From Prosecutor to Gluten-Free Advocate and Entrepreneur: My Story
- Jules Shepard (gfJules Founder)
- 1 hour ago
- 7 min read
Most people know me as gfJules’ Founder: an entrepreneur, cookbook author, and the advocate who helped push a slow-moving FDA to define gluten-free labeling standards. But before I was trying to make gluten-free living easier for people and for myself, I was fighting in courtrooms for women who’d been harmed by the people closest to them.
I was a domestic violence prosecutor in a rural area, representing victims whose lives had been shattered behind closed doors. The work was emotionally consuming, but I loved helping women and children who had been deeply wronged and were struggling for safety and justice in systems that often failed them.
I never imagined I would someday find myself in a fight to protect a different sort of marginalized community – the celiac community – but then I’ve always enjoyed being on the side of those who are vulnerable, dismissed, or unprotected by a system.
The Carboholic Who Couldn’t Eat Carbs
As for my celiac story, I’d been sick for a decade in ways doctors couldn’t explain, so they ineffectually treated the symptoms and labeled me as suffering from things like “IBS,” migraines, and anemia, without ever putting them together to see the celiac pattern. I cycled through specialists at top universities searching for answers, but never found one until I moved to West Virginia. By then it was the late 90’s.
I remember my new doctor saying, “You have celiac disease.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
His answer changed my life forever.
“It means you can’t have wheat.” Then he started listing foods I could no longer eat: bread, cereal, pasta, bagels, pizza….
“Well, that’s pretty much my entire diet.”
I was a carb-adoring vegetarian and the diagnosis devastated me. I felt like my wings were clipped when the freedom to choose how to nourish myself – along with my enjoyment of food altogether – was taken away.
When I was diagnosed, living gluten free meant navigating a world that barely understood the disease, let alone the food. There were few (not very good) cookbooks, almost no specialty products, and no gluten-free bakeries or dedicated fryers. Support groups were rare if you could even find them. Reliable information wasn’t a Google search away. (‘To Google’ wasn’t a verb yet with the internet in its infancy!)
There was a total scarcity of gluten-free foods in restaurants and grocery stores, and what was there was either not labeled or probably couldn’t be trusted.
An Accidental Gluten-Free Entrepreneur
More baker than cook, I was at a loss how to fuel my body. I fell into a deep food depression and it was a dark place. I didn’t know what to eat, but I knew I had to solve the problem and take care of myself physically and mentally somehow.
Baking has always been part of my identity. Long before law school and courtrooms, I excelled in the kitchen.
After my diagnosis, baking suddenly became a herculean effort with minimal rewards. The single gluten-free flours available were inconsistent, gritty, and hard to use. Every recipe required its own custom blend of specialty flours that more often than not spoiled in my pantry before I could use them.
“It shouldn’t be this hard,” I remember thinking.
So, I experimented. For years.
I tested flour combinations in my kitchen ad infinitum, searching for a unicorn — an all-purpose flour blend that could work reliably across recipes. If it existed in the gluten world, why couldn’t it exist in the gluten-free world?
After seemingly endless trial and error, I created a formula that worked. And it didn’t just work, it worked great in all different kinds of recipes, allowing a baker to use just this blend to make nearly anything gluten-free. This first base blend became the recipe workhorse for my first cookbook, “Nearly Normal Cooking for Gluten Free Eating".
Much to my amazement, my cookbook became popular and people wrote telling me how much they loved it…but…
“…making the flour blend for recipes was a total pain.”
I felt their pain.
I’d make giant batches of the flour blend once a month in a crab pot and the process would coat my entire kitchen and me in fine white powder. It was everywhere. I eventually found a gluten-free co-manufacturer willing to make the blend for me and I was able to fill readers’ orders so they could bake delicious things and stop missing foods with gluten.
It was a crazy time for me. I was raising two little people, writing more books, and trying to manage the growth of what would eventually become gfJules – the company people know today with even better gluten-free flour blends (we’ve won #1 Gluten Free All Purpose Flour 9 times in the Gluten Free Awards!), 12 gluten-free mixes, and multiple cookbooks and e-books.
I’d taken time off from practicing law when I had my kids and never looked back. The flour business and writing had taken on lives of their own, taking over my life along the way.
