Beating cancer made me tough enough to build my own business — now I’m a cookie dough mogul

For most people, a just-baked chocolate chip cookie can turn any frown upside down. For Loren Castle, the classic treat wound up being a lifesaver.

With little to lose following a brutal cancer battle, the native New Yorker — who wanted more than anything to live a normal, healthy, happy life — walked into Whole Foods with a plate of homemade cookies and a dream of owning her own, game-changing baking business.

Roughly a decade later — her “10-year overnight success,” Castle told The Post — Sweet Loren’s, an all-natural cookie dough company using plant-based, non-GMO, whole-grain ingredients free of gluten, dairy, eggs, tree nuts and peanuts, is the No. 1 brand in its category, sold in 25,000 supermarkets around the country.

“There’s a happiness and joy that fresh cookies and baked goods bring you that was missing,” the tough cookie, now 40 and cancer-free, told The Post. “After I got sick, I just couldn’t eat [them] the same way.”

“Food is how we get energy — If I’m feeding myself crappy food,” she remembered telling herself, “I’m not going to have the energy to fight this.”

Castle’s rise began with a serious fall in the form of an earth-shattering diagnosis back in 2006, after graduating college in Los Angeles and returning home to Manhattan.