The Wellness Scoop - Learnings From a Roller Coaster Year

Episode Date: November 6, 2018

In this episode Ella and Matt discuss grief, learnings from life’s challenges, their tools for inspiration, finding a work life balance, working as a married couple and what keeps them happy, motivated and grounded. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me, Matthew Mills, and my wife and business partner, Ella Mills, and also actually a very special guest in the studio with us today is our beloved dog Austin Mills yeah who by the way has his own Instagram Mr underscore Austin underscore Mills very nice plug there so yes if you hear any banging that's probably his tail yeah hanging against a table leg or something one of the best bits of this year has been Matt startling Austin's Instagram

account and basically trolling me through it to get back at when I make him pin pictures on the Delicious Yellow account. Anyway, hello everyone and welcome to the very last episode of the season one of Delicious Yellow, the podcast. I guess we started the podcast as a little bit of an experiment and we have absolutely loved the last 11 weeks and with our guests on the last 10 episodes, we have learned an unbelievable amount. I mean, I've been blown away about everything from how our brain talks to our gut every few seconds,

how yoga genuinely is helpful for stress relief and IBS, how eating 30 different plant-based foods every week is so critically important because it literally impacts our brain but also how our brain regenerates and can potentially even grow when we exercise for 30 minutes the hugely positive effects of a vegan diet on the environment yeah stopping farming somewhere the size of africa 3.1 billion hectares yeah and likewise if we stop food waste we would be saving a trillion dollars worth of food a year and stopping farming somewhere the size of China.

Yeah. If food waste was a country, it'd be the third largest polluter of greenhouse gases in the world. It's been pretty mind blowing. So if you haven't managed to catch up on all the episodes yet, please, please do because there's just kind of unbelievable array. It may seem random in some capacity, but it's basically all things we're interested in. But just in the way that we started that series with the two of us giving you a little bit more insight into what we've been up to, what we've been learning,

we wanted to round off the series with a little, I guess, delicious yellow roundup by the two of us and Austin. So from this unbelievable amount of information, what have you implemented from what you've learned from the guests? Well, I would say, I would say actually probably three things. I would say one, I think the episode with Joseph Paul had a massive... Which was on veganism and the environment. Yeah, had a massive impact on me.

And I was always kind of probably 85% vegan. I would still have some dairy milk every now and again. But that episode had a big effect on me. I think I've learned a lot about the power of sleep and rest. One thing I know was a big distraction for me. Basically, when my mom was ill for about a year, I woke up at four o'clock every morning between 3 30 and 4 it was like a loud noise had happened and I was just bolt upright awake and so I was probably only getting about four and a half five hours sleep and understandably then I wasn't feeling my best for a while and so actually really understanding just quite how important sleep is.

And then the other things I can do just to help that. So I started not sleeping with my phone next to the bed, which has really, really helped. That's just it's an obvious distraction. When you wake up and you're distracted and you've got stuff on your mind, it's so easy just to be like, oh, I'll just have a quick look at my phone. And learning to keep my phone away from bed bed has been has been really valuable yeah i mean i feel i've learned a lot i think one of the things i learned actually as well as the power of exercise because people always say to you exercise is good for you but when i was listening to brendan he was really explaining exactly what it does for your brain then when my alarm goes off

and i don't really feel like moving as most of us often don't at six o'clock in the morning i'm always kind of have that little oomph of like no this is going to really impact on my well-being and especially on my mental health and I go and I just feel a thousand times better for it so that was a really really positive one for me and I really really enjoyed learning all about the gut as well as someone that's always had some slight I loved learning about the gut I found that really I really didn't know much about it at all. And so I find that fascinating. Yeah. And I've always got a bit of a dodgy tummy quite often and it's just brilliant understanding how to look after it and why it matters. Yes. 70% of your immune system lives

in your gut, we learned, which is pretty mind blowing. Yeah. So I think those have been two big things I've implemented, trying to really be conscious of 30 different plant-based foods every week, rather than just having all the almond butter. I'm also having cashew butter, peanut Those have been two big things I've implemented, trying to really be conscious of 30 different plant-based foods every week rather than just having all the almond butter. I'm also having cashew butter, peanut butter, walnut butter, pecan butter, mixed nut butters. And I'm adding different vegetables to my hummus. But also, yeah, that was brilliant for me in terms of motivation

to get moving every day. And I see the difference in myself so much. What have you learned this year, personally, professionally, professionally both in the podcast but also obviously outside of it it's gonna sound so cheesy but I think I've just learned and I've always felt like I've been really really lucky and fortunate in my life but I think this year I've just learned quite how lucky I am I think being objectively it's been a tough year personally because my mum passed away in in May but I felt so lucky to be surrounded just by such incredible people to be able to even when something like that happens to wake up every day with a huge sense of purpose because

