100% Natural: A Day In The Life

A mother and daughter team, Charlotte & Jess started 100% Natural in their family home in Brighton. Their delicious raw chocolate brownies are produced from the highest quality ingredients; they are gluten-free, dairy-free and refined sugar free and made using 100% renewable energy.

Jess says:

I’ve recently started getting up at 6am. I do 15 minutes of meditation before having a home-made shot of hot lemon, ginger, turmeric and cardamom to kick start my metabolism. If I have time I’ll do half an hour of yoga. I always try to begin work at 9am but because I don’t have a boss to tell me off if I’m late, I sometimes end up procrastinating and start later!

My family’s love of food and eating well prompted our business idea. We grew up knowing that food should nourish your body and taste delicious. I love converting people to our brownies who expect that because they are healthy, they won’t taste very good. Watching someone’s expression when they try our brownies for the first time is the best feeling. The best advice I’ve been given is to stick to your ethics and founding beliefs of your brand. Always remember why it was that you started and what positive impact you wanted to have.

I was still at university studying French and Politics when we started 100% Natural. Nothing food-related and with no experience running a business! You don’t need any qualifications or experience to run a food business. But you do need passion, determination and flexibility, as things don’t always go how you expect them to! We are passionate about sourcing our ingredients from ethical and sustainable organic farms. I love it when we find an amazing new producer to work with. It makes me feel like what we’re doing is worthwhile when I know we are directly supporting our producers. My least favourite part is how hard it is to source ingredients directly from the producers. Small farms don’t have access to a global market so it takes a lot of work to set up a supply chain with small, ethical producers. My role model is Satish Kumar. I am constantly amazed by his achievements in peace activism and the environment.

I love having a packed lunch in a glass jar (as plastic in Tupperware can disintegrate into food). My favourite at the moment is Asian noodle salad with buckwheat noodles, stir fried vegetables and toasted seeds. My favourite snack is one of our Goji & Acai Berry brownies. After 4 years of making our brownies I’m still not bored of eating them!

I usually finish at 6 or 7pm depending on how late I started in the morning. I don’t really feel like I ever properly finish work because there’s always something that needs doing, I often wake up in the middle of the night remembering an email I need to send or something that needs to be ordered. I go to Hotpod Yoga twice a week and Tempo Reformer pilates once a week. I’ve also recently discovered that I actually quite like jogging so I go for a run twice a week now too. I love cooking and I try to make as many home-cooked meals as possible. For breakfast I like making bircher muesli as you can make it the night before and leave it in the fridge ready for the morning. For lunch and supper I make a big batch of something like noodle salad, lentils, brown rice or a selection of salads which last a few days.

My dream job as a child was an actress, I was always making my family watch shows my friends and I had made up. If all else failed I would love to work as a consultant for food brands, teaching them how to source ethically.

My top 3 sources of online inspiration are:

– Tess Ward for her yummy recipes.
– Dish Next Door, an amazing website which lets you share left over food with neighbours!
– Loving Earth because it’s the only food brand I have found which tells the story of each of their producers.