There is a serious scientific study about luck that links it with connectivity.

People perceived as lucky tend to enjoy a higher than average number of social connections. The more people you meet, the more opportunities open out.

Susie Willis, mother of three and founder of the posh organic baby food maker Plum Baby, feels very lucky, she admits. She is also remarkably well connected.

Plum, by selling a range of recipes comprising some startlingly exotic ingredients to big supermarkets such as Waitrose, Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda, has broken into a market that has largely been a triopoly divided among Heinz, Cow & Gate and the organic firm Hipp.

In only two years it has grabbed a 5 per cent share of a wildly competitive market.

Ms Willis is an unlikely entrepreneur, having given up her London job on marriage to retreat to a rural idyll in the New Forest and bring up a family.

Born Susie Cronk, she was raised in Surrey and attended a girls' school where she admits she was more interested in the lacrosse field than in academic studies.

She went to secretarial college and then to London in the mid-1980s, and a career in PR, the media and marketing.

She sounds a typical Sloane Ranger in a succession of typical Sloane Ranger jobs, at a time when the stereotype was at its apogee.

She still looks the part with her glossy, swept-back hair and designer suit, donned in honour of a meeting with City investors later in the day.

She loved the media but found that she preferred being a PA to a succession of senior businessmen.

These included Sir Hugh Wontner, redoubtable boss of the old guard at the Savoy - “He made me cry at least once a day” - and, after a chance meeting at a charity event, Jeffrey Archer, whose now-infamous shepherd's pie and Krug parties she organised.

When she left, he gave her glowing references. “He said I was scrupulously honest, the most trustworthy companion one could have.”

A commendation for honesty from Lord Archer of Weston-super-Mare? A back-handed compliment, surely?

“He is an extraordinary man,” she says. “I learnt an awful lot through him. No two days were the same. I'm glad I'm not related to him and I'm glad I'm not married to him.”

Instead, she married Paddy Willis, who worked in the wine trade, and went to live “in seventh heaven” in Lymington just in time for the birth of Ben, now 15, and Honor, 13.

Needing something to do and a second income, and possessed of a sizeable kitchen, she started to teach cooking, an art she had learnt at that secretarial college.

More a finishing school, then? “We didn't learn getting out of sports cars and walking about with a book on our head,” she insists. “I can't be a true Sloane.”

From this emerged Purple Plum Cookery School.

“I made very little, but it was a sense of independence, and doing something for myself,” she says.

“Plum was the name I always wanted to give my daughter. You either like it or don't like it. Unfortunately, my husband didn't like it.”

By the time Francesca, now 5, came along, she had branched out into catering, organising complicated dinner parties for “friends of friends” and the odd local celebrity - “I shall just say Dire Straits. I shall say no more.”

Her cookery teaching gravitated towards young children. “With a young child again, I wanted to get close to children,” she says.

“Before I knew it I was concentrating on baby food.” Once Francesca arrived, “I was going down the baby aisles after eight years and was enormously unimpressed that nothing had changed.” It was still bland processed food in bland glass jars.

Young children, baby food, cookery - out of this collision came the idea for Plum Baby.

She says: “I don't do anything by half-measures. If I do something, I embrace it 100 per cent. I knew this was going to be big - I could see it on the shelf already.

"This wasn't going to be a cottage industry where I could make gorgeous little pots. I was going to challenge those glass jars.”

Ms Willis immersed herself in research. She looked up the relevent regulations and EU directives on baby food, what was permitted, how it could be marketed.

She researched the methods of her soon-too-be rivals, by subterfuge if necessary, ringing them up pretending to be a student working on a thesis.

She found an accountant, a commercial lawyer and an intellectual property attorney.

“I had some very grown-up conversations with those people” - with the accountant, in particular, who gave her a flat choice.

She could either get herself a van, trek out to organic festivals and maybe get somewhere in five or ten years. Or she could attempt the near-impossible, getting her stock into the big supermarkets.

First, there was cash-raising, more than £1 million from “friends and family”, a mortgage on the house, the odd grant.

A chance meeting at the school gate, and an inquiry about her recent absences, led to a fellow mum and her husband pledging £100,000.

She found a research laboratory in Gloucestershire specialising in food and nutrition. She found a manufacturer. Then her luck kicked in again, through one of the consultants she had met, who put her in touch with Sainsbury's.

“He happened to know the baby food buyer there at the time,” she says. “It's a very small world.”

The brand launched in 2006 with an exclusive deal to supply 200 stores. “Somebody who was with me at the time said, ‘Susie, that just doesn't happen',” she recalls.

Plum makes eight recipes for babies being weaned and four more, with more texture, for toddlers, what she calls “the chunky stage”.

All the recipes use quinoa, a high-protein grain substitute from the Andes. Ingredients might include beetroot, salmon, parsnip, globe artichoke and fennel - a long way from the bland contents of the average baby food jar.

There is a porridge range comprising “heritage grains”, as she calls them, such as amaranth, millet and, again, quinoa.

The product costs 40 per cent to 50 per cent more than those of her established rivals.

“This isn't just posh baby food for posh mums,” she insists, pointing out that it is sold by chains such as Asda that are not seen as exclusively for the middle classes. “People don't balk at that,” she says.

The aim is to expand the range, but not beyond the age of five. “I see Plum as so much more than food,” she says, admitting that she does not yet know exactly where the brand is going.

“I've been told by so many people, ‘Susie, this isn't going to happen, this isn't going to work. Are you sure you're prepared for that?'”

Source: Times Online