Jamie Guy joins Mabel as head chef, bringing restaurant-standard thinking to a new chef-made food concept being piloted in Shoreditch.
Former Devonshire and HIX chef Jamie Guy is backing a new grab-and-go food venture designed to challenge what people expect from food on the move.
Guy has joined Mabel as head chef, bringing his restaurant background into a new grab-and-go format that is being piloted at Shoreditch Exchange in east London.
The brand has been built around a simple but ambitious idea: fresh, chef-made food should be available in the places people already spend their day, without customers having to rely on expensive delivery, ultra-processed convenience food or traditional staffed retail.
Mabel serves daily-fresh wraps, sandwiches and salads, prepared in its London kitchen using carefully sourced British produce, before being delivered into highly branded, smart refrigerated units. Customers can browse at the unit or pre-order through the Mabel app, collecting their food in seconds by scanning a QR code.
For Guy, the appeal was the opportunity to bring a producer-led, kitchen-first approach into a format where quality has too often been treated as secondary to convenience.
Jamie Guy, Head Chef at Mabel, said:
“You don’t need a restaurant setting to offer great ingredients and transparency.“You need good people who care about creating great produce, combined with people making great food in a way that allows quality to scale. That’s what excited me about Mabel.“It takes the standards people associate with good independent restaurants and puts them into a new format, in everyday spaces where people actually eat.“Grab-and-go does not have to mean compromise. People are busy, but that does not mean they should have to settle for food that feels tired, anonymous or over-processed.”
Mabel has launched with chef-made wraps and sandwiches priced at £5 to £8 and gourmet salads at £8 to £10. The menu celebrates British regional produce and is designed to deliver freshness, value and provenance through a model that can operate in places where a traditional shop or café is not commercially viable.
Jason Hartley, Founder and CEO of Mabel, said:
“We’ve normalised bad food because it’s convenient. That seems like a crazy compromise.“Mabel started with a simple question: why is some of the worst food people eat often eaten when they’re busiest, most tired or most in need of something decent?“Workplaces, stations, airports, gyms, hospitals, universities, hotels and residential buildings are places where people are already living their day. They should not have to choose between expensive delivery, sad grab-and-go or skipping a meal.“We built Mabel to work around real life: fresh food made by chefs, British produce where it matters, and intelligent, unattended retail that makes better food easier to access.“This is not just about making food cheaper or faster. It is about making what people get for their money better.”
Mabel was founded by former WPP brand strategist turned award-winning chef and entrepreneur Jason Hartley. Unlike traditional convenience retail, the model removes the costs of staffed retail and instead focuses investment on food quality, sourcing and kitchen operations.
Its connected units use machine learning and agentic AI technology to help predict demand by site, time of day and product, allowing the business to manage stock more intelligently, adapt menus to each location and reduce end-of-day food waste. The units are designed for locations where fresh food has traditionally been harder to access, including workplaces, transport hubs, hospitals, universities, residential schemes, gyms, cultural venues, hotels and late-shift environments.
Shoreditch Exchange is the first of three pilots confirmed for Q2 and Q3 2026. Active conversations are underway with clients across transport, estate management, fitness and accommodation. Mabel is targeting 60 sites across London by the end of 2027, with the next site expected to open in August.
Phase two will introduce heat-to-eat ready meals, extending Mabel into evening, residential and shift-worker demand.
For more information, visit eatmabel.com or follow @eatmabel.
