In the summer of 2007, my family stumbled into a Greggs bakery while visiting a faded seaside resort in the north of England. Unimpressed by the stodgy bread and doughnuts, we had no desire to return.
Greggs has recently forced me to revise that opinion. Aided by a wry social media presence, the company has reinvented itself as one of the UK’s most popular purveyors of food on the go. Alongside sausage rolls and meat pies, it sells more coffee in the UK than Starbucks and is the top provider of ready-made sandwiches, according to research by NPD. With 90 per cent of stores now open by 7am, Greggs is the second-largest breakfast chain after McDonald’s.
Since 2013, when chief executive Roger Whiteside took charge with a mandate to give up competing with the supermarkets on selling bread, the company’s regular profits before tax and interest have more than doubled and its market value has quintupled to nearly £2.5bn. Some analysts think it could soon join the FTSE 100.