Diana Mourato Benedek can still rhyme off her McGill I.D. number and remembers the room number where she took microbiology and immunology.
She went on to earn three degrees at McGill – including a PhD in engineering – and international recognition for her leadership in water treatment technologies.
Mourato Benedek now juggles her renewable energy work with a completely different venture – a bakery café in Encinitas, California, that serves up gluten-, corn- and soy-free fare. She believes the eatery is the only one of its kind in the world.
She founded the 2GOOD2B Bakery and Café, north of San Diego, in 2011 after struggling with health problems that she attributes to food allergies.
On the company’s website, Mourato Benedek, who now feels good, recounts that struggle and the search for answers that ultimately led her to eliminate gluten, soy and corn from her diet. The website states that “it appears that many people who are sensitive to gluten are also sensitive to corn.”
The response to the bakery café has been amazing, says Mourato Benedek, BSc’81, MSc’83, PhD’90, with revenues at the Encinitas location still growing 15 per cent a year.
“Fifty per cent of our clients are not even gluten-free. They just like the fact that our food is healthy, and no preservatives [or] chemicals. No corn syrup.”
It was a concern initially, she acknowledges, that the business might be limiting its potential clientele by being gluten, corn, soy and grain free except for brown rice.
“And that’s why the name of my business is 2GOOD2B and not ‘2GOOD2B Gluten-free’. I did not want to turn around anyone. And the reality is that we don’t.”
You would never know their cupcakes are gluten-free, she says.
Among the many accolades they’ve received, Mourato Benedek is most proud that 2GOOD2B was named a finalist for best dessert and best bakery in a San Diego newspaper’s readers’ poll – “which for a gluten-free place is pretty good,” she adds.
Mourato Benedek is also chief operating officer at Anaergia Inc., a renewable energy company that she and husband Andrew Benedek, BEng’66, DSc’05, set up. (He’s chairman and CEO.)
A pioneer in the field of water and wastewater treatment, Andrew Benedek launched ZENON Environmental Inc. in 1980, a global leader in membrane technology for water and wastewater treatment, which General Electric bought in 2006.
The bakery café is her forum for “reaching, teaching and helping people with food allergies”, Mourato Benedek says on its website. She’s involved in day-to-day operations in terms of strategy, marketing and administration, but not the cooking.
“We’re very much into giving back,” she says of she and her husband, “so that was my way of giving back – ‘Thank you, God, for making me healthy again and let me try to make other people healthy now.’”
Born in Brazil, Mourato Benedek moved to Montreal at 11. McGill had always appealed to her so she applied even though she had minimal English.
“I was in microbiology immunology, which is pretty much the pre-meds, so we were classes of 1,000 people. We were staying at Leacock 132 because no class was big enough to take us all.”
Most students were just trying to follow the class. “I was trying to understand the English,” she laughs. “It was absolutely crazy … I would never recommend that to anyone.”
In her last semester, she took a graduate course in water pollution. The professor, Gilles LaRoche, “really believed in me” and urged her to keep studying after her undergrad degree.
He helped secure work for her in a sanitary engineering lab at McGill and later pushed her to do her PhD as well, says Mourato Benedek who dedicated her master’s thesis to him.
“I was in charge of a lab that had been abandoned. We had to restart everything and I remember every time I wanted to use a piece of equipment that [was] there I had to repair it.
”Years later, in 2010, the couple’s generous $700,000 gift to McGill created the state-of-the-art Benedek Integrated Laboratories in Environmental Engineering in the Macdonald Engineering Building.
“That’s the connection…that was the lab I restarted,” she says.
A second 2GOOD2B location opened this spring in San Diego and the company is looking to franchise.
Says Mourato Benedek: “My objective is to get 2GOOD2B across the country and into Canada.”
