Planet Elliott

Renée Elliott, owner of the uber-successful supermarkets Planet Organic,is leading the green campaign for Londoners, says Christopher Nye

Above: Renee Elliott

Renée Elliott is a great advert for organic living. Expecting her third child at the age of 43, the founder and owner of Planet Organic supermarkets radiates calm and common sense as she explains the benefits of shopping for organic food. “The greatest benefit is undoubtedly to your health,” she says in a soft, gentle, persuasive voice with a hint of America’s Deep South where she grew up: “Helping the environment comes as a bonus.” So for those of us who’s eyes slide past the organic section in their search for something cheaper and with some tasty E-numbers, what is organic and how can it help us, exactly? “There is a complicated definition,” explains Renée, “but the gist is by creating healthy soil we create healthy crops and grass to create healthy animals. Farmers are working with nature – not against it – and the result is rediscovering a simple type of farming that we lost after World War II. This has a critical impact on the taste of the food.” And now, scientific data is coming out that supports the anecdotal evidence on the health benefits.

Renée discovered her vocation in the early 1990s: “I was a typical woman in her late 20s looking to get passionate about something. I knew I could be persuasive, and I knew I was hard working, but about what…?” At the time she was a London-based journalist and wine writer, having married an east end boy called Brian who she met on the night bus (the N15 to Barking incidentally). In 1991 Renée went home to the US to take a course, and while there she found the perfect health food store; 30,000 sq ft of the kind of food that she’s been scrabbling round poky shops for.

Back in London, she knew this was the opportunity she had been waiting for, but it wasn’t easy to find backers. “They said to me: ‘Oh, so it will be like a really big Holland and Barrett’ and I would say ‘No, no, no! It will be like a supermarket! I wanted to leave clear blue water between Planet Organic and the kind of old-fashioned, vegetarian, hippy-like health food stores. We even had a meat counter, which caused some yelling and screaming from customers – literally, people were screaming at us for having meat in the store,” says Renée. Stocks were hard to find in those days, especially with 5,000 sq ft of store in Notting Hill to fill: “basically we took anything. If it was organic we sold it.”

But the times were a’changing and 12 years and three stores later, including one in Fulham at Effie Road, Renée is able to be choosy about what they sell. As well as tasty and realistically priced, all the foods have to be natural – 90% are fully organic but all are additive, GMO and hydrogenated fat-free.

Renée has become a leading light of the organic movement and government advisor on GM issues. She co-authored the Planet Organic Cookbook (Dorling Kindersley) and has more books on the way. All this, and a mother too? At the time of going to press, Renée was about to give birth to her third child, and insists that her own healthy lifestyle has been critical in helping her cope with pregnancy at 43. “You do really need to be fit and healthy to have a child at this age,” she says, “the baby is usually fine – it is the mother who suffers!”

Renée claims that with her two children, aged two and five, you can’t be too militant about food: “ ‘Good for you’ or ‘bad for you’ are meaningless concepts to a small child, so if the kids go to a party they can eat whatever crap they like. But what I do is to ask them how the food makes them feel. The other day my daughter said that the [unhealthy] food she had eaten made her head ‘feel all dizzy’. That’s what I want to get over, that organic food makes you feel good.”

The success of the stores shows that the message is getting across, two new Planet Organics will be opening by next summer, with funding in place for three more after that – though Renée is uncharacteristically coy about saying where. They will be in London though; Renée and Brian are committed to staying in London, even though Renée admits that the lure of the countryside is strong. She hasn’t been back to Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina – “I think it would be too heartbreaking to see it ruined” – but summer holidays in Tuscany have reawakened her interest in the countryside as a wonderful place for her kids to grow up. “Life is a compromise,” she sighs, “and I can’t stop doing what I do in London, because of what I know.” What Renée knows is that the market for organic food has never been bigger, but with greater competition from the big supermarket chains this is no time to be escaping to the sticks. There is a battle to be won for the hearts, minds and stomachs of Londoners . As for the threat of an economic downturn, doesn’t that scare her? No, Renée is confident: “Once you’re organic –you’re organic for life. Recession or not.”