For the latest in our Out of Office series, we sat down with Frida Redknapp, former model, mother of five, and founder of new food brand Frood launching this month, to talk about the road from a tiny town in Sweden to a life lived across Paris, New York and London.
London is a city she clearly adores. Coming from somewhere small and simple, she’s drawn to London precisely for its opposite energy: the cultures, the restaurants, the shops, the sheer amount to do. But the contrast with home runs deep. She grew up learning to be happy with small things, and that grounding, she says, is what she carried with her when she left at fifteen to model in Paris, packing a suitcase alone and being dropped into the fashion world more or less overnight.
It was, by her own account, daunting and scary, but also formative. Modelling made her independent early, taught her resilience, and made her curious about the world. She’s candid, too, about its harder edges, the pressure around body image, the people who aren’t always kind, and how her steady upbringing helped her weather it.
That clarity feeds directly into how she thinks about wellness now. Where her younger relationship with health was rooted in vanity, and, she admits, a lot of getting it wrong, her forties are about something else entirely: staying strong, energised and alive, with mental clarity at the centre. She’s wary of how social media distorts healthy living, and passionate about not passing that distortion on. With her own children, the rule is gentle: never “don’t eat that,” always “try this instead.”
The food she actually loves is unfussy and Mediterranean – grilled sea bass, chilli garlic prawns whipped together fast with plenty of vegetables. Her husband Jamie, she laughs, happily eats the same things on repeat. (A cheat meal does exist, for the record: a Five Guys burger, milkshake included.) Her produce comes mostly from local farmers’ markets, with the occasional special trip to the Notting Hill fish shop.
All of which leads to the newly founded brand Frood. The name arrived on a school run – a playful blend of “Frida” and “food,” kept because it felt quirky and right for her. The idea came from a two-minute conversation at a kids’ party, when another mum, juggling three children and a full-time job, begged her for a solution. Months later she woke in the middle of the night wondering how to turn the recipes she cooks for her own family into physical products. The result is a range designed to redefine convenience food: savoury and sweet blends, free from ultra-processed ingredients, high in fibre, and options that cut out the prep and turn into proper meals in fifteen to twenty minutes. Add the savoury blend to whatever protein you like – beef, lamb, chicken or Beyond Meat – and dinner more or less makes itself. Her flavour inspiration, fittingly, is everywhere at once: Swedish heritage fused with a lifetime of travel.
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We also cover fitness, (with around 80% of her workouts being at home taking place in her kitchen between meetings and school runs, supplemented by Pilates and the occasional boxing session with Jamie.) The philosophy is “monkey see, monkey do”: her children watch her train and eat well, and copy it. With five kids ranging from four to twenty, she’s found that the more she’s had, the calmer she’s become. Add in some well deserved downtime (meditation after becoming a convert eighteen months ago after a Deepak Chopra summit in Spain.)
And as for what’s in the bag of a busy woman? Two homemade green juices a day (ginger, turmeric, spinach, broccoli, cucumber, apple, fennel, celery – the works), nuts, workout kit with grippy socks, a notebook covered in her son’s doodles, a little lip gloss, sunglasses and an apple. The quickfire round reveals the rest, so tune in to get the sense of a woman who, after decades of getting wellness wrong, has finally made peace with getting it right.
Watch now!
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