I love so much what I get to do every day at Deliciously Ella and professionally just on the discovery of Deliciously Ella that we know that this is a long journey that we hopefully are on and just learning ways that hopefully we can continue to add lots more value to the people who participate and engage in Deliciously Ella every day. I love that. And how about you? Oh my gosh I feel I've learned more in the last 12 months than i have almost in any other period of my life to be honest with you i think one thing i've learned massively from you but i've actually been super inspired by a lot of our guests particularly

um if anyone listens to the episode with brendan on um the power of exercise on the brain in the way that he talked about his um journaling of his gratitude diary and that sense of really internalizing how lucky we are and trying to always always always see the positive in everything and I've said this to a few people but one of my biggest learnings I've ever had was so shortly after your mum got ill and I'm definitely can be someone that looks on the negative side of things. And I'll never, ever forget feeling so kind of distraught for you all. And then we spent the weekend

all in the garden together and Ottie, our amazing, gorgeous little niece was playing in a washing up bucket as a paddling ball. And at the end of the day, you know, your mum said, gosh, what an amazing day. Could you have a more amazing day than this? And I'd spent so much of the day looking at it thinking this is matter what you're doing, it can be a great thing.

There's so much positivity to take out of it if you want to find it. And I think it's just a lens, isn't it, that you look through and it's just anything can be positive or negative depending on how you really decide to look at it and so we were at dinner last night and we were talking about exactly that that lens and the importance of finding the positive lens but also how the lens is created by the tools you create around to keep it in place to keep that lens always there and focused in the way you want it to be focused on the good things and for me the biggest tool I guess that I've really connected to this year has been yoga I've been practicing on and off since I got into the practice after I got on well in 2012 with restorative yoga. But this year, I actually did my yoga teacher training because I wanted to bring it into Delicious Cielo more as well. As you said, I think we both become such passionate believers in this kind of holistic 360 view on

health. And it was the most unbelievable. Lots of people said to me, oh, it's gonna be a life changing life-changing month and I thought nah it won't be that's kind of too much it really really really was I learned so much about myself so much about communication with people but also just this amazing amazing way of every single day connecting to yourself and someone says something the other day which really resonated and if there's one thing I want to continue to learn and go continue to learn going forward it's exactly this which is that if you want to love yourself and I think we all desperately need to have a positive relationship with ourself because that's where the stem of all our other relationships come from then you have to know yourself and I think for me yoga has been the most amazing tool of discovery for kind of connecting to and kind of, I guess, getting to know myself and acknowledging things in myself.

I love that. So what's been the highlight? The highlight of this year was probably we had my mum's memorial a couple of weeks ago and almost 1200 people, and it was a very kind of private family affair where we celebrated her life really as our mum, as dad's wife, and just with her closest friends. And you spoke so beautifully, honestly. It was one of the proudest moments I've ever had. I don't know about that,

but we had my mum's memorial a couple of weeks ago, and it was just a celebration of her life as a public servant and seeing the people that she had touched and learning and hearing stories that I'd never heard before from people was incredibly touching and a really amazing moment in what's otherwise been at times a very, very difficult year. I think also that with Delicious Yellow, it's tough to pick out moments where it's that one special moment.

You know, each day is filled with lots of stressful moments, but then also lots of exciting moments. And so it's typically never, in what we're trying to do with Delicious Yellow, we're trying to build something that will be sustainable for the very long term. And so I think it's just been the little things every day. Our teams almost doubled in size this year. Which is terrifying.

