18 years on from launching the brand, we asked Camilla, our founder, to reflect on the growth of Rude Health & how despite now being in kitchens all over the world, our mission has stayed the same.

It all started with a grand plan to change the way we eat; making eating healthily easy and enjoyable. That’s always been our mission: to make healthy eating a celebration, not a sacrifice. And that’s how the Ultimate Muesli was born. We began mixing at the kitchen table in 2006, starting with muesli, the healthiest of healthy foods. The recipe has evolved, but it was originally a blend of 27 ingredients including blueberries and Brazil nuts, as well as the more traditional and basic muesli ingredients, so every mouthful tasted different.

One muesli lead to another muesli. Then we found ourselves with a sack of oats that were too hard and chewy to make a soft muesli it turns out. Being in Rude Health, we couldn’t waste them. We made flapjacks & porridge; chewy oats make great porridge, & our recipe was particularly delicious. We were expanding by accident & the ideas just kept coming. For example, sat at the kitchen table, I realised the ‘high fibre’ brown flaky cereal I’d been made to believe was the ‘healthy choice’ was high in sugar & salt. I felt hoodwinked.

At Rude Health, we will never hoodwink. We base all our food & drink on kitchen cupboard ingredients, keeping sugar & salt to a minimum. So in direct contrast, we created our our spelt flakes. Just one ingredient, nothing added. Similarly our Almond drink is almonds, rice, water & a tiny amount of cold-pressed sunflower oil. We use rice so we don’t have to include gums & emulsifiers, which usually give almond milk’s their creamy texture & sweetness.

Whilst we started off with cereals, milks are now a huge part of what we do. We just couldn’t carry on using the milk alternatives that were on the market to sample delicious, carefully crafted cereals with. Not only were the cartons ugly & the taste of the milks unpleasant, they all also had long list of ingredients I’d never heard of– which just isn’t what we do. We had no idea the milks were going to be so popular when we first made them… if you’d told me 15 years ago how much time I’d spend testing & tweaking Oat Drink recipes to make sure they had the perfect froth, I’d have said you were mad!

Making these drinks function perfectly, without adding a long list of gums & potassium carbonate, is an ongoing challenge that we’ve made for ourselves. Life would be much easier if we just threw these in, but integrity is so important to us, so we work hard to stick to our simple ingredient principles. Whilst hard work, making our own delicious, dairy-free milks was the best decision we ever made.

Opening the Rude Health café is my other favourite decision. We don’t get to meet our customers in store, unless we lurk in supermarkets (which we do). But in our café we meet you every day, find out what you like, and don’t like; we can trial new food and drink, with instant feedback & we get to host events. This is also where we do a lot of frothing & splitting experiments on our milk alternatives.

Looking back over the last 18 years, the way we eat in the UK has changed. As a nation, we are now much more aware of the value of eating well. Of course, the rise of social media has been hugely influential – but not all good. Whilst it has helped spread the word about eating well & the benefits, it’s made us hypercritical of how we look & has given us license to fixate on things. We’ve still got a long way to go on looking at health holistically, but what you eat is a good place to start.