It was a balmy evening last September. Jamie Trevor Oliver MBE, multimillionaire chef,
philanthropist and scourge of soft drink barons, was filming an episode of his Channel 4 series
Friday Night Feast
with A-list actor
Liv Tyler
. In the decidedly un-Hollywoodish setting of
Southend Pier in Essex, Oliver’s star guest began to show him how she cooks her signature dish
of prawn dumplings. And then his mobile rang.
It turned out to be an uncomfortable call and for once the chef found himself bereft of the
boyish bonhomie that has sustained him since he launched his television career as
The Naked Chef in 1999. Oliver ordered his crew to stop filming.
The message from the person at the other end of the line was brutal and to the point. Oliver’s
restaurant chain, Jamie’s Italian, which his company had aggressively expanded from a single
outlet in Oxford in 2008 to 43 restaurants by the end of 2016, was in serious trouble and
teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.
“We had simply run out of cash,” he recalls, as we sit on a vintage sofa at Oliver headquarters in
north London nine months later. “And we hadn’t expected it. That is just not normal, in any
business. You have quarterly meetings. You do board meetings. People supposed to manage that
stuff should manage that stuff.” A surprisingly sharp tone in his voice suggests that someone let
him down and he was none too pleased.
Oliver was left with no choice but to instruct his bankers to inject £7.5m from his own savings
into the restaurants. A further £5.2m of his own money would follow over the next few months.
/
Last year, Oliver was said to be worth £150m. Even so, £12.7m is not the kind of money that
slips down the back of a sofa, vintage or otherwise.
“I had two hours to put money in and save it or the whole thing would go to shit that day or the
next day,” he continues. “It was as bad as that and as dramatic as that.”
For Oliver, now 43, the past year has been exceptionally painful. He has been forced to close 12
restaurants and make hundreds of people redundant: his company has been in turmoil and he
has endured savage press criticism, not least over the controversial decision to stand by his
brother-in-law Paul Hunt, who he appointed as chief executive of the Jamie Oliver Group in
2014. Oliver doesn’t do many in-depth interviews, especially when the subject matter might be
perceived as “bad news” — yet he is disarmingly honest in our conversation about his group’s
failings. This is the first time he has talked at length about the problems in the business. He has
estimated in the past that he “f**ked up” 40 per cent of his business ventures over the course of
his career, but what went so catastrophically wrong with the restaurants? And what does it
mean for Oliver’s business in the future?
“I honestly don’t know [what happened],” he admits. “We’re still trying to work it out, but I
think that the senior management we had in place were trying to manage what they would call
the perfect storm — rents, rates, the high street declining, food costs, Brexit, increase in the
minimum wage. There was a lot going on.
Oliver’s empire has been
more than 20 years in the making. After leaving school with just
two GCSEs, he started work as a pot washer in his parents’ pub in north-west Essex. He then
went to work for the Italian chef
Antonio Carluccio
before moving to
The River Café
in
Hammersmith where, in 1997, he was discovered by a visiting TV crew. Within two years his
first TV series,
The Naked Chef
, which featured Oliver buzzing around on a scooter and cooking
up a storm, had turned him into a star. His ordinariness, contagious enthusiasm and distinctive
Essex patois (“Bish bosh!” “Lovely Jubbly!” “Pukka!”) soon marked him out. And the money
came flooding in.
Today Oliver remains Britain’s most successful media chef of all time. With sales of more than
40 million books, he is the UK’s best-selling non-fiction author. Yet as his celebrity has
increased, so has the backlash — his campaigning on obesity has been accused of being “anti-
poor” and of “fat shaming”; while recently he was charged with “cultural appropriation” for
marketing a new line of “jerk rice”. As his business and brand endure one of their most difficult
moments, Oliver somehow manages to pull off this increasingly complex juggling act.
On many mornings he travels from his £9m home in Highgate, north London, to his HQ in
Holloway by scooter, the original blue one that he used in his first
Naked Chef
series. He often
arrives in the office at about 5.30am and doesn’t leave until after 9pm. More than 100 people work here, testing recipes, putting together programmes for TV and the internet, publishing
recipes and
campaigning on food-policy issues
.
As soon as you enter, you find yourself in an industrial-scale kitchen that Oliver designed
himself and is used for testing recipes and cooking staff meals; all free for staff but a taxable
benefit. Massages are also available to employees, at a subsidised rate of £10 for half an hour. At
every level, the operation bears the Oliver imprimatur: an antique copper carving station from
his father’s pub sits in one corner. On one wall, a massive mural bearing the phrase “Big Love”
looms over the proceedings. Oliver signs off all his letters (including those to the prime minister
about his campaigns) with that phrase.
