Toast - Little Chef

Sliced Bread

BBC

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 634 Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2024

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Why did the restaurant chain, Little Chef, disappear from our roadsides?

Sean Farrington discovers what happened to the brand which brought us Jubilee Pancakes, Olympic Breakfasts and free lollies for the kids.

At its peak, Little Chef had over 400 restaurants on most of our major highways and a turnover well in excess of ?100m.

So, how did such a successful business ultimately end up toast?

Sean speaks to Fiona Alper who was married to the Little Chef co-founder, Sam Alper; the entrepreneur, Lawrence Wosskow, who once owned Little Chef and Becky Parr-Phillips who started as a waitress but rose through the ranks to become Little Chef's head of operations.

Alongside them all to analyse Little Chef's fortunes is the self-made millionaire and serial entrepreneur, Sam White.

This episode was first broadcast in April 2024

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

You can email the programme at [email protected]

Feel free to suggest topics which could be covered in future episodes.

Sliced Bread returns for a new batch of investigations in May. 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.

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.
0:40.5	Hello and welcome to a new series of Toast from BBC Radio 4, where we look at great business ideas that often became etched in our imaginations,
0:49.7	persuaded us to part with the pounds in our pockets, but in the end, somehow, these ideas became
0:55.8	toast.
0:57.6	I'm Sean Farrington.
0:58.9	With me is Sam White, entrepreneur, self-made millionaire, toasts, business guru.
1:03.5	We've kept Sam in the dark about what's coming up.
1:06.6	Hello, Sam.
1:07.3	Hello, handsome.
1:08.2	How are you doing?
1:08.9	I'm very well.
1:09.8	How handsome do I look?
1:10.7	Because we're not in the same studio.
	...

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