“110% or nothing”: Jonathan Woollard ’00 on pubs, superfoods, and building strength

A committed music student, actor, and athlete before that combination was considered “cool,” Jonathan Woollard ’00 discovered his trademark drive at ASL. After a family illness derailed his plans to pursue opera professionally, he found a new calling in pubs and hospitality, becoming a founding partner of the Fulham-based Yellow Panda Pub Co. in 2015. Now in his 40s, Jonathan has gone all in once again: developing All You Need Superfoods with his sister, Juliette (Woollard) Bryant ’96, and launching Yellow Panda Power, a fitness studio built around his love of kettlebell training. Read on to see how Jonathan continues to turn commitment into impact.

Jonathan Woollard ’00 had worked in hospitality and food service for nearly a decade when he was first asked to help right the ship at a struggling spot where he’d once worked. It was 2011, and the UK had only just emerged from the Great Recession. Pubs and restaurants around London were suffering, and Jonathan quickly realized that he was a talented struggling restaurant whisperer. He helped course-correct that first restaurant (Pissarro, perched just over the Thames in Chiswick), and then developed a hands-on restaurant consulting practice, eventually hiring a team so that, together, they could work with several establishments at once. 

He had soon spent enough time helping pubs and restaurants get out of trouble that he knew he would never want the hassle of owning one himself, Jonathan remembers.

But two of his friends had other ideas. “Their background was in insurance,” Jonathan says. “I told them, ‘Your profit-to-cost ratio in the insurance business is basically opposite to pubs.’ You do not want to get involved in this.” It was 2015, and Jonathan and his friends were out for drinks. It was late.

One of his consulting clients, the owner of a Fulham pub called The Rylston, was sick at the time, and looking to sell—even though, with Jonathan’s help, the pub was 18 months into a real turnaround. 

“I got home around 4 in the morning, woke up my girlfriend, and said, ‘I need to put a business plan together, because we’re going to buy the Rylston,’” Jonathan remembers. “She asked, ‘When do you have to have that ready for?’ and I said, ‘I’ve got the meeting at 9.’” 

Jonathan wasn’t into cooking or hospitality as a kid. He was into music and wrestling, and devoted nearly all of his time to them throughout his ASL high school days in the late ’90s.

“I probably got into sports first, and this was back when musicals, music, acting, and sports were polar opposites,” Jonathan remembers. “It was maybe the mid-2000s when it became ‘cool,’ with your Glees and High School Musicals. We definitely predated that.” 

It was the start of Grade 10, Jonathan believes, when his musical childhood (years of piano lessons; a musically inclined household) and longtime interest in acting came together in the ASL performing arts program, and he stumbled head-on into what he calls “the music side of things.”

At the same time, he was a committed wrestler. “Our coach was Kevin Darkus (ASL 1998–2009), who was a world silver medalist and a national champion in the US,” Jonathan says. Coach Darkus held the team to incredibly high standards, and they trained accordingly: “We had practice every morning, so we were getting to school around 6 am,” says Jonathan. “We also had practice after school, and sometimes we came in at lunchtime and did another training session then as well.”

Between his wrestling and musical endeavors, which took “at least a couple of hours a day,” Jonathan recalls often staying at school until 7 or 8 in the evening. “This is when there were not any shows happening,” he clarifies. “Shows were on top of that.”

“I really fell in love with both music and wrestling, and that transformed everything. Everything I was turned into this focused, driven person, which I had never been before,” says Jonathan. He graduated in June of 2000, and moved from London to Iowa to attend Simpson College, where he became a Division 2 wrestler and studied vocal performance, hoping to become a professional opera singer someday.

His father was sick, however, and took a turn for the worse during Jonathan’s first semester of college. Jonathan’s mother had passed away at the start of his senior year of high school. The youngest of five, Jonathan was the only one of his siblings whose life, at that time, felt flexible enough to be put on pause. He returned to London after his first semester with the idea of looking after his dad and then returning to Iowa to “restart” college in the fall, but his father’s condition worsened, and Jonathan never went back to Simpson.