Pointing to a picture on another wall of himself with Hollywood stars Brad Pitt and Jennifer
Aniston, Oliver tells me the story of how, in 2003, Aniston had contacted him to ask if he would
be willing to cook for Pitt’s 40th birthday dinner. “I don’t normally do paid cookery gigs, but she
was keen on Fifteen [the restaurant Oliver set up in 2002 to give disadvantaged young people a
start in catering] and offered the foundation a big donation. So I got on the plane with two
apprentices from the restaurant. They’d never been on a plane before, let alone upper class. As
soon as they got on the plane, they got the beds down and put on the pyjamas. They hadn’t
cooked for Hollywood stars either but they did a great job.”
This account is revealing: for all his success, Oliver is still amused, perhaps even surprised by
the reach of his global fame. “I grew up in a pub, and my friends at school were gypsies and
cockneys,” he reminds me.
When Oliver started Jamie’s
Italian in 2008, it, too, had a distinctive feel. He and his chefs
made a point of sourcing high-welfare ingredients — a long-standing hallmark of Oliver’s
approach to recipes and cookery — and organic basics such as milk, butter and olive oil. He also
introduced new on-trend ingredients, such as burrata and ’nduja sausage, that he discovered on
his travels in Italy.
Even hard-to-please restaurant critics were impressed. Giles Coren, reviewing Oliver’s Oxford
restaurant in The Times, wrote: “This place is streets ahead of any Italian chain I can think of
anywhere in the world.”
Oliver looks back proudly on the effect that his chain had upon the sector when he started. “We
disrupted massively. We changed the whole mid-market landscape. Our story for the first six
years was incredible. The culture that we built was phenomenal. We had it, and now it’s been
taken away.”
The money that Oliver transferred from his own
pocket to save the chain was topped up by a total of
£37m of loans from HSBC and subsidies from other
companies within the Jamie Oliver Group — among
them Jamie Oliver Holdings, responsible for his
publishing and media output. The debts declared by
the restaurant group last year amounted to £71.5m
in total. To stem the flow of cash out of the group,
Oliver and the board opted to apply for a CVA
(company voluntary arrangement), which involved
closing restaurants and losing a total of 600 jobs. Oliver maintains that he had no choice but to
restructure in order to preserve the 1,600 jobs that remain.
In February, he was also forced to take out a controversial “pre-pack” arrangement that enabled
him to cling on to one of his two Barbecoa steak restaurants. The City branch was allowed to
remain open under a new company, One New Change, which meant that it would not be liable
for the restaurant’s outstanding debts. The pre-pack arrangement meant that many small
suppliers were initially left out of pocket, prompting further anti-Oliver publicity. “Outrageous,”
tweeted the food writer and broadcaster Jay Rayner. The group now insists that anyone who
was left out of pocket has since been repaid.
Oliver’s is not the only
mid-market restaurant group in trouble. In July, the
Gaucho group
of
steak restaurants went into administration, resulting in the loss of 540 jobs. Others
facing the
squeeze
include hamburger chain Byron, Italian chain Strada and the Casual Dining Group,
which owns a series of chains including La Tasca and Café Rouge. Like Oliver, Will Wright of
KPMG’s restructuring team believes that many of these groups are facing “a perfect storm”.
Wright has just been drafted in to perform a drastic slimming-down exercise on behalf of
Carluccio’s, the casual Italian chain founded in 1999 by Oliver’s former mentor. In order for the
group to stay afloat, KPMG has earmarked 30 Carluccio’s restaurants for closure.
Wright says the mid-market sector is likely to continue having problems, at least in the
immediate future. A decade ago, there were far fewer chains to compete with and no home-
delivery apps. “The market is simply too crowded. There is too much competition and business
rates, rents and other costs, especially labour in the shape of the new national living wage, have
all increased at the same time. The pound has been devalued, making imports more expensive.
Expansion has happened too quickly and, in the haste to expand, a lot of the sites that have been
chosen are, shall we say, sub-optimal.”
Alix Partners, the management consultants administering the Oliver group’s CVA, was less
circumspect. In the document itself, it said the company had been “investing in newer locations
which are simply unsuitable”.
At the time, Oliver’s long-standing business partner Simon Blagden was CEO of the restaurant
group, and Paul Hunt was head of the whole company. Blagden stepped down in October 2017.
His replacement was Jon Knight, who used to run Oliver’s international operation and is a
former Marks and Spencer executive. He agrees that “we were opening too many restaurants,
too quickly, in the wrong places. We were opening in places that weren’t university towns and
didn’t have enough of a tourism element.” Knight has promised Oliver that within four years he
will bring the chain “back to value” — that is, in profit and clear of debt. Oliver, he says, will get
his own money back, “or at least most of it”.
Knight also points to a disconnect between the restaurants and the rest of Oliver’s businesses.