Yeah. But at the same time, it's been great to get to know these new people and really embed them within I think all the values that we have within Delicious Cielo and just spending time with such special motivated good decent bright people every day is just is a highlight that I think we both celebrate every day yeah absolutely so what was your highlight of the year I feel there's been so many kind of roller coasters on this year that it's almost tough to pick out one I honestly one of my biggest highlights was um we went up to Scotland a week or no just a few days after your mum's funeral to this one I think it's one of the most beautiful places i've ever seen in my whole life this village that your mum loved called plockton

which is right on the west coast of scotland yeah right by the isle of sky we hadn't been there before and it was it was such gorgeous weather we were so lucky and um she had this little jetty she loved and we went down there with matt's sister Jess and his sister Annie and we all jumped into the sea in Scotland which was so cold into the loch into the loch sorry into the loch in Scotland which was freezing I've never experienced water like it yeah like icy icy cold but we jumped in and I was um have to admit wearing like a tiny little thong and but it was just like we were so kind of free and just like threw all our clothes off and a tiny little thong. And it was just like, we were so kind of free and just like threw all our clothes off and just jumped in.

And it was like, it was a really, that really, it's my screensaver on my phone. It just really stood out to me in that sense of kind of being free. It's a life affirming moment. Yeah, that was a really, really special moment. And we had some really special time away this year as well. And I think one thing that I'm not brilliant at is disconnecting from work I feel I love delicious yellow and it feels like such a part of my soul

that I'm not I'm not I always want to be helping people so every time someone sends me an Instagram message even if it's like two o'clock in the morning I've just opened my eyes sometimes I reply which is not very healthy and we really took some proper time off in June and we went away just the two of us and we didn't leave the hotel for 10 days we like literally walked 200 steps a day and we just ate so much pineapple and lay on the beach and just had really really really really amazing time together because we spent so much we calculated we spent 90% of our time together but so much of it is with work and it was lovely to really that was was a massive, massive highlight. Yeah, that was a special 10 days.

So we've now got some people have fired in some questions that are like us to answer. So first question, favorite meal? Favorite meal, favorite meal ever or favorite meal of this year, do you think? Favorite meal of this year, I think. Okay, favorite meal of this year. What's yours? You know what? It's not one meal in

particular but one thing that we started to do um actually it was when it was when my mum got ill um a year or so ago is we typically during the week we're really really busy and then on weekends we were up staying at my mum and dad's house every weekend so we never really had time just to be the two of us and we started this routine where every single Sunday evening when we got back we went out for dinner and we've ended up basically going to the same restaurant every single Sunday at the same time sitting in almost the same spot and just have we've really really made it just part of our weekly routine and it kind of bookends the week really nicely and it's been it's just been a really special grounding way of having some sense of normality and real niceness around a bit of romance yeah so but we eat at 6 30 we love that so we're in bed

it's like 8 30 still yeah which we like even more so yeah i wouldn't say one specific meal but just doing that every sunday has been a really really powerful thing that I've loved to do this year that has been I completely agree it's been incredible the other thing we're super happy about is um this amazing tiny little pizza place opened up next to our house that does vegan cheese on their pizzas as well which let's be honest we're pretty excited about it's really really good it's really really good so yeah those are the favorites okay another question we've had someone said they'd love to know whether there are any times during our journey building the business where you felt like giving up and how you managed to pull through the slump honestly I've never thought about giving up with this I think that we both love it so much it's

something that's obviously deep within Ella's soul it's taken her from from real sickness to much much much better health and it's something that as a husband now I'm so proud to be involved in and have really internalized myself and I'm very passionate about everything that we we do in Deliciously Ella for numerous reasons I keep referencing my mum which I think is a common theme in in all parts of my life but my mom was was a politician she was the first ever public health minister in the uk with a focus where they focused on on prevention uh rather than cure which is what you typically go to hospital for um and we're delicious yellow we know how many lifestyle related illnesses there are out there we know um that enough not enough people in the uk are eating their five a day let alone their 10 a day which what we should be doing 27 people in the uk their

five a day so being able to continue that work that mum had started as well i i absolutely love doing i think getting to go to work with your wife every day i'm sure can backfire but it's been amazing for us and I think we feel incredibly lucky to do it so I don't think I it probably sounds a bit strange but I don't think I've genuinely I don't think I've ever thought about giving up I think it's something that more than anything I just feel so fortunate to do and I want to grasp that opportunity in the biggest way we can and if we gave up I'm gosh I'm not sure what I would do anyway so I think it's much better doing this I have to admit I have once or twice thought about giving up but just because I've sometimes felt kind of personally pulled in quite a few directions