Back in London, Jonathan returned to Waverley Place—this time, as a staff member and coach. He assistant-directed former castmates, classmates, and friends in the High School’s 2001 production of South Pacific; he coached wrestling, track and field, and cross country; he helped teach choir classes and offered one-on-one voice lessons for a handful of younger students.

“I was doing all these cool things that I was really not qualified to do yet,” Jonathan says. Still, he eventually started to feel like he’d never left high school, and, upset that he couldn’t go back to college, he decided to make a change.

“There was a pub around the corner from where I lived that was hiring,” says Jonathan of the White Horse on Parson’s Green, in Fulham. “I’d never worked in a pub before, but I’d been in a lot of them, so I thought I’d give it a go.”

For a few years, Jonathan worked pub and restaurant jobs while continuing to assist Coach Darkus with the ASL wrestling team. He distanced himself from music, however, in the wake of a bad car accident, which had damaged Jonathan’s neck and forced him to stop singing. Only now, in his mid-40s, has Jonathan been able to return to music.

By his own admission, Jonathan never does anything in half measures. “I’m 110% or nothing on things,” he says. “I get super focused on whatever I’m doing, even if it’s five different things.”

Reeling from a series of concussions that had ended his own wrestling career—and from the car accident that stopped his singing—Jonathan “really fell in love with the pub side of things,” he recalls. In working at, managing, and, eventually, consulting for restaurants, Jonathan gained a deep knowledge of hospitality. He worked in kitchens, behind bars, and in the front of house, and came to know the higher-level elements of the work, too, from marketing to recruiting to finance.

Jonathan’s approach to consulting, he says, was very active. “I’m going to come in and help you. We’re going to figure out what’s not working—it will be loads of reasons—and we’re going to pick it apart and fix it,” Jonathan would say. “But instead of me just telling you how to fix it, I’m going to fix it with you.”

After Jonathan and his two friends bought the Rylston in 2015, under the umbrella of their newly incorporated Yellow Panda Pub Co., he kept consulting on the side. In 2017, the group purchased a second site, a Kennington local called the Duchy Arms. Jonathan told his co-owners, who are generally silent partners in Yellow Panda, that he would wind down the consulting work so that he could focus more attention on the group’s two pubs.

“My big mistake was building up the first site all around me, or rather, all around a single person,” Jonathan reflects. “If you build a business around yourself, it hinges on you doing everything. When we got the second site, I said, ‘I’ll be there for six to nine months and just get it up and running. We’re going to recreate, in another local environment, exactly what we’ve done at the Rylston.’ But what I realized, spending that time there, was that the Rylston started to suffer—and I’d created this second site around me as well.”

Jonathan found himself playing a game of cat-and-mouse, trying to keep the two pubs afloat without his constant presence, while also acquiring third and fourth Yellow Panda sites. By 2019, the group had grown to four pubs.

The Eight Bells, Fulham’s oldest pub and Yellow Panda’s third, was already doing well when Jonathan and his partners bought it. They decided to let it run, untouched, for six months, before making any changes. Amuse Bouche was purchased soon afterward. (In January, Amuse Bouche served as the warm, wonderful venue for the first-ever all-ISST alumni event, and in March, it underwent a rebrand and name change—it’s now AB Craft Beer and Cocktails—as part of an ongoing effort to make the bar more accessible to its neighborhood.)

Before COVID, and in the midst of these acquisitions, Jonathan and his friends launched the Smile Brigade, a charity project where they would use space at a local hall to serve a big, free, weekly lunch to neighbors who couldn’t afford hot meals. 

Once the pandemic struck, the Smile Brigade needed a safe way to keep feeding community members—and having a crowd of people line up for takeaway food wasn’t going to work in the midst of strict lockdowns. 

“Then the Hammersmith and Fulham chapter of Meals on Wheels fell apart, because the council didn’t know how to cope with the pandemic,” Jonathan recalls. “People started calling us saying they hadn’t had a hot meal in three weeks, and we thought, ‘Could we deliver?’” 

The Brigade began partnering with food charities like City Harvest and anti–food waste companies such as Olio to source free, quality ingredients, and set up a local delivery system. They won National Lottery grants and funding from the local council, crowdfunded individual donations, and were largely volunteer-run. They cooked in the Rylston’s kitchen.

