For most people, a just-baked chocolate chip cookie can turn any frown upside down. For Loren Castle, the classic treat wound up being a lifesaver.
With little to lose following a brutal cancer battle, the native New Yorker — who wanted more than anything to live a normal, healthy, happy life — walked into Whole Foods with a plate of homemade cookies and a dream of owning her own, game-changing baking business.
Roughly a decade later — her “10-year overnight success,” Castle told The Post — Sweet Loren’s, an all-natural cookie dough company using plant-based, non-GMO, whole-grain ingredients free of gluten, dairy, eggs, tree nuts and peanuts, is the No. 1 brand in its category, sold in 25,000 supermarkets around the country.
“There’s a happiness and joy that fresh cookies and baked goods bring you that was missing,” the tough cookie, now 40 and cancer-free, told The Post. “After I got sick, I just couldn’t eat [them] the same way.”
“Food is how we get energy — If I’m feeding myself crappy food,” she remembered telling herself, “I’m not going to have the energy to fight this.”
Castle’s rise began with a serious fall in the form of an earth-shattering diagnosis back in 2006, after graduating college in Los Angeles and returning home to Manhattan.
A mysterious swollen neck sent her to the hospital, and the news was terrifying.
“[The oncologist] looked at me and said, ‘You have nothing at all, or you have Hodgkin’s lymphoma,’ ” Castle recalled.
After testing, she received a diagnosis of Stage 2 Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer that affects the lymphatic system — part of the body’s immune system that fights germs and diseases — when healthy cells change and grow out of control.
“At 22, that was just so unthinkable,” Castle said. “On the outside, I looked so healthy.”
While all of Castle’s friends were out partying, getting their first jobs and feeling invincible, she began six months of chemotherapy and fell into a depression.
“I kind of lost hope in everything,” she said. “I’ve always been a very optimistic, happy person, and cancer I just was not expecting. I was not prepared to handle that, and it really knocked me down.”
To get through it, she started therapy, which helped her see how getting through cancer could give her strength and appreciate life more.
“It’s all in our minds, it’s all the way we look at things,” Castle said, recalling seeing the fork in the road.
She could continue to sit on her couch and be miserable, or she could do everything in her power to get healthy.
“If I could figure out how to turn it into a superpower, it wouldn’t hold me back in life — it could actually propel me,” Castle said. “I just wanted to love life, and I wanted to get through this. I was determined.”
It turned out that food was the best medicine for that. During treatment, Castle started taking cooking classes — and studying nutrition.
Having formerly worked at Levain Bakery’s original location on the Upper West Side, Castle had a sweet tooth but having a “weird diet” limited her from tearing open just any box of cookies.
“I wanted a cookie I could eat all the time and just not have it make me feel bad. All that inspired me to really start Sweet Loren’s,” she said.
Amazingly, just about one year later in 2007, Castle got a clean bill of health and was cancer-free. But since she still needed checkups every few months for the next five years to ensure it didn’t return, her life was still on hold.
During this time, she wanted to be “normal” and get a job like her friends had, trying to get jobs in finance, public relations or in a restaurant — but she realized in her state at the time, working for someone else wasn’t going to cut it, and at her core, she was an entrepreneur.
After perfecting a recipe for “really delicious, decadent, warm cookies,” Castle was able to snag a meeting with the head buyer at the Columbus Circle Whole Foods with the help of a friend in her business class.
She walked in without a packaged product — just a plate of cookies. The next day, the buyer called and asked how soon they could place an order, and that set Castle off on her hustle.
As a one-woman show at the time, she did in-store demos herself, bringing a toaster oven in a suitcase on the subway to Whole Foods Markets around the city — but being a young cancer survivor in her 20s came with its own challenges.
“People would ask me in the early years, ‘Well, are you better now? Are you sure you’re going to be OK?’ And that was a little bit hard because it’d be, like, ‘Yes, I’m healthy now, and you can trust this business,’ ” Castle said. “But then it would make me a little bit scared. What if it does come back?”
Castle is just as passionate and motivated today as she was at the start of her journey, which she credits partly to Sweet Loren’s loyal customers.
“Every single day I get messages from people that say we’ve changed their life,” Castle said, noting fans often invite Castle to their weddings.
One of the most heartwarming moments? A couple who named their baby Loren after the company.
“You start to realize: I’m not alone in this,” Castle said. “It’s the best feeling in the world, and I just don’t take it for granted.”
