Daniella Monet lives and breathes the big picture far beyond the big screen. An actress-turned-entrepreneur and activist, she’s making the world a greener place using creations ranging from beauty products to food, all rooted in passion and the conviction to lead by example. With her firstborn baby in tow, she is living in pursuit of a better future for everyone.

It all started with film. Born in Southern California’s West Hills, Daniella broke into Hollywood at the age of seven and had parts in numerous television commercials before landing recurring roles in American Dreams, 8 Simple Rules, Listen Up, Zoey 101, Victorious, and Baby Daddy, among many other shows. In 2007, Daniella played Inga Veinshtein in the Nancy Drew movie, and she has since been in a handful of other films. She also hosted Paradise Run (shot in Hawaii) and made an appearance in her former co-star Ariana Grande’s “Thank U, Next” video.

Along her acting journey, Daniella’s career focus shifted to another inherent passion. “I’ve always felt like acting will be a baseline for me. It’s a part of who I am. It’s got me to where I am today. It’s supported my lifestyle. But ultimately, I’ve always wanted to do more,” she says. Daniella, who has been vegan for over 20 years now, has always wanted to invest in plant-based companies. As she has inadvertently become a wellness and beauty guru, she uses her tremendous platform to further the altruistic mission of three thriving cruelty-free businesses she has invested in: Outstanding Foods, Kinder Beauty, and the newly opened Sugar Taco restaurant. “It’s been really exciting to be a part of a lot of innovative companies,” she says.

This entrepreneurial segue started about five years ago with Outstanding Foods, which created the PigOut Pigless Bacon Chips. “Now we have the PigOut Pigless Pork Rinds,” Daniella says about the brand’s evolution. Though they originally launched with just the Pigless Bacon Chips, the popularity of keto diets and numerous requests for pork rinds led the company to create the PigOut Pigless Pork Rinds. “Pork rinds are very low in carbs, but they’re just so high in saturated fat, sodium, and they’re obviously awful for your cholesterol,” reasons Daniella. “When we reinvented the Pigless Pork Rinds, they really took off very quickly.” These are a healthy, vegan alternative that don’t sacrifice flavor and are now available in four options: Original, Hella Hot, Nacho Cheese, and Texas BBQ. The chips will probably come back in a new way at some point, and there are plenty of other products in the works for Outstanding Foods fans to look forward to.

How Daniella came to be involved in creating pigless products is a fun story. As a teenage actress, she wasn’t bound by the constraints of attending traditional school, but she always wanted to fill her time. “So, I got some odd jobs along the way. One of them was working at a restaurant called Madeleine Bistro. The restaurant was fairly expensive to eat at. But there weren’t many really nice vegan restaurants at the time. And so, when I would eat there, I would kind of break my bank,” she recalls with a laugh. “Granted, I was working at the time, but I did at one point say jokingly, ‘If you ever need someone to work here, I would work for free and just eat the food.’ They took me up on it and I was totally up for the experience.” Little did she know that it would one day lead her into the world of vegan food products.

“Chef Dave Anderson, who was the chef and one of the owners of the restaurant, is our head chef and co-founder of Outstanding Foods. Years and years later, maybe 10 years later, he called me up and asked me if I would be interested in going into business with him,” Daniella says. It made perfect sense for her to join his venture, as she wholeheartedly supports Chef Dave’s ideals, professing that, “He is so gifted—he helped create the Beyond Meat Burgers. He’s helped create so many amazing, really well-known vegan items that people consume on the daily now. Outstanding Foods is his baby, and I’m just so happy to be a part of the journey.”

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“Shortly after that, Kinder Beauty and Sugar Taco kind of came into my life simultaneously,” she goes on. Kinder Beauty Box is the brainchild of Daniella and her partners Evanna Lynch (of Harry Potter) and Andrew Bernstein. “We all kind of came together and created this idea, and it’s been a huge labor of love,” she says, which not only reflects their core values but also fills a niche market. The Kinder Beauty Box is different from other beauty subscriptions in that all included products are vegan. Daniella and Evanna, both being vegan and activists, struggled to find cruelty-free, non-toxic, 100% vegan products that they loved and could trust. They recognized that when you do find them, they tend to cost a fortune. “It was just a struggle, and so that was our real core business question: ‘How do we make all of these products streamlined, accessible, and easy for customers to really trust?’ That’s what we’ve done,” she says of the Kinder Beauty Box.

Their first box was launched in January 2019. “We started small and really just had access to Evanna’s and my following via social media,” she says. Having a great team behind them has also been key: “We are small, but we’re very strategic, and the people that we have now who work with us are incredibly good at what they do—they’re also very mission-driven, and I think that’s what helps us get through the challenging times businesses go through because we really do believe in it.” Over the past year, the subscription business has taken off a little more than when they’d started. “Some of the success, I think, ironically, has happened due to us not being able to just leisurely go out and get the things that we love,” reflects Daniella.

Since becoming a mother, Daniella has become even more conscientious about the products she uses. Coupled with her vegan lifestyle, she’s basically a self-taught wellness guru. Staying hydrated and eating beautiful, colorful, nutrient-rich foods are the foundation for a youthful glow, according to her. With the onset of the coronavirus, Daniella has been doing her own hair and makeup, as seen in the socially distanced photoshoot in these pages. In conjunction with her Kinder Beauty products, she also swears by a self-made concoction of aloe vera gel and a clean, trusted oil (such as coconut or olive) as her baseline. “I’ll mix that together and it makes a lotion or a creamy texture—I use that everywhere, specifically on my face. I’ll use it on my arms, legs, on everything,” she says, calling everything else beauty related “sprinkles and icing on the cake—that’s the really luxurious stuff that I wouldn’t know how to make.”

