HEALTHY FOOD NEEDS TO BE EASY WITHOUT COMPROMISING ON TASTE. THAT’S WHERE ELLA MILLS’ NEW COOKBOOK COMES IN…
ELLA MILLS EXPLODED on to the food scene in 2015. A nervous 23-year-old, she’d spent more than a year battling a debilitating chronic illness that baffled doctors and left her unable to get out of bed. Her cookbook, Deliciously Ella, was the result of her own search for a cure, and the story of how a plant-based diet helped her get well.
Almost 10 years later, she is altogether more confident and sure of herself – and no wonder. That first book – the fastest-selling cookery debut of all time in the UK – was the catalyst for her multimillion-pound food brand of the same name, which today has 100 products in 10,000 stores around the UK, and recently took its first steps into the US market. In its central London offices, where product development and testing happen, are 100 staff, and the brand recently bought its own factory. Then there’s the London restaurant, Plants, and this month Mills has just published her seventh book, Healthy Made Simple.
Her personal life is settled, too. In April 2016 she married Matthew Mills (son of the late Labour politician, Dame Tessa Jowell) who is now also her business partner. Together, they have two young daughters, Skye, four, and May, three, and images of them and the family together, looking happy and glossily healthy, are sprinkled throughout the new book.
The dramatic change in how her life was, and is now, is not lost on Mills. ‘Then and now feel like two unrelated books that are not even found in the same library,’ she says. ‘Before I was so lost and had been in such a dark place. Even prior to getting ill, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I had low self-esteem, no passion, purpose or drive, no direction about the person I wanted to be or belief that I could get there if I worked hard. To totally change my health and discover through that an area I could be passionate about was surprising. It is extraordinary to think that I run my own business!’
Accepting her success has not come easily, though. ‘I didn’t enjoy it so much in the beginning because I felt such a deep sense of impostor syndrome; that it wouldn’t last, that in some way I would be found out,’ says Mills. ‘Of course, there is a right place, right time – when the first book came out, we were at a watershed moment regarding the link between how we eat and how we feel, and Deliciously Ella [the brand] was able to build on that. But it’s taken me until this year to feel that it wasn’t just luck or a happy accident, to look at the years of evidence that show that Deliciously Ella is something different, a really profitable business to be proud of.’
Unsurprisingly, the brand’s success, co
