Why DO Britons buy five Greggs sausage rolls every second?
HARRY WALLOP spends a frantic day behind the counter to find out
WHAT is Britain’s favourite lunchtime treat from the High Street? You might think it was the Marks & Spencer prawn sarnie, a product that kick-started the packaged sandwich revolution. More than 5 million are eaten each year. or possibly the Big Mac, 50 years old this week — an astonishing 90 million of them are sold in this country annually.
But both of these are outstripped by something that costs a mere 95p and has slowly, but steadily, won a legion of admirers: the Greggs sausage roll, which is sold at a mind-boggling rate of nearly 5 every second. or 145 million a year.
This loyalty towards the sausage roll has helped the company become one of the winners on the struggling High Street. While many other shops reported falling sales and profits over the Christmas period, Greggs said sales had continued to forge ahead and it planned to open another 130 outlets this year, taking its total to just shy of 2,000.
More than this, it is a company that inspires genuine affection. When, this week, it offered customers the chance to enjoy a romantic, candlelit Valentine’s Day dinner at a Greggs — because who needs champagne and oysters when you can have a steak bake and some mini doughnuts? — the £15 tickets sold out in just 20 minutes. What’s the secret to its success? To find out I spent a day working behind the counter in a Greggs in East London.
Under the watchful eye of Lynne Bayram, 51, the manager, I attempt to make coffees, restock the shelves with soup, sandwiches and macaroni cheese pots, try not to confuse a cheese and onion bake with a vegetable one (the pattern on the top of the pastry is the giveaway: cheese and onion is V-shaped, a veg one has little birds), and put customers’ orders through the till.
This turns out to be fiendishly difficult, thanks to the fact that Greggs sells an astonishing variety of goods. I thought it was not much more than a sausage roll and tea outlet. I was wrong.
AT One point, I mutter: ‘ oh god, this is a nightmare,’ as I fail to find the button for Belgian shortbread on the till and then don’t realise that four mini jam doughnuts are listed, on the till, under ‘sweet, multipacks’.
A Tottenham cake (a sponge cake topped with lurid pink icing) added by the customer at the last minute throws me into a tailspin.
‘I don’t want you serving customers if you’re telling them they are a nightmare,’ Lynne, a lifelong East Ender, reproaches me.
It’s not a great start. I am demoted to refilling the coffee machine.
My ineptitude, luckily, fails to dent this branch’s popularity. And boy, is it popular! This Greggs, a fairly small outlet in Whitechapel, is continually busy. Sometimes a queue of 20 people stretches to the door. no wonder it turns over more than £16,000 a week, helping to contribute to the company’s annual sales of £894 million.
This branch is helped by being in a particularly busy area of East London, across the road from a hospital as well as the main campus for Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry. Around the corner is an enormous building site, part of the Crossrail project. There is a steady stream of both students and what Lynne calls ‘ the orange jackets’ — workmen.
one, originally from Goole in Yorkshire, has ordered a hot bacon roll with brown sauce: £1.80.
‘nothing wrong with this place,’ he says. ‘I come every day. I have a steak bake for my dinner, and bacon roll for breakfast with a cup of tea. I have confidence in what they sell. It’s quality.’
This branch only opened in September last year. Where did he go before? ‘Sainsbury’s. This is 200 per cent better. You get hot food here.’ He has struck on one of the keys to Greggs’ success: hot breakfast.
Until recently Greggs was known by many as ‘Greggs, the bakers’. All the branches would sell a wide selection of loaves and they would slice your bread in-store too.
But three years ago, the last of the slicers were taken out. The branch I am working in has just one small shelf of pre-sliced loaves.
‘Bread and rolls used to make up over half of the sales in the Seventies,’ explains Roger Whiteside, the chief executive, ‘now, it’s only 1 or 2 per cent of sales.’
In the loaves’ place behind the counter is a cooker for the bacon, sausage and egg omelette used in the breakfast rolls. And, in recent months, a lunch menu has been launched in some stores (including this one). It includes macaroni cheese, potato wedges and chicken goujons.
At one point, I have to inspect a meat thermometer thrust into a goujon to check it has reached the requisite 80C — a new menu means new kit.
But Whiteside thinks it’s all worth it. He joined in 2013 after a career that not only involved launching ocado, the online supermarket, but also running Marks & Spencer’s sandwich department.
When he took over, Greggs was struggling. It had always had ups and downs since its first shop opened in the north-East, on Gosforth High Street in 1951, but it had mostly thrived, taking over rival chains and expanding shop numbers.
However, five years ago sales were falling heavily and profits had nosedived. Many thought it was a tired brand, selling uninspiring, greasy food, while the likes of Costa, Starbucks and Pret a Manger and the supermarkets stole its customers.
‘We were trying to compete on a local bakery front, a food-on-the-go front, and a coffee shop front. We decided we can’t win on all those. So we concentrated on food-on-the-go.’
THIS involved opening longer hours, specifically early in the morning. If you are going to pay large rents and business rates to operate in the High Street, you might as well try to get the tills ringing for as many hours of the day as possible, especially now when we live in an increasingly 24hour society.
‘We saw where markets were going and one of the trends was the growth of breakfast, people eating breakfast away from home,’ says Whiteside.
