In 2011, when Ella Mills 20 was chronically ill and with tiredness, migraines and palpitations up to 190 strokes per minute, she was almost fucking while standing. As a student at St. Andrews University, she had to sleep between 16 and 18 hours a day because the tiredness was unbearable.
“You are so dizzy that your head is separated from your body,” recalls Mills, who had to go home to manage the symptoms.
Mills, now the mother of two children living in Great Britain, saw a dozen doctors and were subjected to over 40 interventions, including visits to endocrinologists and gastroenterologists. A few months later, it was finally diagnosed with orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (Pots), a disturbance in which the autonomous nervous system is involved that causes a quick heartbeat, nausea, brain fog, fainting and fatigue.
There is no official healing for the disorder that mainly affects women between the ages of 15 and 50 – although it has now been bound After the covidal symptoms. At some point Mills had 25 medication a day. None of them worked.
“I did the low point very much and I think it was really clear that I didn’t do anything to help myself,” she says.
Like many in a place of hopelessness, Mills turned to the Internet. She read stories of countless women who have their disorder, many of whom felt desperate and have been facing medication and a combination of nutrition and other changes in lifestyle.
“I just had the feeling that I had nothing to lose, but try to somehow revise my diet and revise my lifestyle, but I couldn’t cook and I didn’t like vegetables” Assets.
Although Mühlen did not do a self -proclaimed unhealthy eater in 2012, she changed for her diet, which chose natural ingredients and cooked at home. In a desperate request for help and to blame herself, she published her tests and difficulties in a blog.
Over a decade, the 20-dollar WordPress blog account with the name Delicious Ella transformed into a company that brings $ 25 million a year. A cookbook that has sold over 1.5 million copies and a social media of over 4 million (a reach that exceeds other herbal snack competitors in the field).
It has become the fastest growing snack brand in the UK and is now expanding the start in the worldwide Us at Whole Foods in May this year. In 2024, the brand was taken over by Hero Group, a Swiss manufacturer. While the company will not disclose the deal, MILLS and her husband share that “we had numerous approaches to sale or together with other food companies over the years, but only they felt right.”
The company currently has a value of around 35 million US dollars, according to the estimates by S&P.
“I taught myself to cook, and I did it in a blog because I am a very allorist person. I thought I know I have to blame myself,” she says. “It took us a decade of experiments and attempts and mistakes to get to the point where we know how we can really be tried with only kitchen cabinet ingredients.”
The random founder”
Mills tells within two years Assets Their location brought 130 million goals and reached people in about 80 countries.
While she still stopped medication, Mills’ minimalist and homemade diet improved her illness. Two years later she had no medication and her business grew in the crotch.
She started more on social media about the recipes she made and what she learned. In 2014 she put together all recipes in an app and published a cookbook in 2015 that was sold out before it was published and immediately became one Amazon And New York Times Bestseller.
Mills describes herself as a “random founder” who has no entrepreneurial brain or the experience that a company scaled, has no entrepreneurial brain. “I’m not trying to pretend that I won’t be what I wasn’t,” she says. It is no surprise that she was not a professional cook or nutritionist, but she marketed herself as a self -proclaimed “home cook” who just wanted to do better.
The start of wellness enthusiasm
A month after the publication of the cookbook, Mills met her current husband and business partner Matt-a Finanznerd in the heart with the willingness to scale a brand. Two weeks after she had hit him, he quit his job to work with her to scale and build up her business and build products that matched her mission.
“He can’t cook. I cannot build Excel table,” she says, adding that she never wanted to licens the brand to third parties to produce products. “I have put together two really obvious skills, and none of us were interested in the work of the other person.”
Delicious Ella’s first product, a cocoa and almond Energy Ball, was published in 2016, followed by a number of other products. After printing, the brand sold over 100 million products, and the company’s membership, which is available for USD 2.74 per month, offers access to thousands of recipes as well as food plans and blog posts.
“It really came together with this world of well -being, which is shaped, and the industry takes shape, and the people who started to think:” Oh, there is an actual commercial value in it, “she says.” I felt almost evangelical, only as passionate that I tried to bring this as many people as possible. I didn’t care how many obstacles there were. I didn’t care that it took over my life completely. ”
Over a decade later, the importance of lifestyle, including nutrition, movement and sleep, for physical and mental health, has become much more mainstream.
The enthusiasm for the limitation of ultra-processed foods was presented in headlines and opens up a trail for brands that promote the use of minimal ingredients. It has been shown that the limitation of ultra-processed food reduces the risk of chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and early mortality. After Cleveland ClinicThe diet is an integral pillar in treatment plans to improve those with pots, if not foolproof.
And wellness and lifestyle brands have increased. Companies that specialize in healthy eating, nutrition and weight loss Global Wellness Institute.
“I think you have this naive optimism when you found a company. It is so critical because you have to believe that you can do the impossible. But we both just felt that this will be a huge experiment,” she says. “It was how, how do we make some importance, size, which really bothers for the food industry, but use this 100% natural and never ultra-processed food?”
Building a brand beyond fashion symptoms
Mills acknowledge that you can lose relevance if you do not itot and develop your brand to satisfy the demand. However, she didn’t want to give in to the latest wellness fashion to stay in front.
Ella was strategically simple in the area.
“We had a moment when turmeric was in which Beyonce wore a kale jumper, and the meat -minute boom, in which the whole world would eat impossible burger,” she says. “We will only stay on our trail. We have never jumped on one of them.”
Mills admits that it is very lucky to be in the lifestyle train at a time when social media were not so loud and brands concentrated less on the damage of ultra-processed food than today. But she attributes her success to the hustling to create a loyal faith community and be consistent.
“There are 1,000 other trends that we could jump on, but for me this is not a long -term way to build the brand or actually postpone the dial of health,” she says. “If it doesn’t taste good or is far too expensive, it just won’t stay part of a person’s life.”
