Toast - Jamie's Italian

Sliced Bread

BBC

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 634 Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

What went wrong at Jamie Oliver's UK restaurant chain, Jamie's Italian?

While Sliced Bread takes a break we serve up? Toast. A study of the spectacular failures of brands which had promised so much to consumers.

In each episode, the presenter and BBC business journalist, Sean Farrington, examines one big idea. What did it promise? Why did it fail? What can we learn from it today?

In this episode, which was first broadcast in February 2024, Sean and the serial entrepreneur, Sam White, examine the fortunes of Jamie Oliver's Italian restaurant chain. It was a big hit when it launched so why couldn't it maintain that success?

Expert commentators - and Jamie Oliver himself - reflect on what made his restaurants so special and what led to their demise.

Tracey MacLeod, formerly of The Independent, was one of the first restaurant critics through the door; Emma Lake, Assistant Editor at The Caterer magazine wrote extensively about Jamie's Italian; Peter Harden, the co-founder of Harden's Restaurant Guide, has trawled through reviews of Jamie's Italian to see what changed from the customers' perspective.

Jamie Oliver's perspective comes through an interview he did with Kirsty Young for the Radio 4 series 'Young Again'.

If you have an idea for a topic with a toast moment then you can email the programme at [email protected]

Sliced Bread returns for a new batch of investigations in February. In the new series, Greg Foot will investigate more of the latest so-called wonder products to find out whether they really are the best thing since sliced bread. In the meantime, Toast is available in the Sliced Bread feed on BBC Sounds.

Toast is produced by Jon Douglas and Viant Siddique and is a BBC Audio North production for Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, podcast fan.
0:03.0	Consider this your invite to the UK's biggest podcasting party.
0:06.7	We're heading to Sheffield from the 4th to the 6th of July
0:09.0	for the BBC Sounds Fringe at the Crossed Wires Festival.
0:12.8	We'll be joined by some of the biggest names in podcasting,
0:15.3	including Sarah Cox, Charlie Hedges, Russell Kane,
0:18.4	and some bloke called Greg James doing his radio four show called Rewinder.
0:23.2	You can watch live shows of your favourite podcasts and the best part is free.
0:28.1	To book your free tickets, go to crossedwires.org slash fringe.
0:34.4	BBC Sounds, music, Radio Podcasts.
0:40.7	Hello and welcome to the BBC Radio 4 series Toast, where we take a long, hard look at some grand business ideas that promised a lot to customers, maybe delivered at one point, but ended up in the end, toast.
0:54.6	I'm Sean Farrington. Sam White is with me, as ever,
0:58.0	texting away right up until we start recording, making deals all the time, Sam.
1:02.7	You're grassing me up now.
1:05.1	Serial entrepreneur, it's probably just sorting out what's for dinner tonight,
1:08.2	but serial entrepreneur, self-made millionaire,
1:10.6	should come here to come up with some conclusions
1:12.4	about why today's wonder business flopped.
1:16.3	We always keep her in the dark a little bit about the topic we'll be discussing.
1:19.7	So like you, she's going to hear all this stuff for the very first time.
1:23.9	You're set, Sam?
1:24.8	I am absolutely ready and raring to go. Let's get down to business.
	...

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