MY LIGHT BULB MOMENT
Health foodie Olivia Wollenberg
Olivia WOllenberg, 30, founded livia’s, a range of free-from healthy snacks, in 2014. She lives in West london with her boyfriend Jamie. GROWING up, I always had a sweet tooth. Yet, even as a baby, my parents knew I wasn’t like my sisters. I had a sensitive stomach. But I was strong-minded and refused to cut anything out of my diet.
It got much worse at university. I was studying neuroscience and the crippling pain every time I ate was insufferable. I’d often get sick within half an hour of eating.
It affected my social life. Dating when you can’t eat anything is pretty tough.
In 2014, I decided to see a nutritionist. I’d just finished a masters, and was living at home. She put me on an elimination diet. It turned out I couldn’t eat wheat or dairy, onions, chickpeas, some pulses — and E numbers, which are in practically everything.
It was a nightmare. I went to countless health food shops. But it was all for ‘lifestylers’: energy balls and wellness products.
And they were using many of the additives I couldn’t eat. I wanted something indulgent, but it just didn’t exist. A week later, I was sitting at my parents’ kitchen table, thinking, ‘This can’t be my life!’ One of my favourite things had been to have cake and tea at 3pm. And now, at 25, I could never have it again.
This was my light bulb moment. It hit me that, if I was suffering, I wasn’t the only one. There was a gap in the market for delicious vegan sweet treats, free from gluten, dairy, refined sugar — and nasty E numbers and additives. I knew I had to be the one to solve that problem. As corny as it sounds, it felt like a calling.
I started experimenting with recipes and realised you could do it quite easily. I signed up to a business course, and won £12,000 funding. My parents drove me round every morning, delivering my first product, a bite-size fruit crumble, to Press and influencers.
Everything changed when Vogue did an Instagram post on us. It was a huge endorsement: I got a meeting with a buyer as a result.
Then, 11 weeks on, my Livia’s Crumble launched in Selfridges. Today, we sell snacks such as brownie balls and millionaire bites in more than 4,000 stores.
We are expecting £5million in sales this year. So many people who couldn’t eat other sweet treats message me to say ‘thank you’. Our goal is to challenge traditional confectionery; there is a better way to treat yourself.