trying to keep everyone happy I guess because my face is quite attached to what we do but I think just as what math was just saying like that sense of feeling so drawn to the passion behind the why and why it matters that we share plant-based recipes is what always always always pulls me back in and I think one thing that we're learning a little bit is that we've been so go go go for the last three years and actually we also need to take small breaks and we're actually going to be we're going to be offline for about three weeks this Christmas and really trying to reset and recharge so that we come back with so much energy so much there's so much excitement rather than sometimes just kind of pushing ourselves a bit far and we were literally talking about so again at dinner last night that

I think sometimes when you're so busy with something and I'm sure sure everyone will feel like this you don't always take those minutes to acknowledge how much you've done how much you've grown the challenges that you have pulled through and as a result you're not always focusing on what you should be proud of and you know celebrating you're focusing on the issue or what you've got to deal with next and I think that's something that we both need to address a little bit sometimes I think it's very much part of our culture today of always always looking at what's next always feeling like we've got to achieve more and what we achieved isn't enough yeah but on what you said about working together as a husband and wife one question that we get all the time and came in as well for the episode is how do we manage keeping

a happy marriage is the one question we get all the time which is interesting but also in doing that when we're working together so much so it's definitely it can it can be testing sometimes obviously but I think the thing that we do and I think we do pretty well is we've really really divided out our roles so I'm much more focused on I suppose the kind of the more businessy side of of what we do and I just tell say one thing on that some we had to do a picture for something today and someone made the really good comment that math was wearing an amazing blazer and a suit and look crisp white shirt and look so smart and a big business meeting he looks so ready for action and I was wearing a fluffy fuchsia green baby blue

rainbow jumper and they said yeah you can really tell what roles you guys do in the business we've got creative here and we've got Mr Make It Happen there so I um so yeah so I think the way we do it is by really really splitting out roles I think if we were both trying to do the exact same thing and say I was trying to be focused on all the creative too i think we'd probably drive each other nuts so i think letting ella uh do everything and bring all the magic that she does to deliciously ella um through all of our content and leaving her to do that and really not trying to get involved in any way um is is the way that we do it and then i think you make it all happen well i don't know about that but we've we've got a great team who who make it happen but we um but i think really

splitting out the roles there um has really definitely helped our relationship in a big way and the other thing we have one rule which is that if there's a big decision to make whether that's on a new product or if we're going to do a new project in the business or we're going to make a new a big hire or if there's just a big decision that needs to be made we'll only do it if we're both 100% in and we both have um the the openness and freedom to to veto any decision if we really just don't feel it's wrong and so i think being completely knowing that we both have to be 100% in allows us to both own the solutions or the successes or the failures

if something does or doesn't work out yeah and I think on that just trying to be as respectful of the other person at all times basically as possible yeah I think it goes I mean I'm sure it's a lesson for any marriage was just to always be be kind and as much as you can polite to the person always as well but I think so I think just knowing and understanding that you know this isn't a straight line up where everything works every day there's challenges and things go wrong and so just having that appreciation and understanding for that person um is i think is another key for every day that we go by yeah it's nice when he's having a cheerleader next to you so when you're sitting at your work and not feeling great or feeling worried you look over and you see the other person there

it's really comforting i recommend it more highly okay one of the other questions we had and we've had this a lot is um finding balance like do we have any hobbies outside what we do are we just hotel nerds and we spend all our time on spreadsheets so yeah we definitely spend a lot of time working I would say that our weeks are very much spent just working and typically one day a weekend we're both working as well so but I would say that we get we we get a pretty good day off um each weekend um if you know it might be a solid half day but if not um a day and i um i like to play golf so i is so fanatical about golf i can't even explain it i've been playing golf since i was three years old and i just love it and lots of my friends play golf and so it's a great way of me

just going out and and spending time with them too so i love to play golf so if i can yeah and austin comes out and plays with me um which i love and so if I getting out to play golf every weekend is is a big thing for me one other thing I actually have have done um as an addition this year which has really helped so I joined a gym and I started work and worked out in years and I started working out again and it's really really helped me because it's something that properly takes my mind off off things when I'm doing it and gives me a bit of space and golf used to be my thing where I would just go and I switch my phone off and I just go and I play and I have fun with my friends and I just completely switch it off and it's my real headspace but just actually having that a bit of that every day

