Jungle Creations puts down five new Twisted kitchens in London after two-year pilot
Twisted London, the delivery-only restaurant founded by Jungle Creations food vertical Twisted, has announced an expansion from one to six branches for greater coverage of London’s food scene.
Twisted London expands to six sites
Alongside personalised cat socks sales and pop-up events, the food delivery gig may have started as an “experiment” last year, according to Jamie Bolding, founder and chief executive – but now it has made a significant investment in expanding the property with plans to put down roots in Bayswater, Gloucester Road, Russell Square, Piccadilly and Edgware Road.
Although it could not comment on sales or revenue, the expansion indicates positive results from Twisted London’s first site in East London, launched in 2017. A Jungle spokesperson told The Drum that the brand had served 50,000 meals in the last year. Furthermore, it said that of its monthly customers, 89-92% have ordered previously demonstrating a “high level of customer loyalty and satisfaction”.
The restaurant’s social presence reaches more than 750,000 people per month from a following of 140,000 people, a model that it said has “reverse engineered the restaurant model” by first building a food audience – and then, of course, selling food. Twisted London is built on the belief that recipe content and creative on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, will help drive food sales at these physical locations.
Twisted’s restaurants are delivery only – keeping overheads down and tapping into the food delivery trend illustrated by the likes of JustEat, Deliveroo and UberEats. Further monetising this offering, Twisted is inviting food brands to integrate their products with menu items, supported by social and digital content.
Bolding, founder and chief of Jungle Creations, said: “We’re incredibly excited about the expansion of Twisted London. Since the launch of our first branch in East London just over a year ago we’ve been inundated with messages from people around the world asking us when it will be coming to a town near them so we’re thrilled to be launching in five new locations.
“Our brand partnerships have proved hugely successful, which goes to show how much potential this kind of venture has, so we’re planning to do plenty more of this type of collaboration in the near future.”
This is not the brand’s first push into the physical world, in 2016 it embraced print with the launch of Twisted: The Cookbook.
Following that, in 2017 Twisted launched the first Twisted London site, which was followed by a Twisted Bar Pop-Up in 2018. Baileys partnered with the pop-up bar to create an exclusive cocktail.
The next stop of the plan is to expand the delivery-only restaurant to “all” major cities in the UK. A reduced menu is available at all newly launched sites, including a serious of burgers and loaded fries, all of which are showcased in Twisted-style videos.
In 2018, The Drum paid a visit to Twisted’s headquarters to uncover the secret sauce behind the viral video phenomenon. The video recipe page Twisted began life in a house-share kitchen, filmed on a GoPro but it has greatly expanded since, off the back of a social following that numbers more than 20 million across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.
Jungle Creations earlier this year launched its creative agency Wild earlier this year and picked up the National Lottery as a client, just another way the digital media title is looking to diversify its income.