Jamie Oliver and wife cut their payouts by two-thirds compared with 2022

Jamie Oliver and his wife, Jules, paid themselves a £2.5m dividend last year – nearly two-thirds less than a year before – after launching their company’s first directly owned restaurant since the collapse of the Jamie’s Italian chain.

The couple took home £4.4m less than in 2022 as profits for their core group fell 37% to £3.4m despite a 14% rise in sales to £27m.

Profits were hit by a rise in operating expenses including staff costs and additional operating and pre-opening costs for Jamie Oliver Catherine St, his first directly owned restaurant to open since the UK Jamie’s Italian chain collapsed five years ago with the loss of 1,000 jobs.

The sales and profit figures cover Jamie Oliver Holdings (JOH), which includes his media interests, including TV production, books, endorsements, his cookery school and new restaurant, as well as franchise income from the overseas restaurants that still bear his name, fees for promoting the supermarket Tesco, and royalties from products bearing his name. The dividend relates to the family’s wider interests, which also include a further licensing business for which detailed accounts are not available.

Royalties, endorsements and licensing income made up the bulk of JOH’s turnover, at £18.4m – up more than 13% year on year. Production and cookery school income was also up, but sales at the international franchise restaurants, of which there are more than 70, including Jamie’s Italian, Chequer Lane in Ireland, Jamie Oliver Kitchen and Jamie Oliver’s Pizzeria, slipped back by about £10,000 to £3.6m. Sales at the Catherine Street restaurant hit more than £335,000 in less than two months since opening.

The group, including the Olivers’ separate licensing business, paid a £7.75m dividend – up from £6.8m a year before. However, the Olivers took home £2.5m, down from the full £6.8m last year, while the group retained £5.25m.

The company became a B Corp in 2019 and this year reconfirmed that status, which recognises companies who officially give equal weight to people, the planet and profit.

Kevin Styles, a former boss of the Vue cinema chain and the specialist retailer American Golf, became the chief executive of Oliver’s business empire in 2022.

He said last year the plan was to “maximise our brand’s commercial and social impact”.