BEFORE the end of this year, the husband and wife team of Andrew and Theresa Roberts will be opening up their fourth Jamaica Patty Company (JPC) restaurant in Farringdon, an area in the Islington Borough of north London, England.

It’s part of the dream of developing this 10-year-old company into a chain of restaurants whose offerings are primarily Jamaican patties, but one, which for now, aims to strengthen its base in London, while positioning for expansion outside.

“At the moment we are hampered in a sense by the fact that there are only two of us in the business, so we will find it difficult to manage stores elsewhere. But certainly, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham…[are under consideration],” Andrew acknowledged after pointing out that after operating for nine years with one, then two JPC stores, the company is opening two in one year, one which opened in April and the other which is to open “either later this month or early next month.”

Ahead of searching for places to expand JPC, Andrew said the company considers areas in which it can open two or three stores, “otherwise it’s not interesting.”

But 10 years ago, things were not as easy for the company.

Andrew’s wife, Theresa, said the idea to start a patty company came to her as she built Hanover Grange, a privately owned villa at The Tryall Club in Sandy Bay, St James.

“Whilst building Hanover Grange in 2007, we sort of lived on Jamaican patties,” Theresa, who was born in Jamaica, told the Jamaica Observer. She later pointed out that her husband was born in Jamaica as well, though both are now British citizens.

“After completing the house and returning to London, and because I am a proud Jamaican and believe everything Jamaican is special, my husband and I decided, ‘Why don’t we start a patty company?,’ “ Theresa recounted. She was appointed a cultural ambassador in 2022.

She said growing up, she watched her father producing patties, a process which took him all day “because he would get up and make the patties traditional style, where you could taste the meat and see the meat,” she continued about her being “brought up on patties in England by my father.”

How her father produced patties became the base for her vision for the quality of the product she wanted JPC to be associated with.

“When we decided that if we were going to do something, it would have to be at the same quality as my father used to make them, because that’s the way I was brought up, and so we embarked on doing that and here we are today,” Theresa noted. Andrew, in differentiating JPC’s products from what Jamaicans buy as patties in the more well-known patty stores, outlined his “is more old-style traditional Jamaican patties based on old-style recipes.”

With a vision in mind and conducting research to determine the viability of the company, the couple set out to register the entity in 2013, before starting operations in 2014.

“I was a bit old to start a food company, because that was never my industry, but I did it. It’s one of the hardest thing that I have ever done, but the most rewarding,” Theresa added. Her husband and herself were past 50 when they did so a decade ago. Theresa previously worked in the London property market while Andrew worked as a private equity lawyer. He no longer works in private equity [so as] to concentrate on the patty business, but the property portfolio remains.

“Now a lot of these food businesses in the UK have been started by 20 year olds who start them as pop-ups and build the business gradually from there. The restaurant industry in the UK demands a huge amount of time, effort, money and energy which luckily, even as older people we had, I’m not sure we still got it, but we had it when we set it up,” Andrew noted.

The couple said the business was self-funded from the start with Andrew telling the
Business Observer that the cost to set up a Juici Patties franchise in New York at over US$700,000 at the high end would give a good idea about how much it costs to set up the first JPC store in Covent Garden in London’s fashionable west end in 2014.

“It took about six years to gain much acceptance, but we had it as a long-term project….We had got the business profitable just before COVID, then COVID hit and that was sort of difficult,” he recounted.

But ahead of COVID, their work was cut out for them.

“The first day we opened was good because everybody came to taste the food. We worked hard at the product so our product was different. And then it was very successful for the first few weeks but we needed to build it because so many people didn’t know what a Jamaican patty was and we were in prime location,” Theresa pointed out. She said only the American and Canadian tourists in London knew what a Jamaican patty was outside of the Jamaican diaspora and their close friends.

But the couple said they wanted to target the broader mainstream market, particularly the English and European markets.

“I think there are two or three things. We wanted to sell the product, not just to Jamaicans. We have a lot of Jamaican diaspora coming in, but we wanted to make it a mainstream product that appeals to people across the UK and 95 per cent of the people who were walking down the street in Covent Garden didn’t have a clue what we were selling. They didn’t know what a Jamaican patty was, so that was quite difficult,” Andrew chipped in.

“We addressed that by basically just standing on the streets and putting food into their mouths, and that was it. I mean we literally stood out there with a plate, with some tasters and we thought we would do it for six months, but we probably did it for nearly six years, because people did not know what the product was.”

“The second thing to bear in mind is that our product is a kind of a premium product, so there are different price points to the other patties in the UK. So we had to create two new markets. The first is for people who bought patties but bought a different product and the second for people who did not know what a patty was. So those were the two markets we ended up having to create, both of which we did successfully,” he continued.

The couple went as far as bringing in renowned Chef Collin Brown to help develop a home-made patty recipe into something that could be produced at scale.

“So Chef Collin Brown came and spent time with the people who produce for us, translating the recipes work, but also working with them to ensure that we can produce in the volumes needed. So it was all produced using Jamaican recipes, then produced by a Jamaican chef working with the production company using Jamaican products, we have Scotch bonnet peppers, etc, etc, so all completely authentic. We wanted to old-style authentic patties.”

He added that though growth did not explode in the beginning as the product was introduced to a new market, it was “reasonable” at about 10 per cent per year, until COVID came an upended that growth which had started to result in the company turning a profit, six years into its operation.

With the UK under enforced lockdowns, but allowing businesses to serve the public under certain restrictions, the couple took the opportunity to continue operating with both hands.

“The only people who really came into central London were the people who lived there…so we ended up serving a lot of the local residents who had nowhere else to go. So, it was literally just the two of us. All the employees were left at home, and we do so, offering a takeaway, a service where we sold frozen patties, and once a week, we would get in a refrigerated van, take all the orders and drive around London delivering these patties to people who were stuck inside,” Andrew recalled.

Then in the midst of the pandemic in 2021, a second store was opened, about 5 kilometres away, this time on Liverpool Street.

“When we opened Liverpool Street, it took us into a whole new dimension really, because that was profitable from day one. The product was known, the brand was known and people just came and that store started very well and continues very well as has Canary Wharf, and so we have sort of arrived now, if you know what I mean, the numbers are very good,” Theresa added without getting into further details.

The Canary Wharf store in east London was opened in April this year with a fourth store planned for Farringdon before year end. Others are in the pipeline that will be opened next year, Andrew said of the plans that are now in place.

He said there are no plans to franchise the operations, at least, not in the UK “at this point in time”, though he did not rule out going international through franchising.

But, with its own production facility in Thame in the heart of Oxfordshire, which has a lot of distribution hubs for many of the major companies, JPC has positioned itself in an ideal location to have its products distributed throughout the UK.

Aside from patties, the stores also distribute Jamaican products such as Blue Mountain coffee, Tortuga rum cream and plantain chips.

“We do curry goat, jerk chicken and vegan stew as a rice and peas meal but we’ve done that in a slightly different way, so it’s all boneless. What we are looking to do, if people want to pick something up, take it to their desk, eat it there, they don’t want to be picking out bones, etc. So we’ve done boneless curry goat, boneless jerk chicken and it comes in a branded rice and peas pot…so that’s the other type of meal lines that we sell,” Andrew said.