News

Annabel Karmel wants to be the Martha Stewart for children, but her approach to building her brand has never been pushy. For 20 years, she has been raising it, gradually and painstakingly, like a parent bringing up a treasured child.

That may be because her career as Britain's favourite children's food expert started in tragedy, with the loss of Natasha, her first child.

"One day I went into the nursery, and she didn't look right," the petite 47-year-old remembers in a recent interview in Toronto. "I called the doctor. He came. Then he lectured me and said all new mothers fuss. I felt uneasy, but when he said she is fine, don't worry, I went to bed. The next day, she looked worse."

She took her infant daughter to a different doctor in the morning. He sent her to the hospital. That afternoon: a CT scan and another prognosis. "They brought me in a room and put the image of her brain on a light box, and said in a very straightforward way, 'Your child will never be normal again.' "

They sent her by ambulance to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, the leading pediatric facility in London. By the second day, her daughter was on a ventilator. On the fifth, doctors said that parts of her brain had stopped functioning. They removed the ventilator and put her in her mother's arms. "She took about four hours to die."

Ms. Karmel recounts her nightmare of 21 years ago - three-month-old Natasha died of a rare viral infection - in a clipped, calm voice, a manner that suggests she has relived it many times, as a memory that never fades and as a story told to others to explain a career dedicated to children's wellbeing. "She looked completely normal," Ms. Karmel says.

"It's just terrible," she continues. "You're no longer a mother. You go back to your home and you have a nursery and all her things. All my friends had children."

She stops short.

"It's terribly bleak," she concludes in her demure British accent.

But the tragedy was also a catalyst in a way. She had tried for 2½ years to conceive her first child. Immediately, she and her husband tried again.

"I got lucky. I was pregnant within five months after her death. It was the only thing that really pulled me through." She now has three healthy children, Nicholas, 20, Lara, 18, and Scarlett, 16.

A classical musician, Ms. Karmel had started to record songs and perform concerts in her mid-20s. "But when Natasha died, that all stopped."

When she discovered her son was a bad eater, she realized that "the one thing you can do to control a child's health was to control what they eat."

Always passionate about cooking, she began to research infant nutrition at the Institute of Child Health, attached to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, instead of relying on "old wives' tales," she says. In a playgroup she ran, she tested some recipes on children.

In 1991, she wrote The Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner, which has since been published around the world, selling more than three million copies.

"It blew away all the misconceptions. I found a lot of moms were giving restricted diets to babies, just fruit and vegetable purées. But you can give meat at seven months. You can give fish, chicken and eggs. The children's [food] market was very neglected. The great chefs didn't want to make children's food. But for me, it was what I wanted to do. No one seemed to care about tasty, healthy food for children. Until recently, the American Academy of Pediatrics has not agreed with what I said, and now they agree with me on everything in that book," she says.

Her career toddled along, "steady but very slow," she says. In 16 years she wrote 13 books on everything from family meals to cooking with children.

Then, in 2006, the year she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire by the Queen for her contribution to child nutrition, a growth spurt happened. Companies approached her with brand extension ideas. She worked with retailer Marks & Spencer as a consultant on a line of children's food. Popular drug store chain Boots invited her to create equipment for making baby food.

Now, she is managing a full-grown giant of potential, which has prompted her to take control of her brand. "I think I have learned that you can do things without a big company behind you, but I didn't believe that at the time. You doubt yourself. But these big companies that make food don't love food the way I do."

She developed her own brand of ready-made children's foods, which are sold in a variety of supermarkets.

She provides the children's food for popular theme parks in Britain, such as Legoland and Thorpe Park. A line of items including bibs, bowls, spoons and cooking kits, including rolling pins and whisks for young chefs, has been launched.

The first edition of the Annabel Karmel Family Cookbook, a glossy magazine full of recipes and food-related ideas, hit shelves in Britain in time for Christmas. Spring and summer editions are planned for this year.

A television series on cooking with children is in development. Next up: nurturing the market in North America, where her books already sell well and where she is a frequent guest on the Today show.

"Natasha's death changed me completely," she says. "It made me have different values. Everything seems superficial. It sounds a bit cliché to say, but you want to do something that's more meaningful."