Patrick ‘Patch’ Hyde is a ball of friendly energy. The eponymous founder of Greenwich Market’s Fudge Patch, he brings so much more to his job than sweet, buttery treats!

Patch welcomes visitors into his shop by creating an experience, like some sugar-coated ringmaster. With the vast marble cooking slab as its inner ring, this is his circus, and he draws visitors into the performance. Customers may start shy, but the ‘almost aggressively welcoming environment’ he generates soon brings them onside. ‘Being funny and offering people sweets’ as Patch puts it, is a winning combination – he’ll have them sampling flavours they never knew they’d love, and learning the fudge making process while they’re at it.

Patch has been making fudge since he was 16, working weekends and holidays at ‘big dogs’, The Fudge Kitchen. A trained actor who studied at East 15 Acting School, he kept working for them throughout his studies, serving his ‘apprenticeship’ and selling their wares at UK food festivals like the Good Food Show, the York Food Show and Bath Christmas Market. The fun and freedom Patch found on the festival circuit led him to question his primary direction in life. So, after his Mum suggested, ‘You like fudge more than acting!’, he became Fudge Kitchen’s training manager, then their operations manager.

Knowing fudge as he does and looking to pour his energies into a single shop rather than overseeing seven or eight, Patch eventually decided to strike out on his own. After some difficulties with a less-than-bulletproof business plan, he was given a small shop in in Greenwich Market in 2018. The Market took a chance, and the Fudge Patch blossomed!

Patch cites his wife, Kim (alongside his Mum!) as his fudge-making ‘muse’. The couple love to travel, and the freedom of having their own shop, which they can leave in the capable hands of staff like Raef and Shannon during quiet months like January, means they can take off on the regular. Backpacking the Pacific Northwest trail is their next goal.

The Fudge Patch make a very old-fashioned style of confectionery known as ‘soft-cracked slab fudge’, which to Patch’s knowledge is only made by seven other manufacturers in the UK. It’s basically ‘loads of sugar and a little cream’, tempered to completion. It’s a skill and a process that goes back more than 200 years and was first popularised on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron in the United States. ‘We’re not chefs though’, insists Patch: ‘to make a smooth fudge is more like pottery, or plastering.’

All of Patch’s fudge uses dairy-free milk, meaning vegans can happily join in. Obviously, he’s happy that no barriers exist to people enjoying his creation, but the original decision was made with taste and quality in mind. Patch didn’t like the ‘curdled’ taste that heated milk imparts to fudge. Experimenting with different plant-based milks, he found that hemp was the way to go, producing a superior result that all can enjoy. Now, according to Patch, lemon sherbet is the ‘must try’ variety of 40 rotating flavours.

Having done a play called Arrows in Greenwich in his acting days, Patch fell in love with the borough. Now, established as one of Greenwich Market’s iconic food creators, he’s somewhere he belongs. The Fudge Patch has taken root here and, travels aside, Patrick won’t be moving any time soon!