“We would cook every day, and at first we delivered twice a week, but then it turned to four times a week,” says Jonathan. “We were preparing something like 10,000 meals a week, and delivered hot meals, groceries, and toiletries. That was kind of my whole COVID: that, and delivering beer,” he laughs.

Just before the pandemic began, Jonathan had not been feeling well, and went to the doctor for the first time in about 10 years. Jonathan’s cholesterol levels were far too high, as it turned out, likely due to a combination of his very stressful job—his workdays often started at 6 or 7 in the morning, only ending after the close of business, around 1 am—and the eating and drinking habits brought on by that stress, as well as a family history of high cholesterol.

Jonathan’s sister, Juliette (Woollard) Bryant ’96, is a qualified nutritionist and naturopath, and she advised him to start fixing his health problems through natural means and lifestyle changes. “I did a massive U-turn of my life,” says Jonathan. “I stopped drinking and started exercising.” 

He found a kettlebell at home, which he remembered being given at the ASL gym 18 or 20 years earlier, after Coach Darkus had them made specially in the UK for his wrestlers to use. Jonathan vaguely remembered training with the kettlebell as a student, and started doing so again. Soon, he was all in on kettlebell training.

Juliette, meanwhile, had him taking somewhere between 15 and 20 different natural supplements, and, after initially scoffing at Juliette’s suggestion that he cut meat from his diet, Jonathan became a vegetarian. His energy levels soared. “I thought, ‘Maybe there’s something to this,’ and then thought, ‘Surely there’s a product that combines these supplements into one.’” 

He did some research: To his surprise, no such one-stop shop yet existed in the natural supplements realm. Jonathan and Juliette decided to change that, starting out just “mucking around” in Juliette’s home kitchen.

It took the siblings 18 months to develop the initial product for All You Need Superfoods. The flagship product, an entirely nonsynthetic blend of supplements, is a naturally vanilla-flavored powder with a non-soy, plant protein base, and it features vitamins D, C, and B, magnesium, medicinal mushrooms, adaptogens including Ashwagandha, coconut fats, and a mix of supergreens. Jonathan stirs one or two tablespoons a day into a glass of water (it’s delicious), or adds it to smoothies or stovetop cooking.

“It went through a couple of changes, different packaging, et cetera, to get to where we are now with it,” some six years on, Jonathan says. “Since we launched, we’ve developed two protein powders, a creatine, a magnesium, and another adaptogen-and-mushroom performance enhancer called ‘Pro’,” he adds. “Now we’re launching two caffeine-free coffee alternatives with mushrooms and adaptogens.”

All You Need, which, until two years ago, was still being produced in Juliette’s own kitchen, has now expanded into retail, with brick-and-mortar stores beginning to carry its products in addition to the brand’s online shop. 

All You Need, as much as he’s enjoying it, is not quite all that Jonathan needs: For one thing, he still operates both the Eight Bells and AB Craft Beers and Cocktails, where he has put a much greater emphasis on nonalcoholic offerings since the pandemic; an effort to keep the community spirit of the two places alive and well without pressuring anyone to drink.

He’s also started to combine his love of teaching with his newly rediscovered love of kettlebells. Jonathan recently became a certified kettlebell instructor, and launched his own small fitness studio, Yellow Panda Power, where he will teach kettlebells and strength and conditioning.

Once Yellow Panda Pub Co. had sold the Rylston and the Duchy Arms, in 2023 and 2024 respectively, Jonathan picked up some consulting work again. “The pub stuff ticks over, and the consultancy work pays the bills, while I’m trying to grow the superfood and kettlebell businesses,” he says.

Jonathan no longer regularly works until 1 am, but he still doesn’t “switch off” from work until around 10 pm. Whereas he used to carefully schedule his weeks in half-day increments, he’s recently found a better way to get things done. He works in bursts on a given project until he reaches a block. “Then I’ll go, ‘Okay, flick over to this.’ Rather than trying to break through that block, I’ll carry on until I get to a block on the next thing, and then switch back,” Jonathan says. “I’ve got no idea whether it’s a ‘good’ way of working, but it’s the way I’ve got,” he explains. 

“People might say, ‘Have a break, and then come back to it.’” For Jonathan, “my break is doing something else.”