6.3 Identifying and describing opportunities

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Plant-based bakery products were a natural evolution under Whiteside that started with introducing hot foods before diversifying into salads and falafel.

As David Cameron and successive Tory governments sought to clamp down on unhealthy foods amid rising obesity rates, Greggs appeared to be in the line of fire. ‘Bakery products, by their nature, don’t start from a great place,’ another former Greggs director conceded.

‘[But look at] the amount of sugar, fats and salts they’ve taken out. To do that successfully, you’ve got to do it gradually. Consumers will be turned off if the taste change is too extreme.’ Greggs replaced puff pastry with lower-fat shortcrust pastry, gradually reduced the mayonnaise content in some products and used internal taste-test panels to trial changes to recipes.

Clive Black, head of research at the stockbroker Shore Capital, credited Whiteside with being quick to see the way the political winds were blowing and reducing fat and sugar in the menu. ‘But it was not about throwing the baby out [with] the bathwater,’ Black said which for Greggs meant ‘keeping the sausage roll and the steak bake but evolving the range’.

A Daily Mail inspection earlier this year of the calorific content of the nation’s sausage rolls found that while the Greggs version charted high in the ranking, it had fewer calories than those peddled by Pret A Manger, Marks & Spencer and Ginsters.

Alongside healthier eating and the wooing of the middle classes, Greggs’s success over the past decade has been cemented by a rapid expansion of shops. More recently, it has targeted travel outlets such as railway stations, airports, motorway service stations and drivethrus. It has also opened more than 30 Outlet stores in disadvantaged areas that offer unsold food at a lower price.

The chain’s knack of reinventing itself has served it well, but are there limits to its breakneck growth? Black believes that opportunities still abound in the UK, particularly in the south of England. Greggs has 40 locations in London; Pret A Manger has 282.

Whiteside said in 2015 that growth outside the UK was ‘impossible’. Seven years earlier, Greggs ended a disastrous foray into Belgium, intended to be the launchpad to expand into Germany, France and the rest of the continent. But Currie disagrees: ‘There’s almost nothing off the agenda in terms of where we think we could take the brand and satisfy those needs.’

That said, she added: ‘We don’t have any sort of arrogance that Greggs will work everywhere in the world.’

Options are being considered. Currie refused to be drawn on locations, adding: ‘We’ve got a small team, a sort of an R&D project, which is looking at where we think that may go in the future.’

Tan at PwC said: ‘Like many UK concepts, it would need to flex that suite of products abroad … Greggs needs to find somewhere culturally that would accept what it does.’

While some believe that Ireland is the logical next step, he suggested an English-speaking country further afield, also with a love of pies, was more likely. ‘It might well be Australia or somewhere like that,’ Tan said.

Currie joined the company in 2010 after a fledgling career at Asda. Now at the helm, she surely knows the recipe for Greggs’s famous sausage roll? ‘Oh gosh, no. It’s in a locked box somewhere,’ she said. The details are shared among a handful of people on a strict ‘need to know basis’, Currie added.

Back in Godalming, Edwina Young, 70, will not hear a bad word about Greggs. ‘I love the coffee,’ the retired council worker said, clasping a box of yum-yums for her husband. The couple regularly travel the country in their car and are always looking out for a Greggs at motorway service stations.’

‘After all, as you age, you have to stop a lot more,’ she grinned.