Deliciously Ella founder tackles her ‘biggest risk:’ expanding her British vegan food empire into the U.S.

But Deliciously Ella has yet to fully penetrate one major market: the U.S. This fall, the brand began selling products through its first retail partner in the U.S., the healthy foods wholesaler Thrive Market. The launch was part of a strategy to tackle one of the world’s biggest markets slowly and deliberately.

Mills founded Deliciously Ella about a decade ago after she was diagnosed with a condition that affected her autonomic nervous system; she says her symptoms resembled those of long COVID. She found that eating a vegan diet eased and even healed many of her symptoms, and she began blogging about plant-based cooking. What started as a content platform evolved into a full-fledged business that sells a range of products made without emulsifiers, flavorings, or preservatives. Mills now serves as brand director while her husband, Matthew Mills, is CEO, running a profitable business that earned £25 million ($31.8 million) in 2023. They call Deliciously Ella a “family-owned business” and haven’t raised outside capital.

Courtesy of Deliciously Ella

Mills says she never aspired to found a business. “There’s this rhetoric that if you’re going to be an entrepreneur, you’re going to know that—it’s the kids who sell sweets on the playground,” she says. “I just never felt that I would be able to start a business or scale something. I just couldn’t imagine it for myself.”

But her blog was a “right place, right time” phenomenon, she says; it racked up 130 million hits in two years. “It was just an absolute white space. There was nothing there,” she says of the conversation around plant-based eating in the U.K. Without realizing it, Mills had stumbled upon “the origins of good content marketing—building a true sense of brand where people engage beyond a simple physical product,” she says. “But I never thought about it like that. I was just really passionate about sharing what I was learning.”

Deliciously Ella was ready to expand to the U.S. in 2020, right before the pandemic hit, and ended up canceling those plans. Now, the Millses are taking a slow-but-steady approach. “It’s the biggest opportunity—and in lots of ways the biggest risk,” Mills says. “It’s infinitely bigger and infinitely more complex. You can end up investing everything into the U.S., in terms of time and energy resources, taking it all away from the core market.”

The vegan recipe content that helped build the brand in the U.K. isn’t as distinguishing a factor in the U.S. in 2024 as it was in the U.K. in 2013. “[Americans] are up to a decade ahead of where we are in conversations around health and wellness,” Mills says. And yet “ingredient decks in the U.S. are infinitely worse in terms of the level of artificial ingredients.” So this time around, the brand plans to lean on its products to build an audience and customer base. It aims to bring plant-based products to mass market grocery shelves, not just to specialty stores. “In time, that’s what we’d like to do in the U.S.—make these healthier options available everywhere,” she says.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe

The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Subscribe here.

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

- Ramen empire. Kim Jung-soo went from stay-at-home mom married into a family behind a South Korean business dynasty to CEO of one of its companies, Samyang Roundsquare. Her company makes ultra-spicy ramen noodles that are starting to be sold on American grocery store shelves. Wall Street Journal

- Campus criticism. Billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman's crusade against recently-resigned Harvard president Claudine Gay, which included allegations of plagiarism, has become a family matter. The publication Business Insider investigated the work of former MIT professor Neri Oxman, who is married to Ackman, and raised similar allegations about her work. In response, Ackman announced plans to examine the work of all MIT faculty for plagiarism, including president Sally Kornbluth, who testified before Congress about antisemitism alongside Gay. New York Times

- Drive safe? Auto technology that allows vehicle owners to track their cars can be weaponized by domestic abusers. Abuse victims have reported being tracked by ex-spouses—and being unable to kick their abusers off of the tracking system when cars are in both spouses' names. New York Times

- Hot topic. Senior-level women are becoming more open about menopause at work. Frank discussions about hot flashes and other symptoms are influencing companies' decisions to introduce more accommodations and benefits intended to offset $1.8 billion in lost productivity due to menopause each year. Bloomberg

- Deleted app. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, the mobile game that was one of Kim Kardashian's earliest major business successes, downloaded more than 60 million times, has shut down after a decade. Kardashian said in a statement that she "realized that it’s time to focus that energy into other passions." Kardashian recently launched a private equity firm. The Hollywood Reporter

MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Puck News hired former Twitter chief customer officer Sarah Personette as its CEO. 

ON MY RADAR

Taraji P. Henson is tired of fighting New York Times

Rachel Bloom is reliving the pandemic onstage every night Vulture

The anti-DEI movement has gone from fringe to mainstream. Here's what that means for corporate America Fortune

PARTING WORDS

"You can’t be original again; you have to be original every time."

—Margot Robbie on what comes next for her production company LuckyChap after the successes of Barbie and Saltburn