I Never Stopped Being a Prosecutor; I Just Changed Courtrooms
In the early 2000’s ‘gluten-free’ labeling was the Wild West.
After my celiac diagnosis, I joined a community where vulnerable people were again being wronged — this time, however, by food companies, regulators, and even restaurants that treated ‘gluten-free’ like a lifestyle trend rather than a medical necessity. Whether through ignorance or negligence, or some combination of the two, the people in control of our food were making us sick.
I saw this injustice for celiac consumers as fixable. We needed to be able to trust foods labeled ‘gluten-free’ and the FDA was the one agency that could make this happen. However, the FDA was dragging its feet putting gluten-free labeling standards in place, despite a growing clamor from the celiac community and despite a Congressional mandate.
This couldn’t continue.
In some ways, I never stopped being a prosecutor. I just changed courtrooms. I was still fighting misinformation, indifference, and a system that underestimated the people it was failing.
Frustrated by the FDA’s glacial pace on gluten-free standards, I worked with other celiac advocates to pressure the FDA to act. We started a petition drive and garnered thousands of signatures, however, we needed more. We needed to do something big and bold, borderline impossible, to force the FDA to take action. The idea of ‘impossible’ didn’t faze me.
In 2011 I rallied a team of like-minded celiac advocates and we built the world’s tallest gluten-free cake — a towering behemoth of a cake made with thousands of pounds of gluten-free flour and 700 pounds of frosting. The thing was so massive we inserted rebar to ensure it wouldn’t keel over and I had to climb ladders to frost it.
It wasn’t just a publicity stunt.
It was a protest.
Our one-ton cake ignited a public conversation on the need for gluten-free labeling standards and drew national coverage from major media outlets like The Washington Post, TIME, and USA Today. Most importantly, though, we got the FDA’s attention and they attended our event, listening to us plead our case and promising to issue the regulations we demanded.
Three years later, in 2014, the agency implemented the national gluten-free labeling standards they promised us at our cake event. Are they perfect? No. But they establish a framework so everyone understands what it means to be “gluten-free” in the U.S., and manufacturers can be held accountable for the products they offer to celiac customers. This victory changed everything for our community.
Looking back, that towering gluten-free cake was never really about cake. It was about showing what can happen when a community refuses to stay silent about a problem that affects its members’ health, safety, and quality of life.
Whether we’re talking about celiac disease, food allergies, or any condition that makes safe eating more challenging, every step forward starts with people who have the courage to raise their voices and ask for better. When a community comes together around a common cause, it can move mountains. (Or at least build a mountain of a cake?)
“...If you can read you can bake...”
While I’m proud of the role I played in helping advance gluten-free labeling standards for people with celiac disease and gluten sensitivity, I’ve always believed the fight is bigger than gluten alone. For that reason every one of my products is Certified Gluten-Free as well as Certified Top-9-Free and held to the highest manufacturing standards to deliver on our ‘free from’ promise. My cookbooks have step-by-step directions and tips make the recipes easy to follow for success, regardless of dietary restrictions. I provide ingredient substitutions so families can make delicious gluten-free and allergy-friendly foods with more confidence, and can enjoy them together at the table.
Here’s a shortlist of some of the favorites I’ve written:
Visit my website to find my award-winning gfJules Gluten-Free and Top-9 -Free products, as well as my cooking videos, podcast, and over 500 free recipes! I’ll send you amazing recipes direct to your inbox when you subscribe at my website (check out this popular cake recipe!) Plus, find other books (print and ebook versions) at my website, too.
My hope is that through my advocacy, recipes, cookbooks, and gluten and allergen-friendly products, I help make the tables we gather around more inclusive, more welcoming, and definitely more delicious! Follow me on Instagram and Facebook (@gfjules).
About the Author: Jules Shepard is mom to two amazing kids, Founder and CEO of gfJules, author, speaker, recipe innovator, food scientist, and a relentless celiac advocate all rolled into one. She’s the reason her company’s gluten-free flours, baking mixes, and books have won numerous awards through the years. When she’s not deep into food chemistry, perfecting recipes, and writing, you can find Jules throwing pottery, holding a yoga pose, or digging in her flower garden.
Images: Courtesy of Jules Shepard of gfJules
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