People in the City are addicted to Farmer J’s large, expensive salad bowls. Why so?
It’s a sight straight out of Soviet Russia, or Cold War era Dresden. Queues of people lining up in the hurling rain down wide, central streets of a capital city. But this isn’t the German Democratic Republic, and it’s not the 1980s. No one need queue for bread. It’s 2024, and I’m standing outside a Farmer J in the decidedly un-Soviet City of London.
If you work in central London, you can’t have missed it: the queues of gilet-clad men and high-heeled women waiting, come rain or shine, not just inside a store, but outside of it are remarkable.
For the uninitiated, Farmer J is a chain that serves the kind of food you wish you could cook at home. It is an Ottolenghi-esque fusion focused on combinations of vegetables, yet with no particular cultural lineage. It is healthy. Whole roasted cauliflower, interesting salad combinations, miso mushrooms, lime leaf tofu curry. Meals (they do breakfast and lunch) tend to cost upwards of £10. Happy employees, known as “farmers”, serve you from large dishes, school-dinner style, with bright smiles.
“Unlike many other food spots, when you come into Farmer J, you will not be faced with a wall of products just sitting, being kept warm under the heated lights. We prioritise freshness and 90 per cent of our food is made onsite,” founder Jonathan Recanati says. The restaurants are dimly lit, with slightly too-loud upbeat electronic music pumping through the airwaves (it makes you wonder: does J want you to shuffle out immediately after you’ve collected your food?) There are tables, but most people take their food back to their desk. The chain was founded in 2014, first opened in 2016 and now has 11 stores centred around the City.
‘Do what comes natural’
Now brace yourselves for this – the shadow behind the initial J, Jonathan Recanati, is not a farmer. He’s an ex-City banker. Whilst working at Deutsche Bank he hated the boring and unhealthy food he had to endure. “I often used to eat three meals a day in the office,” he says. He came up with the idea of serving “a meal that is healthy without preaching, delicious but not expensive, and never, ever boring”. Hence the excitement of the sesame on the broccoli. And indeed, artwork adorns the walls of the King William Street branch with insipid slogans like: “Do what comes natural”.
In fairness, devising a profitable and durable business model did come naturally to him, as his job was to assess the eligibility of firms in turnaround situations for high-risk, high-return loans. He used Deutsche’s research department to analyse his market, looking at data from for example Chipotle. It’s worked; earlier this year the brand secured £5.5m investment and is looking to expand across the Atlantic. In all, FJ has raised $9.42m over three funding rounds. In part perhaps due to Recanati’s work ethic – he has confessed one of his “biggest regrets” is cutting his honeymoon short as it coincided with the opening of Farmer J’s second restaurant.
I want harissa not your opinion!
These joints are not just salad bars; these are lifestyle brands. Check out the Farmer J merch store, where you can buy a cap that reads I’M OBSESSED (with the ‘i’ mimicking FJ’s forked logo). Not keen? Well, they offer an alternative for the same price (£16.50) which reads I WANT HARISSA NOT YOUR OPINION (a hat which fills me, an opinion writer, with nerve-shattering terror). Also for sale are aprons and tote bags.
Farmer J’s older cousin is the $3.5bn US chain Sweetgreen, founded in 2006. It serves up similar salads with similar lines (queuing isn’t just for the British) and similar vibes. It also specifically aims to be cool: “One of the realisations we had was if you looked around, all of the coolest food was the least healthy,” says Nicolas Jammet, co-founder of the Sweetgreen ‘concept’. “Part of building this brand was to change that and… have it be the coolest food.”
American writer Jia Tolentino first introduced me to the cult of Sweetgreen in her 2018 book Trick Mirror, which examined self optimisation. “Sweetgreen is a marvel of optimisation,” she writes. “A line of 40 people – a texting, shuffling, eyes-down snake – can be processed in 10 minutes, as customer after customer orders a kale caesar with chicken without even looking at the other, darker-skinned, hairnet-wearing line of people who are busy adding chicken to kale caesars as if it were their purpose in life to do so and their customers’ purpose in life to send emails for 16 hours a day with a brief break to snort down a bowl of nutrients that ward off the unhealthfulness of urban professional living.” She could easily be describing Farmer J.