The next step, he believes, is opening in the evening serving hot food and keeping stores open until 9pm. Which is where Valentine’s Day at Greggs comes in.
of course, it is a stunt. A mere five shops, serving 100 customers in total, will be given the white-tablecloth-and- candelabra treatment. But it has caught the imagination of customers. It is also a useful way of gently suggesting that Greggs is more than just a pasty shop. Most of
the customers I ask had heard about the event. Mina, a carer buying doughnuts, said: ‘If my husband took me to Greggs, I’d divorce him!’
But there are quite a few tickled by the idea.
Duane Turpin, 45, an engineer working on Crossrail has come in for a tuna and cucumber sandwich with a sausage roll. ‘Their sausage rolls are perfect. They are definitely as good as home-made,’ he says. ‘It’s the pastry. Nice and crispy and flaky’.
He reckons his other half would quite like to be taken out to Greggs on February 14. ‘She’s not a flowers and card kind of woman; but she is partial to a sausage roll and a Danish.’
Amber, 20, a fashion student from Lancashire, who has come in for a cup of tea and a sausage roll, says: ‘I love Greggs. A brew and pasty, that’s what Greggs is good at. And it’s cheap.’ Her tea and sausage roll cost £2.25, less than a large cup of tea in Starbucks.
Bryan Roberts, a retail expert and director at TCC Global, points out that Greggs has, in part, been lucky. The rise of food- on-the-go has helped them, with an increasing number of consumers prepared to eat a meal at their desk or steering wheel. ‘But they are also very good at making sure they are in touch with all the different trends. Their healthy eating range has done particularly well.’
This was one of the many things that surprised me, working at Greggs: the sheer number of Balanced Choice products that customers were buying. This is a range introduced a couple of years ago, which includes sandwiches, fruit pots and salads that have fewer than 400 calories.
For many people, Greggs is synonymous with iced buns and sausage rolls, the type of brand staples that have come in for criticism from the healthy eating lobby. Just one sausage roll packs in 349 calories with 25g of fat, the same as in a Big Mac (adults are recommended to eat no more than 70g of fat a day).
And the sweet treats are no better. One glazed ring doughnut containing 191 calories and 22g of sugar, hefty when the Recommended Daily Allowance for added sugar is 30g. The worst item for this on the sweet menu, the classic Belgian bun, contains a whopping 54g of sugar. That said, some of the Balanced Choice options are positively waistline trimming, the chargrill chicken salad, for example, containing only 200 calories.
Another unexpected thing was how much of the food was made in- house. The sausage rolls, baguettes and bakes arrive frozen from a central warehouse and are then baked in the shop’s oven.
But all the sandwiches are made by hand at the back of the shop in the morning — 325 on the day I was there. Four of the six staff on duty that day had arrived at 5.30am, an hour before opening, to make them, as well as top up yoghurt pots with granola, bag up yum- yums and box up doughnuts. ‘It’s what makes it fresher,’ says Lynne, who has worked for Greggs for ten years.
‘If it was in plastic the whole time, it would get soggy.’ She’s seen lots of changes. ‘They’ve got their eye on what people want. They seem to get it right. All the mainstays like sausage rolls are still here. But these days you get a lot of quick changes like salads, they do mix it up a bit now,’ adding that it is sometimes hard to keep up with the endless changing menu. Working there, there’s not a minute of downtime. I am continually making hot chocolates, replacing the milk in the coffee machine or taking out sausage rolls and bakes from the oven. The staff are paid a bit more than the National Living Wage. Charlie, who is only 18, has already been promoted to senior team member and is on £8.22 an hour. All staff — from Whiteside, who took home £2.1 million last year, to employee Megan, on £7.72 an hour — enjoy a 50 per cent staff discount. Whiteside says he uses it for a frequent sausage roll. Megan, who is vegan, says: ‘That’s the one thing I’d say about Greggs. They need to up their vegan range.’ She points out that even the bread has milk powder in. ‘It’s hard when you are on breaks, because there’s not much you can eat.’
Even this trend, however, is one that Greggs intends to tackle. Whiteside says a vegan sandwich will hit the shelves soon, but replacing all that butter in the pastries will be difficult.
‘We’re finding it more challenging in the savoury pastry area. That’s what people are most keen on, but we haven’t found anything yet.’
Evening meals, low-calorie salads, katsu chicken wraps, witty on Twitter, a vegan option — it’s a long way from the days when Greggs was dismissed by snobs as ‘just a shop for Geordies’, as Mr Roberts at TCC Global says.
‘The perception of Greggs used to be: northern, cheap and pretty down at heel. But its stores are very nice, the service is good, the fact it prepares so much fresh stuff in-house, that all adds up to a very credible business.’
It does. But, reassuringly, it still sells an awful lot of sausage rolls. Thanu, a medical student, tells me, as I serve her: ‘I always come here. It’s healthier than going to McDonald’s. And anyway I’ve got one of these.’
She shows me a Balanced Choice chicken salad sub roll in her hand. But then she spots the sausage rolls that I have just taken out of the oven. ‘Ooh, I’m going to have a sausage roll, I’ll put this back,’ she laughs.
It’s my first sale of the day. One down, another 144,999,999 to go.