JOSH

Littlest Brother: Ex cabinet maker, operations, chief sausage maker, vans, flames, long days, youngest brother

Olly

Biggest Brother: Ex rugby player for Harlequins, big, hairy, top taster, eldest, loves smoking meat and curing meat

Max

Middle Brother: Ex ship broker, numbers guy, middle brother, bossy, also loves cheese

Cool Timeline

2007

January 19

The first sausage!

It all started when Olly was playing rugby for the Harlequins and was out of action for a while with an injury. With the extra time on his hands, and an extra large love of sausages, Olly started making his own sausages after Ella bought him a sausage making machine – best present ever! We still have this sausage making machine to this day – now kept in our Bristol based restaurant, Pigsty.

2008

January 1

Josh Joins!

Josh, our youngest brother but with potentially the largest love of sausages, decided to get involved. With Josh and Olly joining together, The Jolly Hog was born. They met with a family friend and local butcher Ron Sinclair who set them up with a butchers block and larger sausage machine. After making what we thought were the best porkers in the land – something our friends and family agreed with us on – we decided to spread the porky love further. In the Harlequins Stoop car park we set up for our first day ever of trade with our mum and Auntie Fran. We were over the moon we came away having made £500, only to realise we’d spent £800. Oops!

2011

March 5

Max moves back to Bristol

Max, our middle brother, had always been close to the business, helping with events since 2008, but, one day in 2010, and over a fry up in a cafe in London, Olly convinced Max to move from the big city life in London back to Bristol and chase the sausage dream. At this point, we were selling our sausages through private events. Olly made a website himself and couldn’t sleep with excitement whenever we’d get a request through for an event. He’d stay up until 2 am watching videos on how to make sausages, and then Josh would spend the day handing them out at the event.

June 9

Michel Roux tries our sausages

Things really began to change in 2011 when Olly met Michel at Quins rugby ground one day, the boys joked that Olly made sausages and Michel asked to sample them. Josh and Olly made their most finest sausage and took them to his Michelin starred restaurant La Gavroche. The next day Michel Roux was asked what his favourite sausage was on GMTV and he said it was ours! Olly’s mobile number was on the website and orders came in like a tsunami. The next year we got to serve Michel Roux Jr our sausages again at the 2012 Aviva Premiere Cup (a day Olly still calls one of the best of his life). Not only did Olly get to share a Jolly Hog sausage with the legends that are Michel Roux Jr and Monica Galetti, but he got to do it with a Premiership medal around his neck. Meanwhile, mum served Michel Roux a warm glass of chardonnay in a plastic cup. Nice one mum ⁠!

2013

January 16

Miss Piggy on the move

As well as selling our porkers in the shops, we still hand out hog roasts & our famous bangers from our beloved air-streamer, Miss Piggy. Since our first events with her, she’s become quite the jet setter, having visited Glastonbury, Cheltenham Festival & Winter Wonderland just to name a few. Miss Piggy went to the races for the first year in 2017 when we pitched up a massive 35x25m tent to sell our Jolly Hog Food from. Since 2018, we have been so excited to bring out more and more porky products, including Jolly Dogs, Gammon, Scotch Eggs, Pigs in Blankets and our slow cooked BBQ range. 2018 was a big year for us. We marked 10 years of our jollyness at Jolly Fest in 2018 and our Porky Blacks were crowned the winner at the 2018 Great British Food Awards. In 2019, we decided to make things a bit more permanent, and launched our fixture at Ashton Gate Stadium, serving up hot dogs to sports fans in Bristol.

2015

January 14

We opened a restaurant

On 4th July 2015 we got together with our friend, and fellow rugby player, Will Collier & decided to put The Jolly Hog sausages in a banger bap and start selling them out of a pop-up sausage Bar…The Banger Bar, based in Shoreditch, London. We realised lots of people wanted to enjoy more proper pork, so we got together again and on 17th October 2016, our Bristol restaurant, Pigsty, was born. We thought there was nowhere better to open our restaurant than in Bristol itself. After Olly spent the day with a clicker seeing how many people walked over the bridge nearby, we decided to open Pigsty in a shipping container on Bristol’s Wapping Wharf.

January 15

Miss Piggy goes to Glastonbury!

We were over the moon when we found out we could pitch up Miss Piggy at Glastonbury Festival in 2013. Situated right in the middle of the Heaven and Hell area, we can confirm that within one hours of sleep a night, we were in fact in Heaven and Hell!

June 12

The sausages go into stores

We received our first ever listing in a supermarket in Ocado. After lots of persuasion and a few pints, the deal was done, and our sausages were finally in supermarkets!

2016

January 6

Taking the piggy to the market!

After mastering the sausage (if we do say so ourselves), we decided to give bacon the jolly treatment. We’d been curing and trialling our own bacon for a few years (we even built our own butchery room in our old office) so the next step was to take this piggy to the market!

2020

March 1

On the Trot opens

In 2020, we decided to take The Jolly Hog for a journey when we opened our first ever ‘The Jolly Hog: On The Trot’ in Bath Spa Station. After travelling back and forth to London lots on the train, and being unimpressed with the lack of decent bacon sarnies on offer, we decided that we wanted to open a place where people could get a great tasting sandwich on the trot!

2021

January 1

We’ve flown the coop!

In one of our most exciting moves yet, we decided it was time to try our hand at the humble chicken sausage. We wanted to make a chicken sausage we could really sink our teeth into, so on January 1st 2021 we flew the coop and launched our first ever non-porky product!

the team