IT’S lunchtime on a bright and blustery fall day in Preston, in the northwest of England. Across the Flag Market, a vast, tree-lined plaza in the shadow of a colonnaded, Victorian museum, an ever-growing line of roughly 150 people waits patiently for their turn at a modest cherry-red trailer.
This is the daily wait – anywhere between two and six hours.
Party music booms out from within the trailer’s steaming, open hatch, and selfie-seeking customers approach the counter with raised smartphone cameras and big, expectant grins.
You’d be forgiven for assuming that the foodstuff prompting this fervent excitement might be a hype-baiting favourite like a smash burger or birria taco, perhaps.
But the little trailer is the flagship outpost of SpudBros, a family-run, phenomenally popular local business that specialises in that most lumpen, old-fashioned and outwardly unexciting dish: the baked potato.
Better known in the British culinary vernacular as “jacket potatoes” or “jacket spuds,” to denote the presence of a crisp-roasted, unpeeled skin, these hulking tubers were thought of as merely cheap, dependable and comforting, the fare of college cafeterias and grocery store cafes.
But they also act as an endlessly adaptable vehicle for baked beans, tuna salad and all manner of other peculiarly British toppings.
A new generation of social media savvy potato mongers has seized on an opportunity to make the spud cool again.
“People would walk past, and they’d go to Subway or McDonald’s, and we’d ask them: ‘Why won’t you buy our jacket potatoes?’” said Jacob Nelson, who now runs the business with his younger brother, Harley, and father, Tony.
“And they were just like, ‘It’s just a jacket potato isn’t it? It’s not sexy.’ So that was the business plan. How do we make the jacket potato a bit more sexy?”
That was in the fall of 2023, and from the outside, it very much looks like they have achieved their goal. With the help of canny social-media marketing, SpudBros has grown from that single food truck into a force in both the physical and digital realm.
Their TikTok account has nearly five million followers, and 2.4 million more follow the brand on Instagram and YouTube combined.
In the past 12 months, they have launched five brick-and-mortar SpudBros Express shops, including London and Liverpool, with at least one more planned soon in Sheffield and an international outpost in Amsterdam.
A collaboration with the YouTuber MrBeast last April left some people lining up for as long as six hours, and resulted in a clip that has been viewed more than 52 million times. All told, SpudBros now sells more than 2,000 potatoes a day.
And they are not the only baked potato sellers to have turned the vertiginous viewing figures of short form video into real-world business success.
In Tamworth, just north of Birmingham, Ben Newman, a pink-mohawked digital creator known as Spudman, has similarly turned generously filled baked potatoes and creative social media content into an unusually potent formula.
“Walk down my queue and every other customer is an international customer,” said Newman, who has more than five million followers across platforms and can sell up to 2,500 potatoes a day from his two roving “SpudWagons.”
In October, when Queen Camilla attended an event to promote Meals on Wheels, she spent a morning alongside a grinning Newman, ladling baked beans onto steaming spuds.
“So many viral foods are about novelty and hybridisation – jacket potatoes couldn’t be more different from that,” said Ruby Tandoh, the author of All Consuming, a bestselling book on how food trends form and proliferate.
Tandoh believes the diners are embracing a bit of irony in the situation.
“People are enjoying the inherent funniness in queuing two hours for a jacket potato, even while they believe sincerely, at least for a while, that it will be the best jacket potato of their life,” Tandoh added.
Notably, this is not the first time in British dining history that baked potatoes have been an especially hot property. From around the 1830s, London’s streets flooded with hot potato sellers, crying out to passing trade (“Hot hot, all ’ot. Mealy and floury, hot ’ot.”) and selling simple, butter and pepper doused tubers from ornately decorated warming cans.
By the 1970s and 1980s, a Scottish-born chain called Spudulike had grown to the point that it had more than 40 franchised outlets offering baked potatoes with filling options like beef chilli and shrimp cocktail.
By the time that Spudulike went bankrupt in 2019, the baked potato had become better associated with nondescript lunch spots and provincial one-person operations.
Many of the new, algorithm-tapping creators reviving this culinary space can trace their own lineage directly back to this history.
The Hot Potato Tram – the original name of the business that the SpudBros team took over and revamped in 2023 – had operated in Preston’s Flag Market since 1955.
Newman, the son of an agricultural wholesaler who supplied jacket potato sellers, took over his Tamworth operation more than two decades ago.
“My granddad got my dad into the industry and he was a potato worker from coming out of school, pretty much,” Newman said.
Traders like SpudBros and Spudman have modernised and refined the baked potato culinarily as well – adding flavoured butters, crispy onions and globally influenced specialty toppings such as Chinese salt-and-pepper chicken and shaved doner kebab to the standard formula.
They have also benefited from their relative inexpensiveness (SpudBros jacket potatoes start at about £5 (RM26), depending on location) as a hot, assembled-to-order item at a time when the price of prepackaged sandwiches has crept up.
But another core aspect of the appeal is that these businesses embody a particular warmth and local character.
Newman’s videos show him addressing followers as a collective “spud army” in a peppy, Midlands drawl; the Nelsons disarm customers with Lancastrian banter, embrace their local folk hero status (they count SpudBros’ shirt sponsorship deal with local soccer team, Preston North End, as perhaps their proudest moment) and occasionally dish out money so passing children can buy ice cream.
Both businesses have become focal points for an odd sort of national pride – emphasised with each generous ladleful of baked beans or chip shop curry sauce – for a British regional food culture that hasn’t always had its due. The lack of pretension, the unapologetic Northernness in SpudBros case, is precisely the point.
“What’s increasingly interesting in British food culture is how much say non-Londoners are having in the direction and the content of the discourse,” Tandoh said. “A long time ago, people mostly lived in their localised food bubbles. Then, as popular food media evolved, a very London-centric and top-down way of talking about food emerged.
According to her, that changed with the spread of social media.
“It feels like many of the foods that are going viral reflect this shift of power,” she said. “Jacket potatoes, pub roasts. Vernacular British food is taking centre stage.”
Perhaps inevitably, bigger national brands are trying to capitalise on the groundswell of interest.
Subway, which has 2,200 outlets in Britain, Ireland and Northern Ireland, introduced jacket potatoes as a menu item last spring. The initial trial was so popular they became a permanent menu item in September 2025.
“It has been the most well- received project that we’ve had with our franchisees,” said Louise Wardle, the company’s vice president of marketing for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. “It’s a healthier option, it’s something hot, it’s British, it’s craveable.” – © 2026 The New York Times Company