from going to the gym has been really really helpful for me too yeah I find that with yoga I try and get yoga in I'm a big believer in the fact that we do have more time in the day than we often give ourselves credit. Like today, I went to yoga at 6.30, came back, made breakfast, got my almond milk coffee and put it in a little to-go cup and walked Austin all the way through the park to work and was at work by nine. And I'd had two hours basically of just amazing time. It such a beautiful beautiful day to walk and it was such an important reminder to me again just that that we do have that space for ourselves and I'm trying a new thing which I'm really going to be so strict with myself on as well as I don't turn my phone on until after yoga so I have a bit of quiet time of that like just to kind of create a positive start to the day so I'm a huge

believer in morning routines rather than um just kind of rushing straight into work as soon as we wake up which can be tempting because it does sometimes feel like there's a kind of insurmountable amount of things to do yeah I think routine is something people always very interesting do you have a morning routine a nighttime routine um I really like so i wake we wake up every morning and we have sonos in our house and so we wake up with really relaxing music every morning which i think really helps and then we're obsessed with this artist called snatam um i don't know if i'm saying her name right but if you go on spotify and it's spelt uh s n aa-m and then k-a-u-r and she's like a yoga music it's really relaxing it's stunning get the album mantras for divine grace it may sound a bit wacky if you're not into yoga but

just trust us on it we're obsessed we suddenly sit in the office and like we need snap tam yeah so waking up to really relaxing music is is nice and then I always listen to the news um in the morning so uh typically our alarm goes off um at about six and we listen to uh we wake up we have 10 minutes of music and then it goes on to the news and so I feel like while I'm kind of waking up I'm getting filled in on what's happening in the world which I which I really really like and then you have your coconut milk latte yeah I have my coconut milk latte which my dear wife here typically brings down for me after she's given Austin his breakfast. And then now my new thing is trying celery juice every morning.

I'm kind of probably jumping on an Instagram trend there, but I keep seeing people swear by it. And I've not been, my health hasn't been so good again recently. So I'm kind of trying all kinds of weird and wacky things, including, so I go upstairs, I make a celery juice for me and a coconut latte for Matt and some delicious kibbles for Austin. Okay so in general are there any tools that you have to help you find balance anything you come back to time and time again outside of coconut lattes the gym? I think golf's my big one if I'm ever feeling really really stressed and golf's typically

a really good way of reversing that stress also just spending time with as Ella talked about earlier my little niece Ottie who I just completely and utterly adore and she's so little and naughty and heavenly heavenly I just love her to bits. And so when you hang out with her, you realize that everything you're worried about is usually typically pretty irrelevant. So hanging out with her, just hanging out with family, friends, I guess, usual kind of stuff. Yeah, I love reading, especially when we get any time off. Like I wrote one of my, if anyone's looking for book recommendations, I read the book, The End of Loneliness this year, that had me crying my eyes out it was so so phenomenal yeah when we're away on holiday

you typically read about a book a day I mean you really get buried into them it's very antisocial of me but I love it there's for me there's no better way to switch off than that and then I've also been absolutely obsessed with a book recently with the one of my yoga teachers recommended which is called journey to the heart and it's just these really lovely short kind of two thirds of a page daily meditation, which just give you a bit of kind of positivity, something nice to think about today. And they just kind of really, really lift your spirit. So if you're looking for a little something every day to read a kind of sense of affirmation or meditation um then definitely do that we've kind of gone on off meditation this year i'll be do

times where i'm like obsessed with i have huge intentions for for meditation every day i'm literally i'm like i have to do that today and i'm terrible at actually doing it yeah i went through a phase for a while this year where it had um some of those mandala beads which i don't know about anyone else but i always used to see yogis or people that did yoga wearing those beads around their necks. And I thought it was just what you wore if you did yoga. It turns out they're meditation beads. And I got some and I started doing it every night before I went the fact that you've got to kind of go out your way to do those little tools that make you feel so much better. And I haven't done it for about six weeks and I am vowing to do it this evening because it feels really good. But just reading a little something before you go to bed, I think is amazing. And yeah, definitely read The End of Loneliness if you can. It will make you weep, but it is absolutely brilliant.

