Is Jamie Oliver’s Recipease a case of format over function?

Jamie Oliver: not thought big enough?

Neill Sherrell, managing director, srcg, visits the celebrity chef’s new food retailing venture.

In my part of South London, Battersea Rise separates the retail badlands of Clapham Junction from the genteel pastures of the Northcote Road, where the Yummy Mummies of Nappy Valley congregate and shop, and until recently it was quite simply a retail case of never the twain shall meet.

On The Junction side of The Rise, Marks & Spencer has been flying a lone flag for quality retailers for some time now; a bastion against the phone shops, charity shops and the merchandising shambles that is TK Maxx. But now a mini-revolution is taking place. Waitrose has moved into the old Woolworths building, Starbucks has landed and now intriguingly Jamie has moved into the neighbourhood.

Shy and retiring are two words not usually associated with UK celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, so it should have come as no surprise I guess that his new retail concept ‘Recipease’ stands out on the local High Street like a ghastly pink blancmange incongruously slapped amongst the drab frontages. This is either a statement of great intent or, as I and many other locals hope, a design faux pas that will be remedied before long.

Food and kitchen emporium

Before I go any further I need to explain what Recipease is. According to Jamie this space is a ‘beautiful food and kitchen emporium’ that is ‘able to sit within a neighbourhood’. What that means is that it combines a retail space with an area, which allows you to prepare your own food under the guidance of a qualified chef. Stretching the ‘ease’ element of Recipease; we are presented with four concepts; Easy to make, Easy to learn, Easy to go and Jme. The latter being the chefs own brand of kitchen paraphernalia.

Easy to make is the core concept and it couldn't be easier to get involved. Employing real clicks and bricks cross channel integration all you do is book a session on the easy to use web site and Recipease will shop, chop and prep all the ingredients for your chosen recipe, ready for you to come in and spend 10 minutes bringing it all together.

Groundbreaking? Not entirely. We locals, and Jamie is keen to appeal directly to us, have seen it all before. Eighteen months ago a meal assembly kitchen called The Yard opened on Northcote Road. We all raved about its promise of natural convenience, but no one went there. In those days, time and convenience were all the rage and despite the interest the experience didn’t warrant the time it took. Also it was poorly marketed and looked uninviting. The same cannot be said for Recipease.

Recipease presses the right buttons in retail design

Treasure trove?

As a piece of retail design, Recipease effortlessly presses all the right buttons and will doubtless win awards for its concept integration. From the street the tinted windows hint at the treasures that might lie within, whilst inside Recipease makes sublime use of natural commodities to present its natural products. The painstakingly distressed wooden fixturing, so smoothly engineered it makes James Bond seem like a chav in a hoodie, cleverly absorbs the soft as cashmere lighting, giving great depth to the fixture and providing the product with every chance to be the hero.

A giant wooden rabbit dominates one display area. In the run up to Easter this feels appropriate, but it will be interesting to see if this curiosity remains a permanent fixture, or if we will be treated to a selection of giant seasonal animals throughout the year.

The spatial flow is easy to grasp with the idea being to engage the shopper through the retail offer at the front and then surprise and delight them by introducing the kitchen concept at the rear of the store.

In developing this journey the layout succeeds and we transition from one area to the next seamlessly. Shut your eyes and imagine a rustic country kitchen cleaned up, specked up and gentrified for a Chelsea town house and you will be pretty much on the money for the design of the meal preparation area. Although how comfortable I would be to have the punters breathing down my neck and watching my every clumsy move if I had booked and paid for an ‘Easy to make’ session I’m not too sure. In sporting parlance I might be intimidated by the crowd being so close to the pitch.

As you might imagine the Easy to go brand gives off the street punters the chance to take home and sample the pre-cooked kit meals and these are beautifully laid out, providing a relaxed and informal browsing environment. However, the range of food is limited to ‘classics’ and there is nothing you couldn’t easily make for yourself at home. In addition to the meals there are plenty of Jme kitchen accessories and food accompaniments, which would make welcome gifts.

Expensive and then some

The food offer is undoubtedly of a high quality, but there is no getting away from the fact that the prices are at the expensive end of expensive. ‘We've worked hard to get beautiful ingredients into our dishes and make the prices really competitive’, states the web site. What value filter they are applying I don’t know, as not one of the local mums I spoke to felt that the food offered good value; “The bread is ridiculously expensive,” said one, whilst “the costs are extortionate,” chipped in another. If Jamie wanted to charge these prices he should definitely have taken premises 200 yards away on the plusher side of Battersea Rise.

A design success it may be, but ultimately you have to ask the commercial question ‘How is Recipease going to make money?’ Is it another example of format over function? A central concept stretched too far to create a business proposition. Maybe for once Jamie hasn’t thought big enough. Recipease only does half the job. Where is the café and the serve over deli? And why are there no lunchtime baguettes or coffee to go? Surely these are core items to generate regular footfall and to develop daily repeat business.

The local mums I spoke to couldn’t see themselves ever using the kitchen area to prepare a meal; “It’s just not my thing and I can’t think whose thing it would be.” If Jamie was guaranteed to be at the sessions every now and then, the appeal would be greater.

A Christmas shop, absolutely; an all-year round retail success, absolutely not. It is not a retail destination. It’s nice to have in the neighbourhood as a talking point and somewhere to take friends and family to when they come to stay and you want to show off. You might even shop there once, but there isn’t enough to keep you coming back. It simply lacks the abundance in the food department and the daily routine items that could make it a hub for lunching locals.

Pre-crunch I am not sure it would have worked, but post-crunch it lacks that one critical success element; value. I hope I am wrong and that this is the first of many bright pink edifices that will adorn our crumbling High Streets. My fear is that I will wake one morning to find another charity shop where Recipease once stood as a beacon of hope for those who dare to be different.