Peter Prescott swaps Conran's dining rooms for CultJAR

Peter Prescott spent 18 years building restaurants with Terence Conran. Now he runs a fermentation business from a Somerset farm.

Prescott founded CultJAR during the pandemic, turning surplus vegetables from his Victorian kitchen garden into ferments and pickles. The range has grown to around 45 seasonal products, made at Worminster Farm, where two no-dig gardens supply much of the produce. This year's cucumber harvest ran to two tonnes; CultJAR buys the rest from growers Prescott calls "like-minded".

The bestseller is a celeriac remoulade made without mayonnaise. Jars go out through delis, farm shops and the company's own website, with Natoora an early stockist and Borough Market trader Bread Ahead among the retailers that now share shelf space with it.

A man who spent two decades filling restaurants now spends his days deliberately spoiling vegetables.

Prescott built his career at Bluebird in Chelsea in the early 2000s, part of a Conran venture that packed four restaurants, a juice bar, a cheese shop and 10,000 sq ft of fresh-food retail into one site, modelled on Paris's La Grande Épicerie. It was dismantled when the numbers stopped working. He went on to run operations for the wider group, then became Conran's business partner at D&D London, working on Boundary, Albion and Lutyens.

Restaurants, without the white label

CultJAR supplies restaurants including Koya, The Newt and Root, but Prescott will not make white-label products. Six items were developed directly with Koya's executive chef, Shuko Oda, among them a soy-pickled cucumber and an umami oil; a piccalilli was built with chef Rob Howell.

"It wasn't planned, but I'm very pleased I diversified," Prescott told Restaurant Online. He still consults on restaurant projects, including Silva in Mayfair with Daria Grebenyuk, but calls consultancy "a very tough market" after costs rose and five feasibility studies he ran last year for one client went nowhere.

Fermentation as managed decomposition

Prescott describes the work plainly: "What we're doing is essentially managed decomposition." He now runs workshops too, including one held at Tate Modern, teaching the techniques behind CultJAR's jars to people who take one home at the end — not unlike the home fermentation AMUSE readers have been trying with cabbage.

The shift mirrors a wider pull toward fermentation that built through the early 2010s in east London, around the time Albion launched in Shoreditch. Prescott's own supply lines started with a restaurant called Osip. Two decades after Bluebird, he is still feeding restaurants — just from a different end of the kitchen.