You're more a business book guy. Yeah, I like reading business books. Matt has a stack of like, what, 15 business books on your bedside table? Yeah yeah I like reading business books Matt has a stack of like what 15 business books on your bedside table yeah I like reading business books I've read a really good one this year by the head marketing professor at Harvard called Young Me Moon which is called Different which is a really great book and it's about innovation and basically how typically brands just try and add more and more and more but actually sometimes it can be best just to take stuff away and get it back to a much simpler form so I really enjoyed that book. Okay so changing the subject a tiny bit people want to know what's changed at Delicious Yellow this year any big changes anything you felt? Well last change I mean we obviously we shut

two delis earlier this year just so that we could really have all of our focus on our food products. It's just the most effective way that we can fulfill our company mission, which is to make fruits and vegetables accessible and available to as many people in the most exciting way possible. So that was a big change. We've had, we've been working on a big project, which we're developing a completely a big project which we're developing a completely new app which we're really really excited about it's going to have

infinitely better functionality um it's going to have also have a yoga section on it where there'll be lots of yoga videos um it's going to have lots of questions about that yeah it's going to have um it'll be updated with new recipes every week, lots of new great content every week. And we're really, really excited about that. And it's going to be, it'll launch with about 350 plant-based recipes and about 30 yoga videos. And every week it will be updated with more recipes, with more videos. And it'll be 99p a month, which enables us to be able to invest and grow the app and make it the best resource it can possibly be and hopefully just become a really exciting new part of Delicious Diallo.

Totally. It's also got loads of recipe videos, which we've been filming nonstop recently. I literally feel like I'm like Pop we've been cooking so much. And meal planners and shopping lists and all the things you've been asking for as well. So, I mean I feel like it's a little bit like the conversations we had around the deli which is that we know a challenging decision is going to lead us to the best place in the end and be able allow us to give the most to all of our audience and kind of give the most value and really work again with that mission of kind of making veggies cool making eating well a little bit easier for everyone but

you know we we did that in the acknowledgement that whilst hopefully everyone's going to be super excited about it, we also appreciate some older app users may not be as happy about needing to get a new app. But I think it's going to be, I mean, we've seen all the kind of prototypes and everything. I think it's going to be just about the best thing we've ever done at Delicious Yellow.

It's really exciting. Yeah, it's a really, really exciting project. And then the other thing that we're working on is we are, everything we do at the moment is in the UK. All of our team obviously is in the UK. We make our products here in the UK and we are very, very proud of that. But one thing that we also are excited about is Delicious Seattle in many ways already is an international business because we've published books in 24 languages around the world. And we have people who follow our social media all over the world.

And we haven't really been able to travel because we wanted to stay here when my mom was ill. But now it feels like we can spread our wings a bit and we would definitely like to start doing some more stuff internationally which we're really excited about and we hope that it will be interesting content and interesting storytelling for people who engage in delicious yellow and hopefully there'll be things that we learn along the way that we can share and hopefully help other people on that journey and so we're we're really excited to continue to try and build everything that we're doing to try and reach more people to try and go reach new places that feels like a big new adventure for us and hopefully personal level as well it's really exciting we're heading off to the us um the day this comes out

um so on tuesday it's wednesday now and it's you know that's for us as a couple as well it feels like a kind of really exciting adventure it really does if anyone has any recommendations in New York or Chicago um please do send them to us because we've got a bit of time in both and we want to eat absolutely everything we possibly can yeah so we're we're really excited about that we're looking at some stuff in Europe as well we just wait and see what happens with Brexit but um but we're definitely really excited about that and excited to share the the whole story of trying to do that with you so the next question we have here is uh what's your dream for Deliciously Ella? It's such an interesting question because if you'd asked me this on day one I would have said to be able to do this as a career for anyone to read it and you know kind of

as that scale I guess I've never been as confident maybe as you are and I've always had a kind of shallower dream because I never really believed I could kind of make the dream a reality and now I look at it and I have these moments of kind of I guess daring to dream where I think maybe Delicious Yellow could be like, you know, really, really big company, like an Innocent Drinks or, you know, even bigger, and we can really change the world. And the more I learn, and the more I read, and the more people I speak to about the importance of plant-based eating, both for our own health and the health of our planet, the more unbelievably passionate I get about it and I just yeah I guess I have this

