The Jacket Potato Comeback Is TikTok's Spud Glow-Up

The humble baked potato is having the most unlikely glow-up of the year. The Jacket Potato Comeback has turned a school-dinner staple into a TikTok-era sensation, with queues snaking around the block in Preston, supermarket searches soaring, and copycat businesses multiplying — all powered by Gen Z's appetite for food that is cheap, filling, and impossible to fake.

This is not a small blip. Across Britain, the spud has gone from cafeteria afterthought to cultural event, and the numbers behind the revival are startling. What began as a few viral food-truck videos has become a full-blown business boom, a supermarket restocking rush, and — in one Welsh county — a school-lunch revolution.

The numbers behind the spud surge

Start with the searches. Waitrose reported that searches for "jacket potato" on its website rose by more than fourfold over the past year, while searches for "baked potato" more than tripled, as home workers made the jacket their go-to lunch, according to trade publication Fruitnet. By the end of last year, sales of large potatoes at the same retailer were up by a third year on year. A separate poll commissioned by Subway found that nearly every UK adult — more than nine in ten — eats a jacket potato at least once a week, suggesting the revival is building on a habit that never really died.

The business data is even louder. In 2023, just seven food-related businesses with the word "spud" in their name opened in Britain. In 2024, that number shot past forty — and last year it topped seventy, reported by BritBrief. It is the kind of growth curve usually reserved for bubble tea or fried chicken, except the product is a potato that costs pennies.

How two brothers made potatoes go viral

At the center of the story are Jacob and Harley Nelson, the brothers behind SpudBros, who sell loaded jacket potatoes out of an old tram carriage in Preston city centre. Their formula is deceptively simple: crisp skins, split open and fluffed up, finished with generous toppings — filmed up close so the steam and melting cheese do the marketing. The approach has earned them millions of followers across TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, turning a Lancashire lunch van into a national phenomenon.

The brothers' rise has spilled well beyond social media. Preston North End announced the pair as the club's front-of-shirt sponsor for the 2025-26 season, a deal the younger brother called a dream come true, reported by BBC Sport — a remarkable leap for a business that traces its roots to a hot potato cart first set up in the city in 1955. SpudBros has since opened outlets in London, Liverpool, and Sheffield, and signed deals to develop an express franchise concept for roadside service stations, with trial stores run alongside a major forecourt operator.

The contrast with the recent past is stark. Spudulike, the high-street baked potato chain, closed its remaining three dozen branches in 2019 after struggling with falling footfall and rising costs. The Jacket Potato Comeback is not a return of that old model — it is something new wearing an old skin: street-food energy, social-media distribution, and Gen Z customers who film their lunch before they eat it.

Schools are getting in on it too

Perhaps the strangest chapter is playing out in school canteens. In Rhondda Cynon Taf, Wales, caterers have launched a concept called Ty Tatws — Welsh for "potato house" — that rebrands the baked potato with the energy of a high-street food truck. Bright "Spud Stations" now run in several secondary schools, offering daily specials and rotating toppings from beans and cheese to barbecue chicken, with vegetarian options every day.

The county's school catering dietitian said the goal was to make healthy eating feel contemporary and exciting for young people — something closer to street food than traditional school dinners — and that the bright branding and fresh toppings have changed the atmosphere around lunchtimes, according to the council’s announcement. It is a telling sign of how far the trend has traveled: when the school canteen starts copying TikTok, the revival has officially gone mainstream.

Why it works — and whether it lasts

The potato's appeal is easy to decode. It is one of the cheapest complete meals in the supermarket, it carries nostalgia for anyone who grew up on school lunches or cafe suppers, and it photographs beautifully — steam rising off a dark, crisp skin is hard to scroll past. In an era of shrinking grocery budgets and "little treat" spending, a loaded jacket delivers comfort, fullness, and content in a single foil-wrapped package.

There are skeptics, of course. Food fads have a short half-life, and the same social-media machinery that crowned the spud can move on by spring. But the breadth of this one — supermarkets, schools, football shirts, forecourts — looks less like a viral spike and more like a repositioning. The humble potato never actually went away; it just needed better lighting.

For the budget-conscious reader, the takeaway is simple. The Jacket Potato Comeback proves it: the cheapest seat at the comfort-food table is also the most fashionable one right now. Crisp the skin with oil and salt, go generous on the filling, and eat it while it's steaming. Some trends you chase. This one you just bake.

Read next: how childhood comfort foods got a 2026 upgrade, and why cottage cheese became the protein obsession nobody predicted.