24 Jun 2014 Jamie Oliver’s FoodTube: why he’s taking the food revolution online
The TV chef and serial entrepreneur is spinning a new plate in the air with his FoodTube and DrinkTube ventures. After porn, food is the second most searched thing online and he wants to give users a taste for the healthy options.
I knew that Jamie Oliver was successful, of course. How could I not? I knew that he made television programmes and led social crusades and sold cookbooks by the container-load, that there was his website and his apps, that he’d won an Emmy in America, that the mortar and pestle my mum gave me for Christmas has his name on it, and that a rash of Jamie’s Italians have sprung up on high streets up and down the land.
And yet, it turns out, I know hardly anything. I don’t know about his holding company, and the scale of the retail operation, and that his restaurant business has outlets opening in Brazil and India and China and Russia and who knows where else.
I don’t know that Jamie’s Italian turns over £100m a year, the holding company another £35m a year. I’ve never even heard of Barbecoa, his barbecue chain, Recipease, his cooking school, Union Jacks, his fish and chips venture, Jamie’s Italian Trattorias, a restaurant sub-brand not to be confused with Jamie’s Italians.
Since we first saw him scooting around London in The Naked Chef, he’s become an entrepreneur worth an estimated £225m who employs 8,000 people. 8,000! And he’s in charge of it all. While still doing all the cheeky chappie stuff and still making cooking programmes and berating Michael Gove and banging on about people with big-screen TVs eating cheesy chips.
When I turn up at his offices near Old Street – so-called Silicon Roundabout, the hub of Britain’s startup scene – to interview some of the people involved with the tech side of the business, we can’t, initially, find anywhere to sit. There are five floors in all in the 50s block but they’re all full.
“You need a bigger office,” I joke, not realising until later that it’s just one office building out of a whole cluster. There are multiple buildings filled with multiple young folk all dedicated to burnishing the Jamie Oliver brand, including a whole team devoted to his social media, his apps, his YouTube channels.
Because while it’s not quite correct to say that technology is at the heart of all Oliver’s businesses, it’s certainly at the cutting edge of his media empire (as separate from his retail empire and his restaurant empire) and drives everything else.
In just over a year, FoodTube has acquired nearly a million subscribers and is now the third-biggest food channel on YouTube; DrinksTube has just launched; the app was, within a few months of launch, the most lucrative on UK iTunes; the website has eight million visitors a month and has just walked away with three Webbys, the Oscars of the online world.
Jamie Oliver no longer is a TV chef, or a campaigner, or a cookbook author, or the owner of several chains of restaurants, or at least he is, but he’s also, as he tells me later, “a very strange brand, a celebrity disruptive force”. Though moments later, he says: “It’s a really weird thing to try to convey without sounding like a nob.”
But it’s true. He is a strange one-man celebrity disruptive force. One who, somehow, manages to get away with it without sounding like a nob. It would be impossible to explain Jamie Oliver to a visitor who’d just dropped by from Mars. Because alongside all the noisy stuff he does, he is also quietly and strategically using all the weapons at his disposal, many of which are technology based, to actually try to make a real difference to global public health.
And yet, he is also still Jamie, recognisably still the fresh-faced, mop-topped Essex boy with a lisp and a habit of babbling words that don’t quite make actual sentences…..