congratulations on all the success and on what's coming next as well.

59:53I watch with interest to see how it all does. Oh, thanks for having me. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored CMO. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show. So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do. I'm over on x at Uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching and I'll see you next time.