Plant-based food influencer Deliciously Ella has sold her company after admitting she was ‘overwhelmed with fame’.
Ella Mills, 33, the daughter of Sainsbury’s heiress Camilla Sainsbury and former Northern Ireland secretary Shaun Woodward, is believed to have banked ‘millions’ from the sale to Swiss group Hero.
While the price of the sale hasn’t been disclosed, her food empire – which she owned alongside her husband Matthew Mills – was previously valued at £60million.
Since she started designing healthy recipes in her parents’ kitchen while studying at St Andrew’s University in 2013, the recipe mogul has built a food empire, selling millions of her own products across UK supermarkets.
But not everything has always been smooth sailing as she recently revealed she was stepping out the limelight after claiming that she was receiving a barrage of horrendous trolling.
Ella’s vegan products will join other upmarket health food sold by the Swiss company, including the children and baby snacks, Organix, famed for their posh maize crisps and oat bars.
Ella Mills, 32, found fame for her clean eating blog while studying at St Andrew’s University in 2013
In January earlier this year, the foodie confessed that she was consciously ‘retreating from public life’ after she faced years of horrific online trolling
Ready to buy in most supermarkets, Ella’s healthy cereal bar snacks have been extremely popular since hitting the shelves in 2016, having sold 100 million products so far.
In a joint statement, the couple admitted the brand how grown ‘bigger than either of us could have imagined,’ but that the sale has been long deliberated and ‘felt right’.
In January, the foodie confessed that she was consciously ‘retreating from public life’ after she faced years of horrific online trolling.
With fame and seven cookbooks selling more than 1.5million copies worldwide, scrutiny had increased over the years she told The Times.
‘Until quite recently I really, really retreated because I felt overwhelmed. I wanted to be essentially vanilla,’ Ella said at the time.
Finding it easier to stay silent in the face of what she described as ‘personal’ and ‘incredibly violating’ attacks, Ella was at the same time unhappy about having lost her voice.
Ella remedied the problem by removing pictures of herself from socials.
She now focuses her content on family and friends. Pictured with her husband and daughters
Ella’s Instagram account now focuses on pictures of her cooking tasty dishes lightly peppered with images of herself exercising, posing with her husband or cuddling with her children.
Speaking in 2022, Ella said she would like to follow in Jamie Oliver‘s footsteps and take up food advocacy.
‘I know I can do the most good working directly to change the way people eat,’ she told You Magazine.
Over the past decade, Ella’s empire has grown from a humble blog to a firm that sells a food product every two seconds – and her plans for the future underline a commendable determination to spread her message.
She said the vicious trolling she endured after her first book, Deliciously Ella, was published in 2015 almost forced her to quit her venture.
‘We’d gone from something niche to people talking about you instead of to you,’ she said.
Ella owned the company with her husband Matthew (pictured together)
She still regularly shares cooking videos online (pictured)
‘I was so young and out of my depth and confused. I didn’t know what I was doing. I definitely had moments from 2015 to 2017 when I thought, “Do I really want to do this?”‘
Ella said it was her online community that kept her going, adding: ‘When you hear from people who say this has changed their life, you think “Who cares about this random person I’ve never met who doesn’t like me?”‘
Her range grew to more than 40 vegan products – including her original cacao and almond energy balls – which are sold across 6,000 stores.
Ella’s mother is the supermarket heiress Camilla Davan Sainsbury but she says there have never been any handouts from either of her parents.
‘My family haven’t worked in Sainsbury’s since before I was born,’ Ella said. ‘Ironically they were one of the last retailers to stock us.
‘But there is a spirit that comes from my great-great-great-grandpa, who started one of the biggest brands in the country.’
If she does move into food politics, Ella may turn to her ex-Labour MP father for advice.
Meanwhile, her husband Matthew Mills, the chief executive of Deliciously Ella, is also considering following in the family footsteps with a run for parliament.
Matthew is the son of late Cabinet Minister Dame Tessa Jowell and previously said it was ‘definitely in the ether’ that he would one day stand as an MP.
The couple met through their parents in what Ella has dubbed ‘an arranged marriage’. The mother-of-two added: ‘The first two times we met it was business and not a date.
‘Eventually he asked me out to dinner and three days after that we moved in together.’