Health kick
Tandem to the rise of Farmer J, and others like it (see: The Salad Project) are fears around ultra processed foods (UPFs). Books by diet and nutrition experts like Dr Chris Van Tulleken have slammed foods like cereal, packaged sandwiches and plastic wrapped bread as harmful – to waistlines and organ health. Fresh vegetables – from a real life farm no less, and definitely not a warehouse in China – are the antithesis of this. Scroll Farmer J’s site and a list of farms rallies for your attention: “Our lettuce is from Laurence J Betts, a longstanding family-based farm in Kent!” it screams with pride. “Our kale is from Molyneux Kale Company, a family business from over 150 years”. You can almost feel the smugness radiating out of the website’s muted toned pixels.
Not everyone buys the evilness of UPFs: but even if you don’t, it’s undeniable that interest in “healthy” food has exploded this century, from Deliciously Ella or Arnold Schwarzenegger touting “plant based foods” to choosing wholegrains or aiming to eat between 30 and 50 different plants within a single week. Social media has fuelled interest by turning healthy living into an identity. As work and life twist around each other with increasing pressure, the cult of Farmer J will continue to wield power over office workers, luring them in with the promise of vitamins to counteract the 12-hour office day. Farmer J knows, like many cults, that it’s not salad that we crave, it’s the promise of health.
Of course, it’s also not really true that there has been no healthier option than the UPF-riddled meal deal since Farmer J et al came along. Leon was founded in 2004 by Henry Dimbleby as the UK’s first healthy fast-food chain. Pret and Itsu offer relatively guilt-free options too. So the cult of Farmer J captures a dream of something more than just health.
‘Treat yourself’
Some of it is frivolousness engendered by a ‘treat yourself’ mentality. For the younger clientele, spending a lot of dosh on lunch can be explained in part due to generational inequality and “treat yourself” discourse. “I can’t afford a house, so why not treat myself to sesame broccoli?” one City worker told me, explaining her at-least-once weekly trip to Farmer J. Another worker, whose office is slightly outside the City, told me his whole company orders in Farmer J for lunch regularly. “It’s on the house,” he shrugs. “And it’s delicious.” The mania has even reached Whitehall thanks to the St James Park outlet catering to civil servants, who – by my small sample size – appear to be a little more frugal than their City counterparts, opting for the fieldbowl (RRP £7.95) rather than the fieldtray (RRP £9.55).
It’s true, now, that these prices are not all that different from comparable chain lunch stores. A lunch in Pret could set you back around £7 if you’re not careful due to inflation (prices at Pret are 50 to 75 per cent more for some sandwiches and baguettes than pre-pandemic). More firms order in lunch for staff, dinner as well if you’re an investment banker. Others might come to the office less regularly since Covid, and feel more inclined towards an extravagant lunch.
Magician J
But key also to Farmer J’s success is the allure of the queue itself, its purpose-giving dawdling and of course the production line that awaits you at its source. Mimicking a school canteen, customers pick the items to make up their ‘tray’ which are then dolloped on one by one, by workers specifically designated to the “Kale Miso Slaw” section or the “Aubergine Tahini” section, or the “protein” section. We crave service, the familiarity of a canteen, we fawn like limp vegetables at the idea of customisation. Through this elaborate show, Magician J creates a fantasy in which lunchtime is lifted beyond the existential act of grabbing a sandwich from Pret. Joining the Farmer J cult allows you to pretend your lunch is a gift from the gods, rather than run-of-the-mill, mass-produced sustenance.
It calls to mind the now-defunct X account Pret L’etranger: “I did not “decide” to go to Pret. One moment I was at my desk. The next I was asking a Spanish woman for a flat white. Nothing, no agency, occurred between.”
Lunch, after all, is just lunch and that fact that can be hard to stomach: a little meal that is far too often eaten alone. Perhaps what these cultish lunch spots really offer is the facade of community that we all so crave.