Why Greggs is working. The bakery chain is making more dough than ever as it appeals to tradesmen and the moneyed classes alike. Is expansion overseas next, Oliver Gill asks its chief executive.

Greggs does not take American Express, something that one well-heeled customer in Godalming, Surrey, appeared to have overlooked. Clutching a bag of pastries in one hand and an iPhone in the other, he toggled his Apple Pay from an Amex Gold to a Coutts credit card, completed his contactless payment and rushed out into the morning sun.

Nestled alongside Amy Lou's fruit and veg store, Flowers by Rosemary and the Godalming fishmonger, customers were queuing out the door in the leafy market town when The Sunday Times visited one day last week. One of them left tutting that it was taking too long to be served. ‘It's cheap,’ another said. ‘It's not the best coffee, but Costa and Caffe Nero are much more expensive.’

When John Gregg opened his first shop in the Newcastle suburb of Gosforth in 1951, surely even in his wildest dreams he could not have imagined the popularity his eponymous bakery has attained. Now with more than 2,300 stores across the UK, Greggs has become something of a national treasure and a brand with cult status among social media influencers on TikTok and Instagram to boot.

For many tradesmen, a Greggs bacon roll and coffee for £2.70 is a staple of their weekly diet. To the middle classes, it has become a guilty pleasure. And if the branch in Godalming is anything to go by, even those who qualify for an account at the ‘King's bank’ pop in for a bite.

When Greggs floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1984, investors were willing to pay £1.35 per share. By 2012 the stock hit £5, and despite a wobble after the pandemic it has since soared to more than £25. Last week Greggs announced half-year sales of almost £850 million equivalent to takings of more than £4.5 million a day.

Primark even stocks a Greggs clothing range. But the baker's fame is comparatively new-found for a company whose heritage dates back to the 1930s.

‘They have done what McDonald's did in America 50 years ago. It's a very simple menu that can be done in mass in huge volumes. And the genius is that they've entered the national psyche,’ said Kien Tan, a director in retail strategy at the consulting giant PwC.

Most of this change, however, has come only in the past decade.

Greggs, which still has its head office in Newcastle, was ‘confused’ until Ian Durant, then the chairman, hired Roger Whiteside as chief executive in 2013, former directors said. The appointment of Whiteside, at the time seen as a strange selection after a three-year stint at the off-licence Threshers, marked a ‘seminal moment’ for the business, they added.

‘Whiteside pivoted the business towards being primarily a food-to-go operation with manufacturing facilities,’ one ex-director said. ‘Before then, there was a degree of confusion about whether Greggs was a manufacturing business that sold its product through outlets, or a retail business that happened to manufacture most of the food that it sold.’

Roisin Currie, who replaced Whiteside at the start of the year on a salary of £1.26 million, said Greggs's transformation had been less about trailblazing and more about spotting market trends.

‘We're always looking to others for great ideas,’ she said. ‘We've never been known as the innovator. We watch our competition ... and then we try and copy quickly and try and then “Greggsify”, if that's a word?’

Greggs's vegan sausage roll, launched in 2019, is perhaps the best example of this. Whiteside and his team were hardly at the vanguard of veganism, but they hooked onto the bandwagon of meat alternatives just at the right time.

Not even Piers Morgan's well-documented criticism of the product (he claimed he nearly vomited after trying one live on ITV) could stop it from being a runaway success. Profits rose by half in the first six months of 2019, with the product ranking in Greggs's five most popular ever.

(Gill, 2023)