I'll just buy more robots - they don't WFH: Itsu tycoon warns Labour is making it too expensive to hire staff
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There’s something Willy Wonka-ish about Julian Metcalfe, who changed the way Britons eat lunch not once, but twice. First, when he co-founded Pret A Manger in 1986, making office workers realise sandwiches didn’t have to be stale, cardboard-like morsels, before selling the business to private equity house Bridgepoint for £364million in 2008.
![[Groundbreaking: Metcalfe co-founded Pret A Manger in 1986 before selling the business to private equity house Bridgepoint for £364m in 2008]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/12/19/93094965-14186995-image-a-2_1734032592738.jpg)
It was then sold to the German conglomerate behind Krispy Kreme doughnuts for £1.5billion a decade later. And next? There was no Maldivian beach break to celebrate a bulging bank account: he went straight to work on Itsu, which popularised healthy Japanese lunches when launched in 1997.
‘Of course, I was in early that day,’ he says. ‘What would I do with a day off?. ‘I could never retire. No, no, no! How boring.’. I sit with Metcalfe, 64, on new, hot-pink chairs on the second day of trading of Itsu’s newest, and 86th, branch, on London’s Oxford Street.
Lunchtime legend: Pret A Manger and Itsu founder Julian Metcalfe says he is driven by the ambition of selling nutritious food for a price everyone can afford. His eyes fizzle with his passion for Itsu like Wonka throwing open the doors to his factory. ‘You only achieve anything by jumping in really deep,’ he says.
‘If we can succeed here,’ he says, waving his arms around, ‘on Oxford Street, where the rates and the rent are among the highest in the world, we can do it anywhere. ‘I like the risk. I like the fact that my ambition – that we can be bigger than McDonald’s – is preposterous. Because we’re giving people nutritious, affordable food for under ten quid, and that matters. That’s the goal, the joy, that’s the fun of it.
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