Two top executives at Jamie Oliver’s restaurant business have left following a slide in profits.
Simon Blagden – who led the division for almost a decade – stepped down this week just days after the results were published, The Mail on Sunday has learnt. Finance director Tara O’Neill has also left.
Oliver’s restaurant chains racked up a loss of £9.9 million last year, having made a profit of £2.4 million a year earlier.
The heat is on: Jamie Oliver promoting a tie-up with Land Rover last week
Sources said Blagden had not stepped down because of the losses, but as part of a restructuring that will see the restaurants brought under the same management as Jamie Oliver Holdings, which looks after the Naked Chef’s TV and book publishing arm.
That division is run by Oliver’s brother-in-law, Paul Hunt, who has turned it around since 2014. Hunt has taken the kitchen knife to unprofitable ventures that don’t fit with the Jamie Oliver ‘philosophy’.
Six Jamie’s Italian restaurants were shut down last year, in Aberdeen, Exeter, Cheltenham, Tunbridge Wells and two in London. The Essex-born chef blamed Brexit for the closures saying the ‘pressures and unknowns’ since the referendum added to a ‘tough market’.
The 48 remaining UK restaurants are being brought under Hunt’s control, expanding his power base.
Oliver has described Hunt, 54, as a ‘man of great integrity’ despite the fact that Hunt, who is married to Oliver’s sister Anna-Marie, was fined £60,000 and banned for a year from the City back in 1999 while working for a US futures broker.
Oliver’s family has become as much a part of his celebrity image as his 30 Minute Meals. He and his wife Jools have amassed an estimated £180 million fortune since he shot on to our television screens in the late 1990s. And the couple’s five children joined them last week to promote his latest commercial tie-up with Jaguar Land Rover.
Six Jamie’s Italian restaurants were shut down last year, in Aberdeen, Exeter, Cheltenham, Tunbridge Wells and two in London. The Essex-born chef blamed Brexit for the closures
Meanwhile, Hunt has axed several of Oliver’s projects when new ideas failed to perform to expectations, including overseeing the closure of the six Jamie’s Italian outlets.
Many restaurants have found it harder to attract diners, as consumers are squeezed by stagnant wage growth and rising inflation, largely due to the drop in the value of sterling following the EU referendum.
The last of Jamie’s Union Jacks restaurants was shut down earlier this year. The chef opened four of the outlets in 2011 to bring back British classics such as bangers and mash, and fish and chips. Two in London and one in Winchester were closed three years later. That left the flagship Covent Garden branch as the only one standing.
Other ventures have failed too. Oliver pulled the plug on his Jme artisan biscuits, sauces and jams in 2013 amid poor sales and criticism from suppliers. Soon after, he closed two Recipease cookery schools-cum-cafés in Clapham and Brighton to focus on the flagship Notting Hill branch, which met a similar fate on Christmas Eve a year later.
However, the licensing business – which holds the rights to all products and merchandise sold under Oliver’s name – enjoyed another solid year in 2016 with profits rising by 5 per cent to £7.3 million.
The media division, which spans everything from cookbooks to TV shows to mobile apps, also saw profits jump – to £5.3 million last year. The year before Hunt took the reins, Jamie Oliver Holdings was £9.8 million in the red. After dividends of £10 million were paid by those two arms last year, Oliver will be hoping Hunt can turn around the fortunes of the restaurants too.
A spokesman for the company said O’Neill had left to return to Ireland, but would not comment on Blagden’s departure. Jonathan Knight has been brought in to oversee the restaurants and will report directly to Hunt.