Four years ago, his Italian restaurant chain went bankrupt — now Jamie Oliver is back and is expanding. A new cookbook, additional restaurants in London and a first restaurant in Berlin are intended to prove that the British TV chef can still inspire a global audience even at the age of 48. A visit to the Naked Chef headquarters.
The headquarters of the Jamie Oliver Group is hidden in a studio in north London. No sign or logo reveals from the outside that the world’s most famous TV chef resides here and rules over a global food and gastronomy empire. Only in the courtyard of the brick building does the smell of fried food reach your nose — in a commercial kitchen, cooks are preparing pasta, chicken and grilled vegetables, lunch for the staff.
Jamie Oliver will hardly have time for lunch. Today is media day; he is welcoming food bloggers and journalists to his realm to present his new cookbook — and his ambitious expansion plans. Jamie Oliver, 48, is the ruler of a global brand that has barely lost its popularity since the ’90s.
In London he employs 140 people who fill his platforms with content, who design his magazines and books, produce his TV shows and online clips, launch pans and pots with the Jamie Oliver seal, negotiate rights, manage investments — in short: the brand Make Jamie Oliver even more powerful and profitable.
“Naked Chef” (the title of Oliver’s cult TV show) is followed by almost 20 million fans on Facebook and Instagram, plus around six million on X and YouTube; He will soon break the million mark on Tiktok. His 25 cookbooks have sold nearly 50 million copies and have been translated into 36 languages. Jamie Oliver is Britain’s most successful non-fiction author of all time — and his 70 restaurants were visited by 35 million people worldwide last year.
These are impressive figures, and Jamie Oliver is currently recovering from the “toughest time of his life”: four years ago his restaurant chain Jamie’s Italian went bankrupt, accumulating £85 million in debt; Thousands of jobs were lost and the entrepreneur feared for his life’s work. Now the Jamie Oliver empire is fighting back: it is making profits again and is expanding. In December, the TV chef wants to open a restaurant in Germany for the first time, in Berlin-Mitte.
Where does he get his ambition and energy from? And how has he managed to keep his brand relevant for more than 20 years?
Even at almost fifty, he radiates this restless and euphoric good-mood energy with which he spices up his cooking shows and has been delighting a growing audience since 1998. Especially because of the bankruptcy, Oliver apparently wants to prove that he can still do it: “It’s my second and maybe my last chance in the restaurant business,” says Oliver. And: “I come from the world of pubs, this is where my roots lie.”
Last year he opened 13 new restaurants worldwide. In Covent Garden, right in the heart of London’s highly competitive gastro market, his restaurant «Jamie Oliver Catherine St» offers classic British comfort food, including roast chicken, Scotch eggs, scampi and steak. “In no other industry is a pound earned so hard,” says Oliver.
In 2022, its restaurants division reported a pre-tax profit of £7.7m, with sales rising 8.1% to £29.7m. Jamie Oliver and his wife Jools paid themselves a record £7m dividend, although it was thanks to his lucrative publishing business. The Oliver clan’s fortune is estimated at £200 million.
Oliver’s new book «5 Ingredients Mediterranean» is aimed at the modern family cook, at parents who need to put a meal on the table quickly with little time and ingredients. Oliver had his team determine: Today, the majority only have a little more than 20 minutes to cook on average — a few years ago they spent just under an hour at the stove. If the trend continues like this, cooking at home will be threatened with extinction because it will be replaced by fast food, frozen food and take-aways, Oliver fears. He has therefore made it his mission to keep the fire of the communal meal burning: “The core of my business is: I want to ensure that people cook for themselves and therefore eat healthier.”
The publishing industry’s numbers sound less alarmist than Oliver’s fears. Even before the pandemic, the cookbook market was growing strongly. Sales increased due to the corona crisis, the lockdowns and the still widespread work from home. Cookbooks have long been seen as works of art and collector’s items that, thanks to their opulent presentation and smart storytelling, not only appeal to the reader’s palate but also their emotional world. However, only global brands like Jamie Oliver or national stars with a big TV presence like Tim Mälzer can earn high profits from their publications.