“The customer would go and buy Jamie’s latest book, would sit at home and watch Jamie on
Channel 4, but then he or she would go out to eat at Prezzo. That was our problem. We couldn’t
see why — they loved the books, the TV programmes, [so] why aren’t they coming into the
restaurants?
His
restaurants.” Ed Loftus, Oliver’s food and beverage chief, has drawn up new
menus for the chain; some of the higher-priced items — not helped by the spiralling food costs
of those trendy ingredients — have been reduced. “We had become complacent,” says Loftus.
“Our entry-level steak is now £15.50 when it was £17.”
Sarah Humphreys, an analyst at Deloitte, says celebrity restaurant chains sometimes face more
specific difficulties on top of the problems facing the entire sector. “If the personality has a great
brand, then the restaurant has an instant brand to attract customers. But if it goes wrong, then
the effect can be more publicised and be front of mind for consumers, making recovery a harder
proposition.”
In Oliver’s case
, the most serious questions have been raised about the management of the
group. In media articles published at around the time of the CVA in March, a number of critics
— all anonymous — suggested that many of the problems were down to poor business decisions
made by Paul Hunt, the group’s CEO. The critics also claimed there was a toxic atmosphere at
Oliver’s HQ, with a worrying exodus of key executives, including Blagden, who founded the
restaurants with Oliver, and finance director Tara O’Neill.
When the attacks on Hunt started, Oliver was notably quick off the blocks to defend him on
social media. “I’ve known Paul for years,” he tweeted, “both as a loyal brother-in-law and loving
father as well as a strong and capable CEO who I charged with reshaping the business.” The last
phrase seemed uncharacteristically euphemistic for the straightforward Oliver. When Hunt
arrived in 2014, at head office alone dozens of employees and executives lost their jobs. Some
were made redundant, others went of their own accord. As part of their severance packages,
many were expected to sign non-disclosure agreements preventing them from discussing Oliver
or members of his family in public. That might explain the unwillingness of many of Hunt’s
critics to go on the record.
Hunt, who is married to Oliver’s sister Anna-Marie, is a controversial figure. He had a long
career in the City and has the smart dress and manner of a smooth-talking trader. He rarely
gives interviews but consented to talk to the FT at the Holloway HQ, where he has the only
private office in the otherwise open-plan building. Even Oliver, the group chairman, has to “hot
desk”.
Hunt, 55, is unrepentant about the restructuring that took place after his arrival. “I wanted to
change the model, Jamie wanted to change the model. We had somewhere in the region of I
think it was 38 different businesses that we were involved in. Everything from talent agencies to
graphic design studios, to restaurants. We needed to make the business about Jamie again.”
The process, Hunt says, was painful for all. “It was enormously stressful. We were all working
till two, three in the morning, sleeping on the office floor whenever necessary. We got some very
good advisers on board, and we had to make some extraordinarily tough decisions. They were
desperate times.”
Both Hunt and Oliver blame “bad leavers” for the allegations that surfaced in the press about
Hunt’s “bullying” management style. “Those allegations were vile, vindictive, vicious and
baseless,” says Hunt. “When people get made redundant from jobs they really worked hard in,
there’s a lot of stress and a lot of anger and a lot of negativity. All I can honestly say is that we’ve
always paid more than the standard rate of redundancy.”
It was perhaps inevitable that Hunt’s energetic restructuring did not endear him to everyone at
the company, especially those directly affected by it; but his background as a businessman, and
thus his suitability as CEO of a big company, also came under scrutiny. In the 1990s, Hunt was a
lead trader at the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (Liffe),
working for the London branch of the controversial US company Refco, which was eventually to
fail spectacularly amid a welter of criminal charges.
In 1999, as Oliver was making his breakthrough as
The Naked Chef
, Hunt, along with three
other Refco brokers, was found guilty by Liffe’s arbitration panel of “front-running” — a form of
insider trading that involves traders buying stock at advantageous prices for themselves in
advance of a big deal. He was fined £60,000 and barred from Liffe for a year.
Phillip R Bennett, Refco’s US chief, received a 16-year federal sentence for fraud in 2008 after
he pleaded guilty to hiding $400m worth of bad debt: the case became a huge financial scandal
in the US, and prompted much tighter regulatory controls on financial services companies. Was
Refco, as Oliver might put it, “well dodgy”?
“I don’t know if it was dodgy,” Hunt replies. “It certainly wasn’t in London. It had a reputation
of being aggressive and taking the best talent from other businesses, buying other businesses. It
built itself very fast.” Regarding his own ban, Hunt says he was treated unfairly and found guilty
only on a technicality. “We broke an exchange rule. We didn’t think we were breaking that rule.
Our advisers told us we weren’t.”
Oliver is clearly not
bothered by his brother-in-law’s record. He is adamant that asking Hunt
to take over as chief executive was the correct decision. “I think I had to bring Paul in,” he says.
