Morning glory

15/Feb/2012

Intrigued by the extraordinary flavours in her sample cup, muesli-mad food writer Linda Cooke caught up with Maria Jeetoo-Luigi of Mini Magoo’s to find out exactly what bewitching alchemy goes into the company’s handmade cereal.

The proprietor and granolaista-in-chief of Mini Magoo’s, Maria Jeetoo-Luigi, is full of sparkle. She began her working life as a make-up artist, but while the job exercised her innate creativity, it did not, as she says, “feed the soul”, and feeding the soul is what Maria’s cereal business is all about.

Mini Magoo’s started out with a desire to nourish. Maria, wanted her 2-year-old goddaughter, Luna (nicknamed mini-Magoo), to enjoy treats which would be “sweet and yummy, but also good for her”. She began by preparing flavoured popcorn for Luna's snacks. When this went down well, she began to experiment, passing her homemade treats out to her friends to see what they thought. After experimenting with different seeds, fruits and cereals, Maria found the base for what would become her first commercial product – cranberry muesli.

In 2003, Mini Magoo’s was founded in Maria’s kitchen. “The goodness that you choose”, as she labelled her wares, was soon flying out of the door. Before long Maria was supplying businesses from farm shops to department stores, eventually securing a prized pitch at Borough Market. There are now 12 products and four lines in the range: muesli (cranberry, blueberry or date), granola (blueberry, cherry, ginger or orange), granuesli (blueberry, date or ginger) and porridge (chai spice, cherry or date).

These days, while not trotting the globe in search of the perfect ingredients (she has just returned from Kerala in southern India, where she had flown to source coconut flakes), Maria and her small team can be found mixing their wares under a railway arch at London Fields.

Maria loves the social aspect of her stall at Borough Market. Some of the people she meets at the market are cereal-sceptics, who arrive convinced that muesli and granola will taste like cardboard-textured birdfeed, but once she persuades them to try her cereals, even these non-believers have become regulars. She says it’s all about re-educating people, and she delights in sharing recipes. The ginger granola, she says, makes a great topping for rhubarb crumble.

Maria is committed to only using organic ingredients and is passionate about feeding her customers with nothing but goodness. She is convinced that organic food can have a positive effect on children’s growth and development, and sees her range of cereals as food for people whose bottom lines are good taste and health. “I firmly believes that Britain would be a happier place if every family started the day together with a healthy meal,” she says.

The best-selling Mini Magoo’s product is the ginger granola – a delicious combination of large raw coconut flakes, mornflake jumbo oats, linseeds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, almonds and ginger, bound together using the company’s special weapon – raw agave nectar (agave tequiliana), a natural sweetener with a low GI originating from Mexico.

The cereals are all suitable for diabetics, while the granuesli is completely wheat and sugar free. Maria is looking to change her entire product range to gluten-free, as there is so much demand for it among her customers. This will be a big challenge, as gluten-free organic ingredients are hard to find, but Maria is determined to make it work.