The Kinder Beauty Box curation process pulls products from numerous sources. “It could be a product that we are aware of, from small mom-and-pop businesses to large businesses you see in Sephora and Target,” she says. As their name suggests, “The real thing for us is it must be cruelty-free and vegan, hands down.” Then, there’s a list of targets in terms of ingredients and ethical standards. They will ask, “What does it have inside of it to determine whether it’s clean and non-toxic by our standards? And then, ultimately, we want to make sure that affiliated companies are also ethical and that they also care about a bigger picture.”

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The partnerships forged through this process are also of utmost importance to the Kinder Beauty partners. “We like cultivating really strong relationships with our partners—what’s cool is that they really believe in us, we believe in them, and it’s a really good blend of us all supporting one another,” Daniella explains. She and Evanna then try every single item that has the potential to make it into a collection. They’re always trying to think ahead of the curve. According to Daniella, “We try to balance out each box so that it feels like if you’re a subscriber 12 months out of the year, you find yourself needing certain products at the right time, and that you’re trying new things seasonally that you wouldn’t necessarily think of. I’m so in love with our company and our mission, and the fact that our mission is really our through line—that really helps us feel good about the work that we’re doing. Ultimately, Kinder Beauty is like my second baby right now.”

What we put in our bodies is just as important as what we put on them. Enter Sugar Taco, which offers planted-based Mexican food that is so beautiful and delicious that it’s raising the standards for vegan cuisine. Yelp reviews for the Melrose Avenue establishment continue to maintain over four-star ratings, which is even more impressive when considering that this is Daniella’s first venture as a restauranteur. Owing to her waitressing days, Daniella is very aware that restaurants can be a tough investment—especially one that opened up during a global pandemic. “It is a huge labor of love,” she admits. “But I think what separates us from so many other ones is that we really do practice what we preach.”

She’s referring to how much they do outside of just selling food: “We’ve partnered with companies like 8 Billion Trees and Food for Life Global, and we’re always looking to partner with new rescues and organizations that might be smaller, doing more grassroots stuff for animals or the planet or just whatever is current at the time.” With so many tragedies recently, Daniella ruminates, “we’re just happy to donate where we can.” She relishes how Sugar Taco is a place people can go to and enjoy amazing food while knowing that their choices impact more than just their stomachs. They even offer a dog menu, the proceeds from which benefit a different organization each month that helps companion pets.

Sugar Taco is proud to be female-owned. When Daniella’s partner, Jayde Nicole, reached out to her about the restaurant, she was extremely impressed by Jayde’s objective, now stated as their motto: “Saving The World One Taco At A Time.” Together, they set out to create something unlike anything else on the vegan restaurant scene. Sugar Taco has set the bar high for their competition. “The recipes are all authentic,” says a pleased Daniella. “I’ve had Mexican food before, obviously, but it is actually kind of uncommon to find a lot of vegan Mexican options.”

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“It’s important to us and we’ll do what we can because, again, it really comes down to that big picture and bringing awareness back to the people—we can do more with our hard-earned money,” Daniella says, prompting the question of, “Why can’t we learn to think of others and the planet and the animals and the environment? Having a bigger conversation around food is really important to us.” This practice-what-you-preach mentality is beautifully exemplified in the purposeful choices made in every aspect of the restaurant design—from the menu to the utensils and take-out containers—reiterating, yet again, how important leading by example is to Daniella.

This way of living also guides her personal life and drives her belief in our biggest picture: our children. Daniella and fiancé Andrew Gardner welcomed baby Gio into their family in September 2019. This new chapter in their lives inspired Daniella to open up a dialogue about parenting through podcasts.

Adulting Like a Mother, Father is the first project Daniella and Andrew have partnered on. “Newly in my pregnancy,” reminisces Daniella, “I just remember thinking, ‘I’ve got to do this and I’ve got to get Andrew on board.’” At the time, Andrew was working a traditional finance job. Daniella got a producer and pitched the show to PodcastOne—and they loved it. “This is so outside of [Andrew’s] wheelhouse,” Daniella says. “But I talked him into it. I said, ‘We’ll record it at night after you’re home from work—it’ll be great!’ Little did I know what it would be like to bring a child into the world.”

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Two weeks after the birth of their son, Andrew decided to resign from his job to be a stay-at-home father. “The fact that we had Adulting already in the works, and that he felt so strongly about being home and being a family and being there for Gio, really fit seamlessly into our lives and gave us this vehicle to talk about the ins and outs of being new parents and all the things that go along with being adults,” says Daniella, and she admits that it’s led to challenges but also many new experiences. “It’s been something we’ve almost used as therapy. We have two totally different perspectives on things, but we have the common denominator, which is our family, our life, and our household.”

The podcast sees them come together in conversation, facilitating not only understanding but also respect—for our journeys, perspectives, and big pictures. “Together, we are trying to figure out how to cultivate this life for ourselves amongst this pandemic!” Daniella exclaims. Her method, acting out of the purity of one’s heart, is one to be emulated during these uncertain times. As life leads us down unanticipated roads, being open-minded and fostering partnerships, from family and community to business, will only help us grow and adapt. Creative people and entrepreneurs alike can learn a lesson on how to make this world a better place from Daniella.

Features Contributor Elisabeth Ross
Photographer Ben Cope
Stylist Kaylee Jackson
Hair & Makeup Daniella Monet