For Jamie Oliver , his cookbooks, which cover holidays like Christmas or themes of travel and wanderlust like the culinary cultures of Britain or Italy, have helped strengthen his already robust brand. “My success in Germany is mainly thanks to the books,” says Oliver. But that’s not all: the fact that his main job is a cooking TV star is evident from the furnishings in his office. There is a glowing mirror in the anteroom, where he has set up a professional mask and a make-up artist is always on hand. Most working days begin with powder and porridge, his favorite breakfast.One of Oliver’s greatest entrepreneurial achievements is undoubtedly that his brand has met the taste of a mainstream audience since the 1990s. His rise to fame still fuels his ambition today: when he was eight, he helped out for a few pennies in pocket money at the Cricketers, his parents’ pub in Clavering in the county of Essex, north of London. He was made fun of at school because of his dyslexia; To this day he still finds it difficult to read and write; he recorded the texts and recipes of his early books on a dictaphone and had them transcribed.He struggled at school, but he was quick in the kitchen and was soon chopping vegetables in his parents’ pub faster than the most experienced chefs. As a teenager, he worked at Italian Gennaro Contaldo’s trendy Neal Street restaurant in London, at the same time as his friend Tim Mälzer. Oliver later got a job at the River Café, which remains an institution in the London dining world today. When a BBC team filmed a documentary in the kitchen in 1997, the young sous chef’s TV qualities were discovered. This was followed by the BBC cult show “The Naked Chef”, which was produced from 1999 to 2001 and sparked a hype about Oliver and cooking shows in general.It was the era of Cool Britannia: Britart enchanted the art world, the Britpoppers from Oasis and Blur stormed the charts and David Beckham began his rise from football star to global fashion icon. The hype surrounding the British cultural nation’s exports also put the TV chef in the global spotlight.Oliver used his fame early on for social and societal issues, for example with his series “School Dinners”. His commitment to healthier school meals and the fight against obesity became a trademark and continues to be his mission today.His fight against junk food in children’s diets earned him hero status and invitations to Downing Street. He convinced then Prime Minister Tony Blair (and later politicians) to invest more in higher quality school meals. As a clever marketing strategist, Oliver of course also used the resistance of some parents to his campaign to fuel media interest in the story and his program: mothers from Yorkshire gave their children chips, burgers and fries through the school gate because they had eaten Oliver’s “bunny food”. the school canteen did not agree. The exchange between the activist and the infamous “Yorkshire Mums” continued to make headlines years later.
Oliver also used his reach to improve animal welfare and keeping conditions for laying hens. Overnight, he emphasizes, with virtually a single television program on the subject of eggs, he brought about a ban on cruel forms of cage farming and battery laying in Great Britain, before the rest of Europe followed suit.
During the collapse of Jamie’s Italian, Oliver bought the historic £6m mansion Spains Hall. That didn’t go down well with his critics, but Oliver defended the purchase: Here he has privacy with his wife Jools and their five children, aged between six and 21. And he also sees the purchase as the hard-earned reward of his rise: a child who came from far below, who was bullied at school and who can now live in a 600-year-old magnificent property as a multimillionaire — that is social mobility. The fact that Oliver’s son Buddy was filming his own YouTube cooking show at just twelve years old wasn’t well received by everyone. Oliver says: Buddy helps to get other children excited about cooking, which is “a great thing”.
In the center of Jamie Oliver’s headquarters you will find a board on which the goals of his activism are noted. The heading “Implemented Guidelines” includes measures that he was able to implement through his many years of lobbying, such as calorie labeling of menus and food in restaurants or nutritional training for medical students and nursing staff. A measure to reduce sugar and calories in many foods has not yet been achieved. Oliver has also been calling for a ban on fast food advertising aimed at children for a long time — but it has not yet been implemented.
The star sees himself as a cooking activist. There is no doubt that he wants to do good with his fame. But environmental and animal rights activists sometimes accuse him of hypocrisy — for example because he works with the energy giant Shell, in whose gas stations the Jamie Oliver Delis provide car and truck drivers with healthy snacks. His collaboration with supermarket giant Sainsbury’s was also criticized because some of the group’s products did not meet animal welfare standards. When Sainsbury’s made improvements, Oliver took credit for it; the partnership has now ended.
When I say goodbye, the entrepreneur accompanies me to the exit. As we pass the olive tree in the courtyard of his company headquarters, he talks about his summer vacation in Portugal. There he rented a villa with his family. Grilling, going out to eat, splashing around in the pool – he would like to have more time for that.
Employees still admire Jamie Oliver’s work ethic. He is almost always the first in the London office – and the last to leave. This is also a lesson he learned early on in his parents’ pub in Essex: success is always the result of hard work. He actually wanted to take more free time, he says, but opening new restaurants meant he was back to an 80-hour week; He actually wanted to reduce it to 50 hours. But he doesn’t want to complain about it — his typical Jamie Oliver smile flashes again, then he says: «I just really love what I do!»
