About Sous Chef

Sous Chef hand-picks the best from the world’s kitchens. Food-lovers find uncommonly good taste in all that Sous Chef brings, from ingredients and gifts, to tableware and cookware. We're an independent family company and have inspired home cooks and professional chefs since 2012.

 

The problem with working in a Michelin-starred kitchen

Hi, I'm Nicola. In 2011, I left my corporate job and 'staged' as a chef in a Michelin-starred London restaurant.

For weeks I grated parmesan, peeled asparagus and diced aubergine. Eventually, I was shown how to seam-butcher meat, make mirror glaze, and stir beautiful truffle risottos — getting the silkiness ‘just so.’

That kitchen was eye-opening. I saw and tasted the ingredients that only the world’s best chefs had access to.

From the finest French fruit vinegar, to pistachio paste and ice cream stabilisers, these products translated to next-level flavour.

The problem?

I couldn't find the same quality or range of ingredients... even in speciality stores. Pinning down everything for one recipe often meant hours of trawling.

I realised how much flavour was missing in my home kitchen. And I had to find it.

Travelling the world for a solution

I worked my way through hundreds of cookbooks, listing the ingredients I couldn't buy locally. These became the first 400 items I had to find. 

Finding them was a treasure hunt.

A small family producer in Italy may make the most vibrant, expressive olive oil, but their expertise is olive oil making and not marketing. You may never hear about them.

My small team and I have spent the past 12 years tracing ingredients back to their origins. We've met with small-scale makers, eaten around their tables, and forged relationships that have become genuine friendships.

Today, all that work means that the world's best ingredients are now at your fingertips.  

Only one in every ten

Ingredients weren't enough.

In Tokyo we found the ramen bowls we loved in our local Japanese ramen bar. In Italy, tableware painted using olive branches.

Top chefs shared the kit they couldn't do without — from sous vides to pans that last a lifetime.

Sous Chef has grown into a careful selection of over 6,000 food products.

But for every one item you see, we've said no to nine.

This obsession with quality is how we win Feefo's platinum customer service award every year, and why we receive reviews like this:

"Like a lot of people, I don't like scrolling through hundreds of versions of similar products, all with fake reviews. Knowing that everything has been carefully selected, and will undoubtedly be high quality is exactly what is needed."

It’s not one order, it’s the next 100 years

Sous Chef is a family business. I asked my husband Nick to join the business very early on. Together we've grown the business, side-by-side with a fantastic team.

It feels like just days since we were a start-up, but now we’re looking ahead to the next 100 years...

• Throughout the website you’ll find stories about where people are doing better: songbird friendly extra virgin olive oil, spice traders who guarantee good prices for their pepper farmers years into the future, chocolate producers who'll only source sustainable cocoa, and many more.
• Our deliveries are carbon neutral via DPD, and we were one of the first ecommerce companies to only use paper packaging in our parcels.
• Every time you shop at Sous Chef, we give towards the United Nations sustainable development goals. See our impact here.

... so that in the future, cooking is a joy for everyone.

“Cooking in a Michelin-starred kitchen, I tasted the most incredible ingredients and wanted to make them more widely available. So Sous Chef was born.” Nicola, Sous Chef Founder