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- New market. In the U.K., Deliciously Ella is a well-known brand. The plant-based consumer packaged goods line sells its granola bars and pasta sauces in 10,000 stores across the U.K. and Europe, including grocer Waitrose and drugstore Boots. Its founder, Ella Mills, has published eight cookbooks.
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.
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
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