Sweet Loren’s Founder Loren Castle on How Cancer Led to Her Viral Cookie Brand

For Loren Castle, a cancer diagnosis eventually led to a viral cookie dough brand. 

Castle, a New York native, officially launched her better-for-you brand Sweet Loren’s back in 2012, though the idea started several years earlier. While it all began with gluten-free, vegan and dairy-free cookies that taste like the real thing, the company has since expanded to other products, including puff pastry, breakfast biscuits and pizza dough, all allergen-free. Although the company is now synonymous with better-for-you treats and is available in 30,000 stores nationwide, Castle’s start was bittersweet. 

Shortly after graduating from the University of Southern California in 2006, Castle, a health enthusiast and yoga instructor living at home in New York City, woke up one day with swollen lymph nodes in her neck. 

“I saw the doctor, and he looked at me, and he was like, ‘You either have nothing at all or Hodgkin’s lymphoma,’” she remembers. “They did a biopsy and confirmed it was stage two. I had to start six months of chemotherapy immediately.” 

Castle identifies herself as a “happy, outgoing, positive energy person,” but says this experience truly knocked her down.

“For the first time, I was like, ‘Holy s–t. This isn’t the movie I signed up for,’” she says. 

But in true Castle fashion, she started seeing a therapist who reframed the experience for her, asking what it would look like if she took her diagnosis on as a strength that allowed her to empathize with others and see the world differently. From there her outlook completely changed and she went to her doctor asking what she could do to be the strongest, healthiest version of herself to get through chemo.

She was disappointed to hear “eat what you normally eat.” That wasn’t good enough, so Castle set out to cook and eat healthier, cutting out ingredients from her diet like bleached flour, corn syrup and processed foods.

While she started taking cooking classes and studying nutrition, she found it was easy to make healthy meals but difficult to achieve sweet treats. Additionally after working at Levain throughout her college breaks, she says. “I realized the power of a fresh, warm, gooey cookie.” 

With that in mind, Sweet Loren’s was in the making.

“I became psycho and started to bring in every type of oil, every type of flour, every type of sugar,” she says, baking new concoctions all the time to create something that didn’t taste like a healthier alternative to the real thing, but was. 

“I have a younger sister who’s very picky, and she was like, ‘My god, these are the best cookies ever,’” Castle says, noting she knew then she’d cracked the code. 

Around the same time in 2007, she was cancer free and cleared by her doctor to go live a normal life. 

“I couldn’t be normal,” she recalls. “I was serious after going through that, and I knew I wanted to find a way to make what happened to me, which felt like a nightmare, into my superpower.” 

After trying a slew of jobs — public relations, finance, restaurant — a friend encouraged her to join a baking contest. She won. 

“The judge came up to me and was like, ‘You really need to do something with this,’” she says.

So she took a business writing course and created a proposal. By chance, a classmate worked at Whole Foods restocking shelves and he got her a meeting with the head buyer. 

After meeting and falling in love with the product, the buyer asked Castle how soon they could get it on shelves at the Columbus Circle location. She began selling and demoing the product. In doing so, she met hundreds of customers a day and continued to perfect her recipe. From there, the brand took off, as Castle won another competition, The Next Big Small Brand Contest for Culinary Genius. Now, 12 years after its official launch, the brand, which currently makes cookie dough, puff pastry, breakfast biscuits and pizza dough, is in 30,000 doors.

“You don’t have to eat total junk that’s terrible for you in order to have your favorite foods,” Castle says.

While she doesn’t shy away from talking about her cancer journey now, she didn’t realize what a crucial role it played in her business until a journalist asked her about it after winning one of the competitions.

“When I saw the emotional connection it had and how much it made her take what I was doing seriously, I realized I had to tell the story all the time because without it, we just seem like a cute bakery,” she says. “I have told this story a thousand times, more than a thousand times… and it still hits home for me every time.”

It hits home for the brand’s customers as well.

“We’ll get people that are going through cancer or just finished treatment writing us crying that the story inspires them,” says Castle, emphasizing the impact of offering people healthy food that actually tastes good. “You don’t want to be on a sad diet for the rest of your life… That really touches me, because if you were sick or going through cancer and then you go into a normal grocery store, it’s a sad feeling. You’re like, ‘Is this food made for me?’”

With Sweet Loren’s, it is. With that in mind, Castle plans to expand to other areas of food, particularly those where it’s hard to find great-tasting, healthy alternatives.

As Castle’s whole ethos is about offering people a way to treat themselves and feel good about it, she’s done the same for herself following the success of the brand.

“For my 40th birthday, [we] went to Japan,” she says. “I bought myself this ridiculous and gorgeous magenta Chanel bag because our Sweet Loren’s color [is] magenta… It was a moment of, ‘Yep, I deserve this,’ and thank God for Sweet Loren’s and all the things. I have two daughters now. I’m so grateful for my health. I have an amazing husband… All these things I just didn’t give up on.”