Food influencer Deliciously Ella has revealed her frustrations with still being labelled a ‘blogger’ following the sale of her £24m food brand.
Ella Mills, 33, who lives in West London with her husband and two daughters, is reported to have banked ‘millions’ from the sale of Deliciously Ella to Swiss group Hero earlier this year.
The mother-of-two set up her food blog Deliciously Ella in 2012 when she was experiencing health issues during her second year at St Andrew’s University and created her first products in 2016.
Since then, the company has gone on to sell over 100m products and expand into plant-based pastas, spreads and snacks. They are expected to sell 20m cereal bars this year.
Despite her company’s success, Ella – who is the daughter of Sainsbury’s heiress Camilla Sainsbury and former Northern Ireland secretary Shaun Woodward – has voiced her grievance with being referred to as a ‘blogger’ 12 years into her career.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Ella explained: ‘I don’t think there are any male businessmen who you would title by their first job.
‘I’m not sure at this point what I’ve got to do to be called an entrepreneur.
‘We’ve sold 100 million products, we’ve got our own factory, we’re bestselling in every retailer across the country, we’re launching in the US, we’ve got 100 people in the business.’
Describing how she has been overlooked professionally, Ella detailed how prospective buyers would address her husband Matthew – who is also her business partner – during the sale and invite him to go golfing without her.
Elsewhere in the interview, Ella admitted that she ‘didn’t want to be an influencer’, which is why she has shared less and less online over the years.
Although Ella has not publicly revealed how much the company has sold for, Companies House records show group revenue had grown to £24m last year.
Despite the sale, Ella will remain in her role as founder and brand ambassador while Matthew will continue as chief executive.
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 said she felt like she had lost her voice.
As such, the mother-of-two decided to remove pictures of herself from her social media accounts.
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.
‘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.’
This post was originally published on here
