Mother Knows Best
Annabel Karmel has helped millions of parents fedd their children heathily with her books and ready meals. Now she’s set to conquer America
WORDS | ALISTAIR DUNCAN
THROUGHOUT HER 20-YEAR CAREER AS A BESTSELLING COOKERY WRITER then doyenne of kids’ ready-meals, Annabel Karmel has posed the same question repeatedly: why must kids eat bland food?
“Children’s palates are much more sophisticated than people think,” she says. “Children like curries and they like garlic – as well as soy sauce, olives and all sorts of things you wouldn’t necessarily imagine. Ethnic-style foods can go down well: satays or stir-fries. Parents get stuck in a rut, feeding kids chicken nuggets, pizzas and burgers, but it doesn’t have to be like that.”
It’s why Karmel’s name is a byword for wholesome, tasty food for children. It began in 1991 with her wildly popular book, The Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner, a word-of-mouth publishing sensation. It remains the number one bestselling book on feeding children to this day and has been followed by 18 more, translated into 20 languages. But her portfolio has expanded now: a former food consultant for high-street chains, Karmel currently supplies meals for theme parks, restaurant chains, pubs and hotels and presides over a rapidly mushrooming empire of chilled ready-meals for toddlers, called Eat Fussy.
“I want children to have the best quality food, wherever they go,” she proclaims. “Whether it’s in school, at a theme park, through meals bought in supermarkets or made with my books at home.”
Her success, however, has been hard won. Before Karmel wrote her first cookbook, she experienced personal tragedy with the death of her first daughter, Natasha, at just three months old. A year later, when she had a son, Nicholas, a fussy eater, she felt “very vulnerable, as a mum who had lost one child, with another who wouldn’t eat”. She made him purées, instead of the shop-bought baby foods he so disliked, and Nicholas started to eat. The kernel of an idea was planted.
“I was running a large playgroup in my area at the time,” she recalls. “I asked the other mothers if their children were bad eaters – 90 percent of them were. So I handed out some of my recipes and people suggested I write a book. At first, I wasn’t sure. Then I thought: what a wonderful legacy for Natasha. Something good might come of her short life.”
After the standard round of rejection letters from major publishers, Karmel’s collection of recipes, encouraging mums to use garlic, herbs and cheese and to cook chicken, meat and fish, with a practical daily menu plan, was taken by one of her friends to the Frankfurt Book Fair.
It was handed to a major American publisher, who immediately offered her a book deal.
This is the breakthrough moment which launched Karmel’s lucrative cookbook career. To date she has sold four million books, gaining the tag ‘the Delia Smith of kid’s food’ in the process. Like Delia, she has always encouraged mothers to cook fresh food themselves if possible, but Karmel says she has always had her sights set on making ready meals for those who don’t have the time.
“When I first started writing books, I wanted to have my own ranges of food and improve the quality that was on offer. The baby foods, for instance, were in the dark ages. But it’s taken me 20 years to get there.”
With the proceeds from her book sales, she could invest in creating her Eat Fussy ready-meal range in 2007, following a career as a food consultant for Marks & Spencer and Boots. She identified a gap in the market when she realised that most children’s food sold in supermarkets caters only for four years and older. So she aimed her meals at one to four-year-olds. The range proved immediately successful – a vital aspect of starting a business such as hers.
“It’s very difficult getting products into supermarkets. You can’t prove yourself until you go on a shelf, and supermarkets are reluctant to take on a new product when they can just keep an old product there that sells well. But the first line that went on shelves sold well. If it hadn’t, we would have been dead in the water.”
Her Eat Fussy range had a turnover last year of £9 million, a growth of 49 percent on the previous year. Her company, which employs eight people (including, occasionally, her daughter, in between her studies at business school) is based in London but she harbours both nationwide and transatlantic ambitions.
“America is a key part of the business plan,” says the determined 47-year-old, the daughter of a businessman and an architect, and who attended posh private school St Paul’s. “I’ve had 14 books published Stateside, so I have a presence there and it’s such a huge market. But there’s a lot more to do in this country. We’re still building the company and, in our position, you tend to put most of the profits straight back into developing new lines.”
There have been some harsh lessons along the way for Karmel. In January this year, she found herself at the centre of a furore, following a BBC investigation that claimed six out of eight of her ready meals contained more than a third of the daily recommended salt intake for a child aged one to three years (two grams per day). She says that the reporting wasn’t even-handed (other companies, for instance, exploit legal loopholes to not fully disclose their salt content) and that her meals are designed in the context of a balanced diet. Nonetheless, she has changed the salt and sugar levels and sounds wounded by the experience.
“Why would I want to make unhealthy food? I’ve spent my entire life trying to improve the quality of food for children. I don’t, however, want to make something with no salt in it that doesn’t taste nice [so] children won’t eat it.”
It all comes back to that central question Karmel is forever asking about why give kids bland food. At six months old, a child starting on solids is a “completely clean slate”, she says. “Children don’t care how healthy something is. You can make something incredibly worthy that doesn’t taste nice, but it will be a waste of time. They simply won’t eat it.”
Annabel Karmel’s Top 100 Pasta Recipes is published on 13 May (Ebury Press). www.annabelkarmel.com
