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 flavors 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 $97 million in gross sales in 2024.
Here’s how the 40-year-old built her cookie empire.