Renée Elliott is in her kitchen, which means she's in her element. It's a sunny day, her pet budgie is tweeting from his perch upstairs, and Elliott, 36, the woman who founded Planet Organic, is cutting huge chunks of Irish soda bread. She baked it the night before, using spelt instead of traditional wheat flour, and big, juicy, organic sultanas. The heart of her kitchen is her oven. 'It had to be a gas hob and an electric oven,' she says in her soft American accent. 'I love baking. My mother has love and baking all mixed up, and I do too. There is nothing as simple as baking a loaf of bread or a cake. It gives me such satisfaction.' And seeing people enjoy the fruits of her baking sessions pleases her even more. At Christmas and Easter, she bakes cookies for all 100 of her staff. Hours of work is scoffed in minutes. But it's worth it. It makes a difference.
'I sound like the happy homebaker, don't I?' she laughs. But she's far from it. She bakes at weekends for recreation, just as other people might go to the gym, take a walk, or watch a film. The rest of the time, she is busy honing and developing her business, which began in 1995 with a shop in Westbourne Grove, and grew last year into a second super cool supermarket, with everything from a juice bar to a cake counter, just off London's Tottenham Court Road. That she works in the food industry is perhaps inevitable. 'My mom's from New Orleans, where it's all Cajun-Creole cookery. Food was so important as a child. Mom was always cooking, baking, feeding people.' Her father kept a small vegetable garden, which Elliott helped out on. When she left home to go to college, she says, she couldn't understand why the tomatoes didn't taste like they did at home. In 1985, as a student, she went travelling to Europe with her sister, and met her future husband in London. The following year, she realised it was more than a holiday romance and came back to stay. Planet Organic was inspired by a concept she had seen in America, and six years ago, she set about making it work here.
The organic market has grown with her. 'Whenever there's a food scare, people turn to organic,' she says. 'A food scare makes people learn a bit more about conventional farming; it's not pretty.' She is on the council of the Soil Association, and is sure that the only way forward for British farmers is to go organic. 'In the beginning, I had two goals: one was to make organic mainstream, and the other was to change food retailing. But that happened in 1999 with GMOs [genetically modified organisms]. The supermarkets made it happen.' These days, it is possible - if expensive - to do your entire weekly shop at Planet Organic, from your floor cleaner to your Sunday morning croissants. But few are lucky enough to be able to shop for food daily, as Elliott does. It's one the perks of her trade. She likes her ingredients to be as fresh as possible, and says she only cooks as much as is needed for a meal: 'I hate leftovers.' The day we meet, she has already planned dinner that evening, and stocked up the vegetable drawers of her fridge with cauliflower, salad stuff and a couple of bulbs of fennel. She and her husband, Brian, who is also a director of the company, are both vegetarians.
The kitchen is not grand - either in scale or content. There is no freestanding industrial cooker to double as a status symbol; no state-of-the-art stainless steel worktops or flashy lighting system. There isn't even a cool Waring juicer, because Elliott says she has all the fruit and vegetable juice she likes during the week at work, and she makes smoothies instead in her Moulinex blender at home at the weekends. The couple moved to their West London mews house two years ago, and are still in the process of decorating. They were happy with the kitchen, with its clean, wooden units, and functional Bosch appliances.
It is not the kitchen of a show-off. But as soon as you open the cupboard doors, you realise that this is the domain of a serious cook. The KitchenAid food mixer on the worktop is already a clue. Elliott says she couldn't live without it. But the cupboards are crammed with loaf tins, pie tins, muffin trays, pancake griddles, and cookie presses. Out of one drawer she pulls a ginger grater, a pastry cutter (along with most of her baking tins, she brought it back from America because she couldn't find one here), a hand whisk, a garlic press, and a tiny, fluted, lemon tart tin, the size of a walnut. Open another drawer, and you find Elliott's spice and herb collection, in alphabetical order. They are stored in glass Schwartz bottles but are mostly from Hambleden Spices, a British company that supplies 90 per cent of organic spices. In the oven, there's a pizza stone, which is frequently used, especially by Brian, who might bake two different varieties for a dinner party. In the freezer there's an ice-cream maker, waiting for summer.
There is just one, compact food cupboard, and it's packed with goodies, including a jar of Seggiano artichoke hearts (they don't have an official Soil Association stamp, but according to Elliott, 'they're the best in the world - I know the farmer doesn't spray or use pesticides') a bag of dates, some hemp and spelt pasta, brown basmati rice as well as white arborio for risottos, a tin of baked beans, rice crackers and Quinoa black sesame snacks, and several bars of Green & Blacks chocolate, because she is planning on baking a chocolate cake. There are also two packs of OAO spaghetti (the packaging is designed by Philippe Starck and yes, it's organic) and a corner of Japanese ingredients: wasabi, umeboshi paste, nori, kuzu root, used to thicken stews and sauces, and something called mochi, which, Elliott says, is a good staple to always have in the cupboard. 'They are little brown rice pillows - you put them under the grill and they puff up, and go all chewy and sweet.'
The real secret of Renée Elliott's kitchen however, is nothing to do with American muffin tins or Japanese condiments. It is contained within an unobtrusive black ring-binder folder, in a short stack of recipe books, sandwiched between her own The Organic Cookbook, co-written with Eric Treuillé, (published by Dorling Kindersley) and Fields of Greens by Annie Somerville, from the San Francisco restaurant with the same name. The black folder is heavy with hand-written recipes, sent to Elliott by her mother back home. 'I never give out recipes,' she says darkly. 'It's a family secret.' And there is no way she is going to give anything more away - not even the recipe for her mom's delicious soda bread.
• Planet Organic, 42 Westbourne Grove, London W2, and 22 Torrington Place, London W1; for mail order, ring 020 7221 1345.
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