38 Monday May 2 2022 | the times
Business
business came at the cost of two
London cafés, in Edgware Road and
Herne Hill, which the couple closed in
2018, as they refurbished a third café
at a cost of “hundreds of thousands”
of pounds and reopened it as Plants
by de. The closures led to job cuts and
media reports of £723,000 losses.
Meanwhile, the product business
secured listings in Starbucks, Tesco,
Morrisons and Waitrose. The negative
stories hurt them, Ella said. “I even
got a call from the CEO of one of the
Big Four — not Sainsbury’s —
because they thought we wouldn’t be
able to continue to stock them
because it was so widely reported...
[that we] were going under.”
The coverage came as they were
dealing with tragedy. “It was also the
time when my mum was basically
passing away in front of my eyes,” said
Matthew. “It was horrendous.”
Happier times have since returned.
Matthew and Ella, who have two
young daughters, bought out their
existing shareholders in September
last year after taking out a loan from
OakNorth Bank. “If something goes
wrong it’s absolutely terrifying,” Ella
said, “but equally, it felt like the right
thing to do.”Ella and Matthew Mills set up their foodDeliciously Ella founders
plant seed for the future
J
udging the moment to open a
new restaurant is difficult at
the best of times, but during
the pandemic entrepreneurs
have had to take a leap of faith.
That was the approach adopted by
Ella and Matthew Mills, the couple
behind the Deliciously Ella healthy
food and lifestyle brand, when in Junelast year they opened the doors of
their central London restaurant
serving plant-based food. Initially, it
had the reception they had hoped for.
“It was profitable every week,”
Matthew Mills, 38, said, “and then
Omicron hit.”
Trade at Plants by de in Mayfair
dropped by 70 per cent as restrictions
were imposed. Customers have
returned since then, helping Plants by
de to make a small profit, but for the
couple there was more tied up in the
restaurant than the health of its
accounts. Since launching her blog in
2012, which later spawned five
bestselling books, an app and healthy
snacks, Ella Mills, 30, had hoped to
create a luxury eatery to “showcase
the breadth of plant-based food”.
It was difficult at the start. “When
we were starting out, each business
activity funded the next one and we
didn’t have money to take on big
restaurant leases,” she said. Instead,
they took incremental steps. She had
originally started the Deliciously Ella
blog to chronicle the diet changes she
made to try to combat postural
tachycardia syndrome, a serious
illness diagnosed while she was
studying at the University of St
Andrews. The blog had “about
130 million hits” in the first two years,
so she started doing small cookery
classes and supper clubs.
The first iteration of the Deliciously
Ella app followed in 2014 and
Matthew became chief executive in- The couple were introduced by
Ella’s father, Shaun Woodward, the
former Labour MP and Northern
Ireland secretary, and got engaged.
But the frenzied interest in Ella
threatened to destroy the business
before it even began. “When our first
book came out... people had levels of
expectation that as a 23-year-old I just
couldn’t meet. It was a real moment of
vulnerability,” she said.
Undeterred, they launched their
first café at the end of 2015 and a
range of products, including granolas,
snacks and oat bars, in 2016. They
raised funding in 2017 from a group of
private investors — not their families.
Ella’s mother is Camilla Sainsbury, the
supermarket heiress; Matthew’s father
is David Mills, a lawyer who worked
for Silvio Berlusconi, and his mother
was Tessa Jowell, the Labour
politician who died in 2018.
“It was really important to us to
take that money from an external
source,” Ella said, adding that it was
often assumed that she had been
given handouts by her family. While it
bothered them in the early days, they
find it less troublesome now.
“Operating across multiple retailers,
across multiple countries and having
the subscriber base that we have —
that doesn’t happen because your
family gives it to you,” Matthew said.
Deliciously Ella, which celebrated
its ten-year anniversary last week and
now employs a team of 46 people, has
more than 40 plant-based food
products stocked in 6,000 retail stores
in Britain. It expects to hit sales of
£20 million this year and the
entrepreneurs say it is profitable.
They took their first steps to expand
overseas in 2020 with launches in
Switzerland and Ireland, before
further growth was halted by the
pandemic. A launch in Austria is being
followed by Germany and, later in the
year, the United States. The decision
to focus on the product side of the
Business Times Enterprise Network
Ella and Matthew Mills
have move d on from
troubles and tragedy to
target global growth,
Hannah Prevett writes
T
enterprise
network
going for
growth