The right bite: Laura Trice's Wholesome Junk Food line took off after she shrunk the cookies to meet consumer demand for her sample size.

LAURA Trice read countless biology and chemistry text-books while training to become a medical doctor. But books on cookie mogul Mrs. (Debbi) Fields and ice cream duo Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield have meant more to her current career making all-natural vegan cookies.

Trice, president of Venice-based Laura's Wholesome Junk Food, founded the company in 2001 after bringing vegan cookies to movie sets where she worked as technical adviser and medic. She noticed it wasn't only health food nuts that were gobbling up the cookies.

"I brought some to work once where there were a bunch of construction workers and truck drivers," Trice said. "I noticed they were taking them over the doughnuts and that's when my eyebrows went up."

To start the company, she dug into her savings and brought in a partner who is no longer active but still owns half the business. After three years, Laura's is in more than 100 stores, including Los Angeles-based Erewhon and Santa Monica's Co-Opportunity.

As with most upstarts, it's been a challenge getting noticed. Trice said it took a year of repeated phone calls before she got the chance to pitch her company to what is now her biggest client, publicly held Whole Foods Market Inc. Her line is among the 50 best-selling products in Whole Foods' 800-item baked goods department, "said Liz Sharpe, bakery team leader at a location in Santa Monica.

Part of Trice's success, Sharpe said, has been relentless in-store marketing--giving out samples twice every week and answering customers' questions. "She really put her product out there and people absolutely loved it," Sharpe said.

Vegan roots

Trice first became interested in natural foods as a medical student at the University of Vermont. She spent a month at a vegan resort, three months at an alternative medicine clinic in Bali and studied under several holistic practitioners. (She still follows a vegan diet, which goes beyond some forms of vegetarianism by excluding foods that come from animals.)

Following her medical school graduation in 1995, Trice decided that after so many years of studying she was lacking in "life experience." She picked up and moved to Los Angeles, where she worked in the film industry and tutored French.

Trice spent two years searching for the right manufacturer to bake her cookies. Very few, she found, placed the required importance on all-natural ingredients. Others were not interested in producing natural foods, or did not run the kind of clean and efficient facility she was seeking.

Finding sometimes-obscure ingredients also proved to be time-consuming. Trice wanted to avoid a coconut product that included preservatives, but "it took almost a year to find a reliable supplier who had a contact overseas where I could get unsprayed, all-natural plain coconut," she recalled.

Rolled oats are a primary ingredient in the cookies. She uses dates as her main sweetener, although they're nine to 10 times more expensive than using processed white sugar, and she also uses grape juice concentrate.

Trice spent years to develop her initial products, oatmeal raisin and chocolate chip cookies. Banana split and chocolate fudge flavors took about six months.

She initially planned to sell Laura's Wholesome Junk Food bars, but when handing out samples she gave shoppers bite-size pieces she called "bite-lettes." They like the bite-lettes better.

"People kept asking, 'Where can we buy the bite-lettes?'" she said. They weren't buying the bars and we were sitting there thinking 'Oh this is not good.'"

Trice scrapped the bar idea and finally found a Northridge-based manufacturer to bake the bite-lettes: small, 50-calorie cookies, which retail for about $5 for a 7-ounce container.

When it came time to design product labels, Trice used a photo of herself at age four baking in her grandmother's kitchen.

"Ordering 50,000 labels and producing 50,000 tubs when I didn't have one customer was a really unusual feeling," she said. "In medical school and in college you know you're going to graduate at the end of your four years, but with a business like this we really didn't know how it was going to go. We were just persistent and we've been a really lucky company."

John Orcutt, grocery buyer for the natural-foods grocer Co-opportunity, said products like Laura's Wholesome Junk Food have been gaining in popularity, although they are often more expensive than their less-healthy, brand-name counterparts. "People are becoming more aware and trying to eat healthier," he said. "It's generally people with college degrees, upper income, and they have a little bit more money so they're willing to spend the money for quality."

Trice agrees, remembering her mother's story of when white bread first hit the market. It was the poorer farm kids who had to eat their families' whole-grain, homemade breads while their wealthier peers got the new manufactured bread from the grocery store.

"Now you go to some high-end bakery and you're paying a lot more for the whole grain," she said. "So it's kind of gone full circle."

No matter how successful Laura's Wholesome Junk Food becomes, Trice has no plans to give up medicine.

"When you can't find your banana supplier or your bananas are floating somewhere around the country and you're trying to make 50,000 tubs of cookies, it's really nice to go use a different part of my brain," she said.

PROFILE

Laura's Wholesome Junk Food

Year Founded: 2001

Core Business: Healthy vegan cookies

Revenues in 2003: $30,000 (began selling in September)

Revenues in 2004: $375,000 (to date)

Employees in 2003: 2

Employees in 2004: 4

Goal: To continue expanding nationwide and introduce new lines

Driving Force: People who love great food and also care about the quality of ingredients and nutritional benefits