Natural turn: former Hollywood producers cast in new role as owners of vegan cookie company looking to expand by satisfying a hunger for healthy snack foods. (Small Business).

CONSIDER this plot line; A husband and wife quit their longtime Hollywood jobs, start an all-natural vegan cookie making company, persuade 7-Eleven to carry the line and live happily ever after.

Organica Foods is the brainchild of Jeremy Paige and Vicki Slotnick, two vegan ex-movie producers who walked away from the industry three years ago to perfect this culinary specialty.

"Only in L.A. can you go from being a movie maker to a baker," said Slotnick, the company's president who has been a vegan for seven years.

With vegans precluded from eating animal byproducts, Organica has replaced traditional cookie ingredients like milk and eggs with evaporated cane juice and soy butter. The company has headquarters in Toluca Lake and manufactures four types of cookies at Bloomfield Bakers in Los Alamitos.

The cookies are also free of preservatives, pesticide-treated products and genetically modified organisms, such as wheat and soy crops that have been made pest-resistant.

"If you can make a cookie that anyone would like, it introduces more people to the fact that you can create products that don't have to have animal products or pesticides, or be high in fats or cholesterol," said Paige, chief executive of Organica.

Already available nationwide at Whole Foods and Albertsons outlets, Organica last month went on sale at 600 7-Elevens, part of the convenience chain's plans to introduce fresher, natural goods (even introducing a soy smoothie product in its Bay Area stores starting in June).

"They were very brave to try it," said Paige. "It's further validation that the public is asking for foods without preservatives. You read the labels today on food packages that are three or four paragraphs long. You can't pronounce the names on them."

Market growing

Vegetarian foods (defined as "foods that directly replace meat or other animal products" will be a $2.8 billion industry in 2008, up from $15 billion this year, according to Mintel International Group Ltd., which tracks consumer trends. But the all-natural vegan market remains centered among smaller regional businesses.

Slotnick, who owned with Paige an independent production company releasing mostly low-budget films (including 1997's horror release "Jack Frost" and the mystery "Murder In Mind"), grew up working in her grandparents' Four Star Bakery in Beverly Hills. Paige once cooked at Canoga Park health food restaurant Follow Your Heart.

"We had done a movie where the director didn't want to come out of his trailer and the accountant had embezzled money," said Slotuick. "We were kind of at our wit's end at that point."

Slotnick missed working at her grandparents' bakery and had routinely baked for friends and associates. And they figured that the vegan snack market was sorely lacking in products. Slotnick began baking vegan cookies for Follow Your Heart and The Newsroom health-food cafe in West Hollywood.

"I thought it was crazy that there wasn't a cookie that had no animal product in it that was great tasting when I could make that myself," said Slotnick. "I felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing."

Branching out

Slotnick and Paige were approached by Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf about baking for its chain of 150 stores, and they rented out a local kosher bakery to fulfill the orders.

The pair then spent a year perfecting baking formulas for a handful of cookie types, officially launching the packaged brand at the Natural Food Expo in Anaheim in March 2001. "We were thinking, 'if we get one order, we did well,"' said Paige.

With inquiries from Whole Foods and Kroger Co. (Ralphs) in tow, Paige and Slotnick approached Bloomfield, a kosher bakery that also produces baked goods for Trader Joe's Safeway and Clif Bar, to do its contract baking. After the flavors are chosen by Slotnick and Paige, much of the selection of natural, GMO-free ingredients is done by Bloomfield.

By the end of last year, Organica had grossed $200,000 in revenues. With its cookies in a couple of thousand stores, the company expects to quadruple that figure this year.

"I thought they were very good," John Cunningham, consumer product resource manager for Baltimore-based nonprofit Vegetarian Resource Group, said of Organica's Ginger Walnut Cherry Chocolate Chip cookies.

Slotnick and Paige are looking to expand the brand by launching four types of iced shortbread cookies next year. "What Hostess is to the mass market, we would like to be the same thing in natural," said Slotnick.

RELATED ARTICLE: PROFILE

Organica Foods

Year Founded: 1998

Core Business: Animal product-free cookies

Revenues in 2001: $200,000

Revenues in 2002 (projected): $800,000

Employees in 2001: 2

Employees in 2002: 4

Goal: $6 million in revenues in 2004

Driving Force: Greater consumer awareness of food products free of preservatives, animal products and genetically modified organisms