Deliciously Guilt Free didn’t start with a business plan. It started with my wife, Basma, our first child on the way, and a diagnosis we didn’t expect.

When Basma was pregnant with Hana, she developed gestational diabetes. We wanted to manage it for as long as possible without injecting insulin, so we cut carbs and sugar and began searching for foods that would let us do that without feeling miserable.

There wasn’t much out there in those days. 

So I began experimenting in our kitchen — baking low-carb treats, testing ingredients, and sharing the results on Instagram. People started asking to buy them. That was the first moment I realised this might be more than me pottering about.

But for the next two years, it was exactly that: a tiny hobby squeezed around my job teaching children with special educational needs who couldn’t attend school. Orders were rare. I baked because I cared, not because it paid.

Then the pandemic hit.

I thought it might be the end of my little side project. Instead, it was the turning point. With everyone online, a few customers recommended us in Facebook groups and everything took off almost overnight. Suddenly we had more orders than my kitchen could handle.

Because everything was closed, we moved into a shut-down café. They needed income; we needed a kitchen. We paid their rent and used their space — a small act of mutual survival that kept both businesses going.

By June 2020, even that café was too small.

So we moved again, this time into a closed soft-play called Cheeky Monkeys. We baked in their café kitchen, packed postal orders on the tables, and my kids played in the ball pit while we worked. It was chaotic, mostly crazy, and genuinely one of the happiest memories of Deliciously Guilt Free’s early days.

In September 2020, we moved into our current headquarters.

Low Carb Cakes were going well, but chocolate I really wanted to understand how to make chocolate accessible for anyone on a low carb diet too. 

So I taught myself how to make it from scratch.

I developed our low-carb chocolate using a lab notebook, testing every single experiment with a glucose monitor — to see how each recipe affected blood sugar. Then we refined the chocolate by grinding for three days until it was smooth, creamy, and good enough to share.

That original milk chocolate recipe is the same one we use today.

After that came the chocolate orange bar, then white chocolate, dark chocolate, salted caramel, and eventually bigger ideas like the Dubai Bar. Each new product was another step in proving that chocolate could be low-carb without tasting like a compromise.

If you’d told me back in 2018 that we’d have a full team, a proper HQ, and a community of people who rely on our products, I’d have said you were talking nonsense. But here we are — and it’s a real privilege.

Deliciously Guilt Free exists because of the low-carb community, and I genuinely see it as a team effort between me, my family, my staff, and all of you. If there’s something you’d like us to create — higher-protein options, added nutrients, new flavours — I’m always listening.

Thanks for being part of this story.
Dan