“I needed honesty. I needed clarity, and I needed trust to sort out a myriad of things, including
over-leveraging and over-employment. Don’t forget that my day job’s doing ‘jazz hands’ and
making content for television and books. I can’t do everything.”
But isn’t bringing family in to run a big business fraught with danger?
Gordon Ramsay
, a rival
celebrity chef, became embroiled in a lengthy dispute with his father-in-law over his running of
Ramsay’s restaurant group, which ended with his father-in-law going to prison. For the first and
only time, Oliver seems prickly and uncomfortable, even a bit defensive.
“Do you know why I chose him? Because he’s many things. But he’s honest, and he’s fair. I
absolutely trust him. His job was to come in and clean up. He has done the hardest and most
fabulous job. I’m not saying that because he’s my brother-in-law. I’m saying it because it’s a
fact.”
So how long has he got? “Look, Paul will step down at the right time. But there are times when
you need family and you need the thorough trust that family brings. In the kind of game that
we’re in — whether it’s restaurants, TV, media — there is always the risk of leakage. When
there’s dough and cash and stuff getting nicked, if it’s not customers stealing things in the toilets
— and napkins — it’s staff and ingredients and bottles of wine. There’s so much leakage
everywhere that it becomes normal and acceptable. When you’re genuinely trying to run some
decent businesses with some good values, sometimes you’ve got to bring the family in.”
Throughout our conversation
, Oliver is honest, charming and very likeable: it’s easy to see
how and why he became such a compelling TV personality. He acknowledges that many of the
restaurant chain’s problems were down to over-expansion but also suggests that some of his
business failures were the result of his trying to get in first. “There is often a disadvantage to
getting in first. In the future, I might spend a bit more time getting in second and getting it
right.”
Though his decision to appoint Hunt as CEO caused unimaginable repercussions, Oliver is
clearly well liked at the business. But, as he strolls around the office, it’s clear that doing “jazz
hands” every day takes its toll. While full of energy, he has a tendency to deviate from questions,
not it appears from any desire to be obstructive but from what seems to be overwhelming
pressure: the business problems, his campaigning and incessant plans for further expansion.
His life is further complicated by the fact he and his wife Jools have five children. Oliver insists
he still manages the school run as much as he can.
As a result of Hunt’s restructuring, Oliver’s
slimmed-down business now has four key pillars —
media and publishing (in 2017, the media side of his
business had revenues of £30m, with a pre-tax
profit of £5.4m); licensing and endorsements
(which in 2017 delivered even more profit, £7.3m,
on revenues of £10m); restaurants; and
philanthropy, the campaigning work that Oliver
regards as so important.
With his first project, Fifteen, he wanted to train
“disengaged” young people so they could get decent jobs and learn a trade. At the time, he was
in the first flush of success and money, more than he had ever imagined, was pouring in. Still, he
says the budget for setting up Fifteen amounted to more than he had in the bank. The project
would come close to exhausting his reserves but he still went ahead. Fortunately, a publishing
royalty cheque from Penguin landed within the next few days.
This work continues to demand not only time but a lot of resources. Although the Fifteen
restaurant remains open, the apprentice project has been scaled down. Fifteen Cornwall in
Newquay still recruits disadvantaged young people but the London operation was simply
costing the group too much money — close to £1m a year — and a less ambitious apprentice
scheme has been set up around the restaurant chain.
His current biggest project is a drive to combat obesity. He worked closely with the government
and backbench MPs in drafting the second phase of the childhood obesity strategy, published
recently. Along the way, he has been pilloried in the tabloid press for being a “hypocrite” for
selling burgers and calorie-laden muffins in his own restaurants. One of his media company’s
key clients, Channel 4, criticised him for calling for a ban on junk food advertising before 9pm.
.
He has even managed to upset some nutritionists over his use of the term obesity. “What should
I call it?” he says. “I didn’t invent the word.”
He sounds understandably exasperated, yet he has no intention of giving up. He is pleased with
the strategy’s proposals — wider calorie labelling, a ban on sweets at checkouts and restrictions
on the sale of energy drinks to under-16s. The so-called sugar tax was also a key plank of his
thinking. He regards the campaign as a qualified success.
The restaurants are a different matter. The group’s next results are due in September and no
one at the company is expecting an immediate return to profit. I ask Oliver why he continues to
bother: are they worth the grief, when he could happily stick to his television, publishing and
licensing projects?
“It’s what I grew up in. I really care about it,” he says. “And it’s a cocktail you have to get right,
and when you get it right, you can give the public such great value for money, and what I’ve tried
to prove is that you can do decent ingredients, high-welfare ingredients, at mid-market prices.
With Jamie’s Italian, we kind of got halfway there and then it all ran away. But now I am a bit
more confident. We’re beginning to see a little bit of light out of a very dark year.”
