James Perry

speaker

571 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

James Perry’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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James Reed: all about business · 89. The business decision you'll thank yourself for in 5 years | James Perry · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

But actually what happened was they all figured out how to scale that batch cooking methodology.

And we just built bigger and bigger and bigger kitchens.

And we've got better at processing.

So we now have three large savory kitchens and one large puddings kitchen, which is down in Somerset, and a large logistics center.

And the savory outfit is in Sittingbourne.

So the logistics center is also in Sittingbourne.

It could be elsewhere, but actually for operational reasons, it makes sense to be proximate.

Well, I think a lot of that came from my formative experiences with my economics degree and then at Cadbury watching what happened to that business.

But my parents, both of their backgrounds, their families lived overseas.

So my mother's family were explorers and then coffee farmers in East Africa.

And my father's family was from India where they were part of the

British Raj for a while and you know engineers and that kind of thing so they were all quite independent spirited adventurous people playing that family culture was there but also when my mum and dad started their bakery business they needed someone who could bake and my mother's best friend had been running a drug rehabilitation center as the cook and they persuaded her to join them as the person who was going to bake the cakes and her condition was

was that she would employ the recovering heroin addicts that she had been cooking for in the drug rehabilitation centre.

So their employment policy when they started was pretty racy because they pretty much employed recovering heroin addicts, which was challenging.

They figured it out.

But what it did with my brother, my sister, myself, was that it landed this idea that you could use business as a means to do many things as well as making money.

Yeah, and it's a capital-hungry model.

And one of my tips to young entrepreneurs is if you can avoid a capital-hungry business model, then that's really a great thing to do.

It's not always possible, certainly not possible in the case of Cook.

But we were very fortunate because we were given a leg up by my mum and dad with that business, which was a bit of a hidden diamond.

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