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The business grew as demand jumped for vegan products, acquiring supplier Redwood Wholefood in 2009, but was hit by rising costs and supply issues.

A few doors down from the Wholefood Store, Sherri Singleton runs the renowned Italian restaurant Lucca and its sister seafood restaurant, The Mistley Thorn, in the neighbouring village of Mistley.

We tend to cook more healthfully for ourselves and our family, perhaps after the initial period of comforting eating, I’ve noticed a trend sliding back to more wholefood conscientiousness.

Tim Lang, a social scientist who established City University London’s Centre for Food Policy in 1994, says that the wholefood movement of the 1960s and 1970s paved the way for the current vegan trend.

“There are wholefood firms, vegan firms, animal-welfare-obsessed firms, and there are firms that are the complete reverse of those,” he says.