Health Speak with Hayley Gait Golding, Founder of Super Healthy Snacks, Bear & Urban Fruit

Hayley Gait Golding is 32 and Founder of yummy healthy treats BEAR and Urban Fruit made of nothing other than 100% pure fruit. It is the fastest growing healthy snack brand in the UK, loved by both kids and adults. BEAR adult fruit nibbles are particularly loved by grownups! We pick her wonderful healthy brain about snacking, start ups and staying young…

What is the first thing you do in the morning?
I drink more tea than is probably good for me and answer my early emails from all our farmers in the far east.

What do eat for breakfast?
Porridge and freshly chopped up fruit. A proper bears breakfast.

What is your work place like?
Our address is ‘BEAR’s big cave, deepest darkest woods…We’ve transformed an underground office in the city into a woodland cave with real wood carved out trees, bears, birds, and bees everywhere. Our meeting table is our favourite, it’s a big upturned oak carved into a picnic table for our meetings. We work hard at BEAR but love to find ways to make it really fun.

What do you eat for lunch?
I try and take my lunch to work but something like soup or tuna salad and lots and lots of fruit.

Do you snack?
It’s my job to snack. I do all our fruit picking and new product development so I’m constantly nibbling on the latest BEAR snack. It’s all healthy so I don’t worry about it.

What do you have for supper?
I eat a really simple diet of veggies and lean meat like fish or free range chicken. My gran thinks it’s awful when she comes for Christmas dinner as the amount of veggies we eat as a family is a bit disproportionate.

What made you start BEAR?
I founded BEAR because I was passionate about making snacking a whole lot healthier and tastier too. At the time I was a personal trainer and all my clients were struggling to find healthy tasty snacks without all the nonsense they could fit in with their busy lives. They were also shocked how much the ones for their kids were laden with added sugars and preservatives or made from concentrates instead of real fruit. I wanted BEAR to be the trusted favourite for the whole family and be made from great ingredients you could pick in a field or up a tree.

How does it feel owning your own business?
It’s amazing, I have to pinch myself every now and then to check it all really happened. It hasn’t been easy and there have been a lot of sacrifices in other parts of my life, like having time for friends has been tough, but I think all the stresses and diverse situations I’ve had to face have made me more capable.

What do you enjoy about BEAR the most?
I enjoy the fact that it’s fun and it celebrates healthy in a happy positive way. The best thing (in the whole wide woods) are the lovely letters and emails we get in the cave every day from people who eat bear and write to tell us how much they love our snacks and 100 fun fact cards you get inside of every pack of Yoyos (pure fruit rolls). I also love the fact I get to travel the world to work with all of our farmers and find the very best in season fruit.

How do you keep fit?
I love running so I do a loop from my house on the Southbank around the river Thames about 4 or 5 times a week if I can fit it in. This year I’ve also started doing yoga and I’m really enjoying that. The tricky part is fitting in fitness when I’m travelling, which is quite often these days but I always take my trusty trainers and so have managed to grab some memorable runs through places like a safari park in South Africa, up and down a remote aeroplane landing strip and through the streets of Bangkok; which I think on reflection probably did my lungs more damage than good!

What keeps you young?
Hopefully my expensive face cream. If not I’m going to send them an invoice in 10 years’ time.

Which three celebrities (dead or alive) would you invite to dinner?  David Attenborough to tell me great stories about the world…I’d have to mull over the others… I’m not really into celebrities.

What is your biggest luxury in life?
Honestly it is fruit. I spend far too much money on fruit and have a bit of a compulsion to buy everything that looks tasty even if I’m well stocked. I get a bit too excited when I travel and buy enormous bags of rambutans and mangosteens. I try and bring them back to the cave for the team to try too.

What three things can’t you live without?
Fruit, tea and exercise.

What gets you up in the morning?
Tea.

And what do you go to bed thinking about?
I’m usually mulling over something creative we’re doing in the cave like making the new fact cards. That means my brains full of random facts like did you know if takes the average person 7 minutes to fall asleep?

What motto do you live by?
Be fearless