The campaigner and entrepreneur Heather Mills says she is “devastated” after her vegan food business VBites fell into administration this week. 

Mills said that a host of factors including “corporate greed”, Brexit, utility and ingredients prices all contributed to the failure of the company. 

Mills bought legacy meat and dairy-alternative food company Redwood Wholefoods (owner of brands such as Cheatin’ and Cheezly) in 2007 and renamed it VBites. 

VBites operates from two manufacturing sites in Peterlee and Corby and employs nearly 80 people. Administrators were appointed after the business failed to attract new funding. 

In a statement on her website, Mills said: “With great regret, I am sorry to announce that after 30 years of pioneering plant based production and innovation in the meat-free, fish-free and dairy-free sectors, VBites Foods Ltd, a company very dear to my heart, is entering into administration this week. This is extremely distressing for me on a personal level but also for my wonderfully loyal and hard-working staff.

“My team and I have undertaken 30 years of product creation and evolution as well as personally investing tens of millions of pounds into the business and offering every solution I feasibly could to keep it going, but sadly mine and my staff’s efforts have been thwarted.”

Mills pointed out that the plight of VBites had not occurred in isolation. The collapse of other plant-based food companies, following sometimes spectacular growth and high market valuation, signalled that the sector needed to work together to rebuild and protect itself from the “galvanised and well funded marketing of misinformation currently being undertaken by the meat and dairy industries”. 

She also alluded to the widely discussed ‘corporate takeover’ of the plant-sector in recent years. “It is unsurprising and inevitable that where profits are to be made, amorphous corporate entities will follow and unfortunately their practices too often undermine the entrepreneurial spirit, flexibility and agility of movement that saw plant based entrepreneurs have so much success. There is too often a tendency to treat their investments as short-term experiments and opportunistic flights of fancy, embalm them in restrictive governance and then either walk away or enforce a takeover when the market hits a bump.”