The Future of Food Is Female by Jennifer Stojkovic

Author:Jennifer Stojkovic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jennifer Stojkovic
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

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Heather Mills

CEO of VBites and Paralympian

Surviving Against All Odds, Choosing Conscious Capitalism, and Changing Diets Through Consumer Choice

“My whole ethos is: if there’s a problem, there’s a solution.”

Heather Mills has long been a trailblazer, but before she became a titan in the vegan food world, she was an inspiration to millions for her indomitable spirit. In 1993, while working in London as a model and advocating for refugees of the Balkan Crisis, Heather was involved in a collision with a motorcycle that resulted in her leg being amputated below her knee. As part of her healing from her accident, Heather switched to a whole-foods, raw vegan diet. Inspired by her plant-based recovery, Heather founded VBites, a vegan CPG company, which sells 104 products in more than twenty-four countries around the world. Incredibly, Heather also not only returned to modeling but became a champion Paralympic ski racer, setting the world record for fastest disabled woman in three sports.

Like many successful entrepreneurs, Heather Mills’s solution-oriented attitude and strong work ethic were shaped in part by her early experiences in life. When she was just nine years old, her mother left the family. Four years later, her father was incarcerated. With no other choice, Heather started her very first business at age thirteen to care for herself, launching what would become a lifetime career in and passion for entrepreneurship.

“If I modeled my entrepreneurship after anyone, it was my dad, who thought he could achieve anything,” Heather tells me, “even though he ended up getting himself in a lot of trouble. Hopefully I took the best bits of that and learned that everything is achievable.” Heather says her father, who’d been in the military, had her on a tight schedule, getting up early, ironing shirts, and running the five miles to school and back because they didn’t have access to transportation. “I suppose that gave me the discipline to do things and to be entrepreneurial,” she says. When he was sent to prison, Heather left home and was living on the street. “It was a matter of treading on eggshells and learning what to do and creating different opportunities,” she says. “Entrepreneurs can be born and entrepreneurs can be trained, and I think I was probably a little bit born, but mainly trained by the university of life.”

Heather says that while she didn’t have a stable family life, her friends helped to bridge that gap. From her childhood best friend, whose family fed Heather when she didn’t have enough to eat, to a circle of about seven women she’s been close with since she was young, Heather says her biggest supporters have almost always been women. “You can find inspiration in all types of women,” Heather says, “not just those in business but those who are wonderful mothers, who are kind, who always have time for you and want to support you. I’d say I’ve gotten where I’ve gotten in the VBites business because I have four or five fantastic women around me who really listened to me.

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