Coughlans, the family-run bakery chain co-owned by comedian Romesh Ranganathan, has ceased trading after nearly 90 years, entering voluntary liquidation and closing all 32 of its stores across south London, Surrey, Kent and West Sussex with immediate effect. For a business that had spent generations building steady, loyal trade, the end came with startling speed.

The Croydon-based company, founded in 1937 by Jack Coughlan and carried forward since by three generations of the family, employed between 165 and 176 staff. Managing director Sean Coughlan said the decision to liquidate was taken so that suppliers and employees could still be paid in full, rather than risk reaching a point where that was no longer possible.

What makes the collapse so shocking is how recently things looked secure. Accounts filed for the year to 30 September 2025 show a business on the mend, with losses falling from £229,600 in FY24 to £98,800 and turnover up 9% to £6.8 million. Coughlan said March this year had been a strong month, part of a run of solid trading that stretched back through much of the previous year.

Then, within weeks, several unconnected pressures landed at once. April brought increases to employer National Insurance Contributions and the national minimum wage, adding an estimated £20,000 a week to costs overnight. Around the same time, fuel prices rose sharply amid the conflict involving Iran, reportedly doubling the company's fuel bill from £3,000 to £6,000. Then came two summer heatwaves, which Coughlan said cut footfall to roughly half its usual level at precisely the moment outgoings were highest. No single one of these factors would likely have been fatal. Together, arriving almost simultaneously, they proved impossible to absorb.

Ranganathan, who joined the board in 2024 as the first person outside the family to do so in the company's history, said he was devastated by the news.

Coughlans is the third UK bakery chain to enter liquidation in recent weeks, following Norfolk's Kellys Bakeries and Carlisle's Routledges The Bakers, both of which pointed to a similar convergence of rising labour, energy and ingredient costs. Taken together, the three closures suggest that even bakery businesses trading well only months ago now have very little room to absorb shocks that arrive from several directions at once.

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