complete dream that one day what we do will just be the complete norm and how about you? So I think for me it comes back to the thing that I think this again may sound a bit cheesy but I think it's the thing that is most exciting to both of us about Delicious Yellow is the purpose that it has. We absolutely love all of the businessy bits that we do. And it's a great way of us and it kind of manifesting all of our values. But the thing that we're most excited about is our purpose. And our company purpose is to help people try and live better, to be really useful. So not just to sell stuff for the sake of selling it, but sell stuff because we think it's going to add real value to people's lives and to

try and make vegetables cool and so if my dream for delicious yellow is that in 25 years we're sat here and we have a business that is much much much bigger than it is today and somehow through delicious yellow whether it's through content sharing or being able to make food products really accessible and available to lots of people that we have somehow been able to show that we've created a tangible change uh that's shown that people are living slightly better each day and that somehow we've made vegetables cool which really that challenge which is a never-ending thing is the thing that excites us most about Delicious Yellow. And if one day we're able to show that, wow, we actually did that in some way.

I think that that really is our dream for Delicious Yellow. Yeah. So exciting, isn't it? OK, so just to close, wrapping up the end of the year so that everyone knows we're going to be pausing the podcast and back on Wednesday, the 2nd of January, which is incredibly exciting. Yeah, so we're really excited that we're going to be doing a second series of the podcast. As Ella alluded to at the start, we really weren't sure what the podcast was really going to work out to be. Or whether anyone would want to listen to it. But somehow lots of you have, which we are so touched and and uh humbled by but we we say this to people sometimes when we're talking the

strange thing about both Ella and I is we're actually both very very private people so even though Deliciously Ella has this big following we don't really share too much about our private life because we are both actually quite private people and the great thing about the podcast is is it's just you you kind of feel like you're a bit protective because you're just sat here um without having to be in front of lots of people or really kind of showing it in in a big way and so we've really really really loved uh during the podcast yeah and the honest conversation we hope that there's so much different information about there and we're so fortunate to be able to bring these real experts in to share their wisdom and knowledge with us and so the podcast will remain where it will be ella and i talking to

hopefully really interesting useful people for for everyone to be able to learn something from and hopefully add value to their to their every day and i think and we get to learn so much along the way yeah we're going back out to the states in march so we're going to try and interview some some people there and uh we've already got some really really exciting uh guests lined up and i don't think we could finish our series of our podcasts it shows the we've talked a lot in this series actually about some of the negative effects of social media but one of the great parts of social media has can be the connections that you can make and our amazing company have helped us produce all of this mags creative um have been invaluable

and i think a real partner to us so thank you to them and we're really looking forward to doing another season with them and going on different adventures around the place interviewing lots of different people and as you said I think social media has had quite a bad rap this year I think we've all become increasingly unconscious about the way we consume information online but what feels really nice about a podcast is it feels kind of exempt from that completely it feels a really positive hopefully uplifting and insightful interesting medium so I think it's going to become a really core part of delicious yellow so don't worry we're just pausing for a split second because it's been an incredible year but i think also like in anything that we do in delicious yellow

you know any of the food products that we release are always the ones the recipes have been the most popular from the from the blog the app the deli the events that we've done and so everything we do is led by this incredible community that we get to exist and interact with every day at delicious yellow so if there's anything else that you're particularly interested in trying to hear about or people that you would love to hear from then we would love to be set the challenge of trying to get them on so if you have any suggestions please always just email us with anything it's just we try and have easy email addresses on purpose but it's just matthew at deliciouslyella.com and ella at deliciouslyella.com and always please feel free to shoot us a note if there's if there's anything that we we could do better on this too two t's in the matthew because when we met and i was trying to stalk him on

instagram i only put one in and couldn't find him. So if you want to get in touch, he needs two Ts. Nice. Otherwise, thank you guys so much for listening. Honestly, it means the world. We've been blown away by the number of downloads. Yeah, we talked for a while about doing this. We really weren't sure what the response has been like, but we've been touched by by your comments and the amount of listens that has literally blown us away we didn't think

we would get close to the amount of listens that we've had and we're so touched and humbled by that so thank you thank you and we look forward to catching up with you all in the new year bye you're a podcast listener and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more.

That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.