Name: Sabeena Ladha
Age: 32
Hometown: Born in Chicago and raised in Euless, Tex.
Currently Lives: In a 1920s, three-bedroom house in the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood of Los Angeles, with her husband, Kabir Jain, and a French bulldog.
Claim to Fame: Ms. Ladha is the founder of Deux, a vegan, gluten-free, ready-to-eat cookie dough that is a favorite of Paris Hilton, Kristin Cavallari, Addison Rae and other celebrities. Popular flavors include chocolate chip, birthday cake, brownie batter and peanut butter. “Deux makes you feel good when you eat it,” Ms. Ladha said. “It solves this problem of ‘healthy food doesn’t taste good.’” Deux is now sold at some Whole Foods stores, Erewhon Market and Foxtrot grocery stores.
Big Break: Ms. Ladha was featured on “Shark Tank” last November. “A lot of other raw cookie doughs are made with things like refined sugars, preservatives and animal byproducts,” she said on the show. “Our cookie dough is made with things like oats, almond butter, flaxseed and coconut sugar.” But it was more than her sales pitch that got attention. She wore a hot-pink short suit by Cinq à Sept that prompted misogynistic comments on Reddit, Twitter and elsewhere. (“Woman was not dressed appropriately. Wouldn’t have done a deal,” one person wrote.) Instead of keeping quiet, Ms. Ladha called out the negative comments in a TikTok video, with the caption: “silly me! should’ve known my place is in the kitchen not in the board room!” The video has been viewed more than 1.3 million times.
Latest Project: Last summer, Deux released a chocolate hazelnut spread called Drip that is made from five ingredients, all vegan and gluten-free: dry roasted hazelnuts, organic cane sugar, cocoa powder, sea salt and maca root powder. “Nutella is a beloved nostalgic snack,” Ms. Ladha said. “We did a full marketing campaign around Valentine’s Day because it’s a liquidy chocolate sauce and it’s a little sensual.”
Next Thing: The next cookie flavor, cinnamon roll, comes out in April. “It tastes like you’re eating a breakfast cookie,” Ms. Ladha said. The ingredients are oats, blanched almond butter, cinnamon, vegan white chocolate, flaxseed and vitamin B12.
In the Pink: Ms. Ladha isn’t the first “Shark Tank” contestant to face backlash for something other than her product. “I’ve talked to other female founders” — including Caroline Creidenberg, the founder of Wedfuly, a wedding livestreaming service — “who’ve been on the show and some of them had similar experiences,” Ms. Ladha said. “People kept saying her voice was annoying. That’s such a microaggression toward women.”