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Free to indulge
Removing gluten, dairy and sugar from her diet prompted Olivia Wollenberg to create new versions of her favourite festive treats that are equally delicious. By Jessica Salter. Photographs by Ben Quinton
Christmas treats suitable for people with food intolerances
The thought of a Christmas feast will leave most of us salivating at the prospect of all that excess – roast potatoes! bread sauce! Christmas pudding! mince pies! brandy butter! – but for those with food intolerances, it must be torturous.
Olivia Wollenberg, a self-confessed foodie and ‘sugar monster’, found sweet foods the hardest to replace when, in 2014, she was advised by a nutritionist to go on a gluten-, dairy-, and refned-sugarfree diet (she also discovered she was intolerant to preservatives and other foods including chickpeas). Leaving fve years of studying neuroscience at University College London (UCL) behind her, Wollenberg set about creating a range of products – fruit crumbles at frst, and now her latest ofering, an alternative Christmas ‘cakepud’ – that cater for a free-from diet.
The cake-pud is made with only six core ingredients – gluten-free oats, apple purée, date syrup, coconut oil, currants and orange – plus spices, and despite any healthy connotations it might have, it tastes indulgent and delicious. ‘It’s just a diferent way of being able to have a treat at Christmas, by cutting out the refned sugar and dairy,’ she says, ofering me a raw mince pie (nicer than it sounds – basically a
gooey mass of cinnamon-spiked fruit in a ground-almond and date casing).
Wollenberg, 26, isn’t the typical health chef currently saturating the market. For a start, she says she doesn’t want her foods to be associated with the word ‘diet’. ‘They are sweet, they are indulgences; you can’t eat unlimited quantities of them,’ she says. ‘But they will leave you feeling better than the usual treats that are flled with refned sugar and cause you to have energy spikes. My products are a healthier way of enjoying your favourite things.’
After deciding that the life of an academic was too solitary for her, she thought about other career options. Then, after years of digestive problems led her to see a nutritionist in April 2014, she realised there were huge opportunities for healthy, natural foods in the free-from market.
‘When I got a list of foods that I couldn’t eat, it was just so miserable,’ she says. ‘The alternatives on the market weren’t that great and a lot of the free-from food wasn’t even healthy – they had lots of unpronounceable ingredients in there.’ Like her Christmas cake-pud, all her products contain no more than fve to six ingredients.
Wollenberg had always been keen on cooking, so she started researching healthier ways of eating and attended a cookery course run by Ella Woodward, author of the Deliciously Ella cookbook and blog, and a Telegraph columnist. One Friday evening Wollenberg made her family a crumble that adhered to her new diet, with no butter, sugar or gluten; made instead with nuts, oats and fruit to sweeten it. ‘They instantly said it was the best crumble they had ever eaten. They were obsessed by it. My dad in particular couldn’t believe that it was actually healthier than normal crumble. Their reaction made me think that this could be quite a good business idea.’
She perfected the recipe in three days (consulting Woodward, now a close friend, who helped her taste-test the fnished product), and in June 2014 she started an eight-week business course at University College London. ‘It was like a fast-track MBA.’ After pitching her business idea – the crumbles – to her tutors at the start of the course, she won a £2,000 grant to start her company. At the end of the course she pitched again – now with a full business plan – this time to a panel of investment bankers, who awarded her a further £10,000. ‘I started my pitch by giving them each a crumble to eat while I was talking,’ she says, smiling. ‘I think it helped.’
She immediately started baking 300 crumbles, then drove around London with her mother, delivering them to journalists and food buyers. ‘I recognised that the healthy-eating movement was moving very quickly, and I needed to act fast,’ she says. ‘There wasn’t any time to sit back and gather ideas.’
When a journalist at Vogue posted a picture on the magazine’s Instagram feed to their one million followers, Wollenberg saw a new fanbase of 1,500 followers on her own account. Two hours after she delivered a crumble to Selfridges, a buyer called her back. ‘She said the whole ofce loved them and
‘They will leave you feeling better than the usual treats that are flled with refned sugar and cause you to have energy spikes. My products are a healthier way to enjoy your favourite things’ Below Livia’s Kitchen Christmas cake-pud
that they would be prepared to sell them as soon as I was ready. It was amazing.’
Wollenberg gave herself a month to learn the details of food technology (such as how best to heat the crumble to ensure a longer shelf life), and sent the product of to laboratories for testing. She rented space in a commercial kitchen in north London, and she and her mother started baking about 100 crumbles a week – from mixed berries with coconut and goji, to rhubarb, vanilla and açai – on two bake days, delivering them on two further days.
‘I soon realised that we were spending an extortionate amount of money on this kitchen – so much that I couldn’t aford to hire any chefs, but I knew I needed to take a step back and develop the business further,’ Wollenberg explains. ‘So in the autumn I decided to move the business back home, use my parents’ kitchen and hire a full-time chef. It was a big decision, but my parents were so generous. They said it would be a great adventure.’
When we meet, the evidence of her parents’ generosity is plain to see: Wollenberg’s business has completely taken over their kitchen. Sacks of ground almonds and tupperware boxes flled with dates, currants and spices line the pantry; a giant shrink-wrap machine blocks the entrance to the downstairs lavatory; Wollenberg’s boardroom is their dining room. But come January, as the business has expanded beyond her home kitchen’s capacity, all production will have been transferred to a factory that also supplies Daylesford. ‘It was a struggle to fnd somewhere that worked with gluten-free and chilled products,’ Wollenberg says. ‘I had my share of disasters, such as investing time and money into one place only to fnd they couldn’t do what I needed.’ The factory has already begun to make the Christmas cake and the crumble toppings (which are still assembled in her home kitchen).
The ups and downs of her business (such as the dip in the middle of this year, when sales dropped from about 800 per week to about 200), are what Wollenberg is keen to share. She has just launched a YouTube channel, through which she disseminates not only her recipes, but also ‘the inner workings of my business’.
‘The summer was very frightening. I phoned around other people in the food industry who said it was happening to them too, but I was particularly afected because people see the crumble
Two hours after she delivered a crumble to Selfridges, a buyer called her back. ‘She said they would be prepared to sell them as soon as I was ready. It was amazing’
as a winter product.’ Next summer she plans to market them as a breakfast item.
The summer blip aside, Wollenberg’s business is on the rise. She is back up to 800 crumbles a week, sold through Harvey Nichols and Planet Organic as well as Selfridges and Daylesford, and is in talks with other nationwide retailers for the new year (as well as planning trips to Australia and America to discuss business opportunities there); the Christmas cakepuds have just gone on sale exclusively at Selfridges on Oxford Street (£19.99 for 1kg), and there are new products planned for January. She now employs two full-time members of staf, along with an army of interns, whom she calls her Christmas elves. Wollenberg’s frst book, Livia’s Kitchen, is published in May (available for pre-order now), and she has more than 60,000 Instagram followers and 200,000 hits a month on her blog. Her online community is important to her – hence the new YouTube channel – but so is developing one ofine: in the summer she took part in Jamie Oliver’s The Big Feastival, and she has started hosting a monthly afternoon tea in west London. ‘It’s growing really fast,’ she says, smiling. ‘It seems that people are buying into the whole Livia’s Kitchen ethos, which is exciting.’