What's Cooking? · 2026-06-17 · 49 min
Ed Loftus on bringing Jamie's Italian back to the UK, scaling Jamie Oliver Group to 80+ sites in 24 countries, and the discipline behind a real second act. Very few people in UK hospitality ever get to attempt a real second act. Jamie Oliver Group has just done it: Jamie's Italian back in Leicester Square in March 2026, seven years after the 2019 administration that closed the UK estate. The man who's been at the company through all of it (nearly 15 years, employee number one of the post-2019 strategy) is Ed Loftus, Global Director of Jamie Oliver Restaurants. In this episode he walks Conor through what it actually took to get here: building globally first (80+ sites, 24 countries, 7 brand formats), the franchise-first pivot, the partnership architecture behind the UK return (Brava Hospitality Group with Cain International), and a 30% smaller menu doubling down on fresh pasta made on premises every day. Plus 16 global partners, a head office that's banned PDFs, why "my Jamie is not your Jamie" matters when scaling a celebrity-chef brand, the John Lewis Cookery School partnership, and Ed's frank case that "people" is the operational metric most operators ignore.
Jamie Oliver Group bite-size: A second act67 / 100
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