No wheat, but business is sweet

After medical tests showed that Christine DeToro Ruggio, CHEP ’92, would have to eliminate all wheat from her diet, she says her first horrified thought was: “I’ll never be able to eat chocolate chip cookies again!”

Three years later, not only does she eat cookies, she bakes thousands of them every week.

When Ruggio was diagnosed with celiac disease, an intolerance of gluten that requires a wheat-free diet, she envisioned life without bagels, pasta, pizza or sandwiches. That all seemed bad enough, she says, but she knew she had to find a way to have cookies.

Visits to natural food stores and her own research soon taught Ruggio—a mother of three young children whose doctor had for years insisted that stress was responsible for her chronic stomach ailments—that gluten-free and preservative-free items were available. But, she says, the cookies were always disappointing, so she set out to develop her own recipe.

“It took me more than 150 batches to figure out how to make them, but I came up with a cookie that I really liked,” she says. She started making them for school bake sales and her children’s birthday parties and was soon flooded with compliments and requests for more both from adults and from her toughest critics, children.

That’s when, she says, she learned how many other people had various food allergies, sensitivities and intolerances that made her cookies an especially welcome part of their diets. Some parents also told her their children with autism seemed to do better on a gluten-free diet, and many parents said they tried to limit preservatives in their family’s foods.

“I started supplying cookies and brownies to various events like health fairs and fundraisers for celiac disease and autism,” Ruggio says. “I always wanted to work with children, even when I was a student at Delaware, and I started to see this—my diagnosis—as a way I could do that.”

The natural foods stores where she had started shopping began stocking her home-baked goodies, and she set up a separate kitchen in her Kennett Square, Pa., home dedicated to her new business, Sweet Christine’s Gluten-Free Confections. Today, Ruggio bakes at least 500-1,000 cookies a day, is introducing such new products as frozen dough that consumers can buy to bake their own cookies and is busily testing recipes for pizza. Because her products have no preservatives, she bakes and then freezes them for delivery to nearby retail stores, where they generally are kept in the refrigerator or freezer sections. She also sells online at [www.sweetchristinesglutenfree.com].

Baking, especially the sweets that are her favorites, is challenging when wheat flour is ruled out. Ruggio substitutes other types of flour, oats (if they are processed in a way that doesn’t contaminate them with wheat), tapioca and potato starch. She uses no preservatives and allows no gluten in or anywhere near the Sweet Christine’s kitchen.

“I work about seven or eight hours a day, but not necessarily 9 to 5,” says the former human resources and public relations specialist turned stay-at-home mom, who now employs a home child-care helper while she runs her business. “I sometimes work all night and fill my freezer [with products to be delivered to stores] so I can take a few days off with my family.”

Ruggio’s celiac disease and resulting diet changes have altered the way she and her husband and children eat and think about food, she says.

“I never went to health food stores or thought about natural foods,” she says. “Now, my diet is much healthier. And my kids [who have not been diagnosed with celiac] eat the same way I do. If they are given a cookie with preservatives in it, they can tell right away, and they don’t like it.”

In addition to a new lifestyle, the condition has also given her a way to help people through her business, she says, by supplying foods for events and raising awareness of the role diet can play in various medical conditions.

“This really is my passion,” Ruggio says. “I always wanted to help kids, and now that this is the way I have to live and eat, it’s led me to a way to do that.”

The nonprofit Celiac Disease Foundation, [www.celiac.org], describes the condition as a lifelong autoimmune disorder. Gluten, found in wheat, damages the small intestine and can interfere with the absorption of essential nutrients.

“Don’t try to diagnose yourself, and don’t assume you have celiac,” Ruggio says. “You have to be tested.”

—Ann Manser, AS ’73