Deliciously Ella Acquired by Hero Group at $35 Million Valuation

Ella Mills, the founder of Deliciously Ella, began her journey in 2011 when she was just 20 years old. Suffering from severe chronic pain, Mills was bedridden with fatigue, migraines, and heart palpitations that reached up to 190 beats per minute. As a student at university, she had to sleep between 16 and 18 hours a day due to the unbearable fatigue. Mills described her condition as feeling dizzy, with her head disconnected from her body. She saw a dozen doctors and underwent over 40 procedures, including visits to endocrinologists and gastroenterologists, before being diagnosed with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). This disorder affects the autonomic nervous system, causing rapid heartbeat, nausea, brain fog, fainting, and fatigue. There is no official cure for POTS, which primarily affects women between the ages of 15 and 50. Mills was on 25 medications a day, none of which worked, leading her to feel hopeless.

In her desperation, Mills turned to the internet and read stories of countless women with her disorder. Many of these women felt desperate for any way forward and had turned to medications and a combination of diet and other lifestyle changes. Mills decided to overhaul her diet and lifestyle, opting for natural ingredients and cooking at home. In 2012, she started a blog to document her cooking trials and tribulations, posting her recipes and progress online. This blog, named Deliciously Ella, would eventually transform into a multimillion-dollar snack empire.

Over a decade later, the $20 WordPress blog account has grown into a business that brings in $25 million in revenue yearly. The brand has a cookbook that has sold over 1.5 million copies and a social media following of over 4 million. Deliciously Ella has become the fastest-growing snack brand in the UK and is now expanding globally with the launch in the U.S. at Whole Foods in May of this year. In 2024, the brand was acquired by Hero Group, a Swiss manufacturer. While the company won’t disclose the deal, Mills and her husband share that “we have had numerous approaches to sell or partner with other food companies over the years, but only this one felt right.” The company is currently valued around $35 million, according to estimates.

Mills describes herself as an “accidental founder,” who didn’t have an entrepreneurial brain or the experience scaling a business. She marketed herself as a self-proclaimed “home cook” who wanted to feel better. Within two years, her site garnered 130 million hits and reached people in about 80 countries. While she was still weaning off medications, Mills’s minimalist and home-cooked diet improved her illness. Two years later, she was not on any medications, and her business was growing in step. She began posting more on social media about the recipes she was making and what she was learning. In 2014, she compiled all the recipes into an app, and in 2015, she published a cookbook that sold out before its release, instantly becoming an Amazon and New York Times bestseller.

A month after the cookbook’s release, Mills met her now-husband and business partner, Matt—a finance nerd at heart with the eagerness to scale a brand. Two weeks after she met him, he quit his job to work alongside her, helping her scale her business and build products that aligned with her mission. Deliciously Ella’s first product, a cacao and almond energy ball, was released in 2016, followed by a line of other products. As of print, the brand has sold over 100 million products, and the company’s membership, available for $2.74 a month, provides access to thousands of recipes, along with meal plans and blog posts.

Mills recognizes that if you don’t iterate and evolve your brand to meet the demand, you can lose relevancy. However, she didn’t want to give in to the latest wellness fads as a way to stay ahead. Deliciously Ella was strategically simple in scope. Mills admits there was a lot of luck to being on the lifestyle train at a time when social media wasn’t as noisy and brands were less focused on the harm of ultra-processed foods than they are today. But she credits her success to hustling to create a community of loyal followers and being consistent. “There are 1,000 more trends that we could jump on, but to me, that isn’t a long-term way to build the brand, or actually shift the dial on health,” she says. “If it doesn’t taste good or is way too expensive, it’s just not going to stay a part of someone’s life.”