Failing Jamie Oliver brand gets the chop

Jamie Oliver recently put his sparring partner Gordon ramsay’s incessant animosity down to being ‘deeply jealous’ of his success. But is the energetic chef quite the golden boy of British cuisine we’re always led to believe?

For while the cheeky chappie continues to charm audiences, his much-trumpeted venture, Jamie at Home, which contracted agents to sell his cookware range at parties, has quietly ceased trading after racking up huge losses.

The company began in 2009, as part of the Jamie Oliver organisation, before being licensed to another firm in 2013, and has just shut up shop.

While it briefly sparked a craze for suburban ‘ Jamie at Home’ themed parties among giddy housewives, suggesting the concept was a success, a quick inspection of the company’s latest accounts reveal a different story.

Oliver’s firm lost £1.39 million for the year ending 2013. it also owed its parent company Jamie Oliver Holdings (JOH) a staggering £15.2 million from a loan.

a spokesman says of the closure: ‘While it is a sad decision, the direct-to- home market has become increasingly competitive in recent years.’

meanwhile, a scan of the complex web of companies which make up the celebrity chef’s business empire, covering projects ranging from his Tv work to cookery, reveals everything isn’t quite all milk and honey chez Oliver. While JOH reported profits of £4.4 million at the end of 2013 (down from £7.2 million the previous year), it also appeared to be propping up a number of the chef’s subsidiary companies.

Jamie Bianco, which runs Oliver’s Union Jacks restaurants, owed JOH £7.95 million, an increase from £6.7 million from 2012. His recipease stores owed £5.8 million, up from £4.7 million the previous year. last October, Oliver (left) abruptly closed two of three branches of recipease, in Brighton and Clapham Junction, after five years in operation.

One unnamed employee complained at the time: ‘They literally just came in at lunch, kicked out customers, shut the doors and hey presto . . . To be just sacked off just like that. Shameful, as if he couldn’t afford to keep us open a few more weeks so we could have a proper send-off.’