A FORMER Royal Navy air traffic controller has left the armed forces behind after 22 years to open an award-winning pizza business in Taunton.
Andrew 'Jumper' Collins, 40, from Taunton, is behind the town's newest street food pizzeria Ludacrust — which you may have spotted at Taunton Together or the Quantock Brewery Tap.
Jumper's journey to opening Ludacrust has been a truly unique one, with some of his first pizzas cooked up during his service on the HMS Queen Elizabeth in an oven "designed for curing parts for the F35 fighter jet".
Keeping morale up on the ship during a long pandemic deployment, Jumper started his speakeasy known as the Circle of Crust where he'd cook up pizza from "a few stolen galley ingredients" for his shipmates.
Jumper said: "It all started in the unlikeliest of places, deep in the hull of HMS Queen Elizabeth [an aircraft carrier] where I found an oven meant for curing F35 parts and transformed it into a pizza oven.
"It was a risky endeavour, but fortune favours the brave. We were deployed for nine months in 2021 and everyone onboard had Covid so countries wouldn't let us come alongside.
"We were stuck at sea and the chefs couldn't get fresh provisions, so the food was rotten, to be honest. We were all working eight hours on, eight hours off, so it was the only thing we had to look forward to really."
After getting back onto dry land, Jumper "started to legitimise the enterprise" in Yeovilton, where he cooked up pizzas in a small oven and took donations for charity.
Encouraged by the positive response to his pizzas, Jumper launched his street food pizzeria Ludacrust and decided to go full-time with the endeavour in September.
Ludacrust has already gained a Gold Award from the Taste of The West, with a critic writing: "It would be difficult to believe you could get any better street food." It has also been awarded a five-star food hygiene rating.
Jumper has big plans for Ludacrust, and Taunton could see a permanent Ludacrust restaurant open "this time next year if the right property becomes available".
Ludacrust can regularly be found at Somerset Boat Centre, a "budding venue" on Taunton and Bridgwater Canal. It also frequents Quantock Brewery Tap in Bishops Lydeard [next visit October 17], and North Down Orchard in Crewkerne. Ludacrust will be at Langport Artisan Market on October 19.
Check Ludacrust's socials, @ludacrust_pizza on Instagram, to catch them near you.
Jumper said: "Ludacrust represents a blank canvas for me to paint my future after being under the auspices of a massive organisation and being highly regulated. I feel as if I've won my freedom because now I've got this flexibility, knowledge, and ability to move forward with my life."
He added: "There are so many skills I've learnt from the Navy over 22 years, like regulatory compliance as an air traffic controller, for example, getting all the boxes ticked. I genuinely don't have a business without my friends, and most of those are in the Navy."
Jumper will soon be taking a short break to reset his "pizza calibrator" at his favourite pizzeria in Naples.
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