How Loren Castle beat cancer and found inspiration to turn her $40k side hustle in a $150m business

Loren Castle did not have a certain career path in mind when she graduated from the University of Southern California in 2006.

The then 22-year-old New York City native got a degree in communications and knew she liked health, wellness and business, “but I had no idea what I was going to do with my life,” she says. Post-graduation, she went back to New York but planned to move to L.A. permanently to see where life took her.

Just months after graduating, however, Castle was diagnosed with stage 2 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, a cancer that attacks the immune system, and had to undergo six months of chemotherapy. Depressed, she began seeing a therapist who helped her see the moment as empowering and an opportunity. There were still ways in which she could take control.

One such way was her diet — she could make sure to eat healthy even after her treatment. Castle began taking nutrition and cooking classes, but she quickly discovered something was missing: dessert. “I have a huge sweet tooth,” she says, and she couldn’t find baked goods made with more whole foods that didn’t use ingredients like bleached white flour, corn syrup and artificial chemicals.

So Castle started trying to make healthier desserts for herself. She took a typical chocolate chip cookie recipe, for example, and “just started tweaking little by little,” she says. She substituted bleached white flour with whole grain flours like oat flour and refined brown sugar with cane sugar and molasses, eventually landing on a recipe that was both made with natural ingredients and “the best cookie I’ve ever had.”

Nearly 20 years later, Castle is founder and CEO of Sweet Loren’s, which sells vegan, gluten-free and allergen-free refrigerated cookie dough in an assortment of flavours as well as refrigerated puff pastries, pizza and pie crust, is sold in 35,000 grocery stores nationwide and is estimated to have brought in $150 million in gross sales in 2024.

Here’s how the 40-year-old built her cookie empire.

‘You need to do something with this’

After completing her treatment in 2007, Castle, who had to stay in New York for several years to continue regular checkups with her doctor, tried working in an assortment of industries: PR, finance, food and beverage.

By night, Castle would return home to her kitchen and continue baking, amassing a binder full of healthier cookie recipes. “I wanted to create an oatmeal cranberry cookie,” she says. “I wanted to create a fudge brownie cookie recipe.”

By 2010, having gotten positive feedback from family and friends, Castle started expanding her reach. She entered a baking competition run by the nonprofit Lower Eastside Girls Club, for example, where judge and acclaimed pastry chef Gina DePalma told her, “you need to do something with this,” she says.

That was the first time “someone that was highly regarded in the professional dessert pastry world was recognising what I was doing.”

Castle also started selling her cookies at various farmer’s markets throughout the city, getting “great confirmation that people loved it.”

In early 2011, she competed in another New York contest, The Next Big Small Brand for Culinary Genius contest run by a local design agency, and won both first place in the competition and the people’s choice award. For her prize, the agency helped her design her branding.

Around this time, a friend of her mother’s who specialises in branding helped Castle land on the name Sweet Loren’s.

‘How does one even get into Whole Foods?’

In 2010, Castle started taking a business writing course teaching the basic logistics of starting a business like the cost of rent, the number of employees necessary and the importance of location.

Still regularly baking at home, she’d bring extra cookies to class and discovered a classmate worked at Whole Foods restocking shelves. “I asked him, ‘how does one even get into Whole Foods?’” she says. “And he said, ‘let me talk to my boss.’” He quickly called Castle to let her know she had a meeting with the head buyer at a Manhattan location of Whole Foods.

Castle and the buyer considered the various options for selling her cookies including packaged, baking mixes and raw cookie dough. The latter stood out as the most interesting option. “No one’s built the next brand name that stands for natural in cookie dough,” she says he told her. And it clicked that that’s what her business should be.

Using $40,000 of her own personal savings, she says, Castle spent seven months trying “to find a factory, design packaging, scale up recipes.” By January 2011, Sweet Loren’s was selling at Whole Foods.

‘I love your concept, but my kid is nut-free’

Castle took a few years to perfect her product and slowly started selling at more Whole Foods locations and hiring staff. As she started expanding to other major supermarkets like Kroger and Publix, she got emails from customers about her cookie dough.

They’d say, “Hey, I love your concept, but my kid is nut-free or my husband is gluten-free or we’re trying to be more plant based,” she says. She realised there was enough demand to try a cookie dough that’s “gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free,” removing all of the major allergens, she says. When they finally launched it in April 2017, “it became our No. 1 [cookie dough] overnight.”

In 2018, all of the company’s products were switched to be vegan and allergen-free. Sweet Loren’s raised the price of their cookie dough by $1 each to cover expenses, and “from that moment on, Sweet Loren’s was profitable,” she says.

‘I don’t feel like we’re selling another product or cookie’

This year, Sweet Loren’s is projected to generate $190 million in sales. Still, there have been challenges in growing the business. Starting alone was tough. “There were many nights that I would call my best friend or my sister just crying hysterically because it was hard,” says Castle. And finding the right supplier was tricky.

She’s tried “five different factories over the years to figure out who we can trust, who can deliver always on time, who has the best quality, who can grow with us,” she says. But she’s now thrilled to offer the service she was missing after getting diagnosed with cancer.

“I don’t feel like we’re selling another product or cookie,” she says through tears. “I really feel like we’re creating a lifestyle for people that makes them feel their best, and it makes them feel heard in the food industry.”