Greggs is a peculiar thing.
In case you don't know, it's a chain based in the United Kingdom that's basically half-bakery,
half-sandwich shop.
It's most closely associated with the north of England, where it is a very, very popular
place indeed.
From their humble beginnings, to their PR victories, to their clashes with the British
government, this is the untold truth of Greggs.
Greggs began in 1939 as a simple door-to-door bakery round in Newcastle, but that's not
quite what you'd call the modern iteration of the company.
In fact, in recent years it's made a massive pivot away from the bakery brand towards a
"food-on-the-go" image with the intention of satisfying the need for breakfast, lunch,
and snacks rather than providing simple treats.
Now, Greggs offers everything from sandwiches and salads to soups, yogurt, porridge, fruit
pots, and drinks, in addition to more traditional British bakery favorites like sausage rolls
and sweet treats.
That's not to say those items have been taken out of circulation at Greggs, far from it,
in fact, and you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who associates the name with porridge
rather than pasties.
But some traditions have taken a hit as Greggs has stepped into this new world.
Most notable of all of these is bread, which many of the chain's stores stopped selling
in 2015.
The reason?
A lack of consumer interest.
In early 2019, Greggs hit headlines around the world after it stirred up a bunch of controversy
with the release of its vegan sausage roll.
In the wake of the company's announcement of their new meat-free roll, notorious offence-taker
and television personality Piers Morgan took up arms against Greggs for this, tweeting:
"Nobody was waiting for a vegan bloody sausage, you PC-ravaged clowns."
The spat made them the talk of Twitter for at least a few days, and gave the vegan sausage
roll more publicity than the company's initial post could have ever done.
So much so, in fact, that Greggs fans were left distraught after they showed up hoping
to purchase one and see what the fuss was all about and found that they'd sold out.
Not exactly a PR disaster for Greggs, but we're not sure you could say the same for
Morgan.
In 2012, the U.K. was deep in the midst of the Conservative government's austerity program,
a series of highly controversial policies implemented to try to repair the country's
fragile economy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
It was during this time that Greggs found itself embroiled in a battle against the government,
when, as part of the austerity budget for that year, Chancellor George Osborne introduced
a tax hike of 20 percent on hot takeout snacks, which included pasties.
What became known as the "pasty tax" pretty much constituted a scandal.
Some criticized it as an act of class warfare, on the basis that most people who enjoyed
the foods hit by the tax were of a lower socioeconomic class.
Things weren't helped when Osborne admitted in Parliament that he couldn't remember the
last time he had eaten a bake from Greggs.
The outrage was real.
"Ed Milliband immediately went with Ed Balls to Greggs."
"Yeah."
"And they both ate a pie, and the tory cabinet had to all go to Greggs.
'What is this?'"
Eventually, the government was forced into a humiliating climbdown, and a concession
was allowed in which pasties and other bakery items were made exempt from the tax if they
were allowed to cool down after removal from the oven.
It's all in the details.
What could possibly be better than tucking into a hot, fresh steak bake?
Why, watching someone make one on camera, of course.
Luckily, that's exactly what you can do thanks to Greggs: More Than Meats The Pie, a documentary
series about the company which aired in 2013.
The show followed Greggs staff members and workers around the U.K. as they each went
about their assorted jobs.
One episode, for example, focused on the Newcastle-based plant which creates the chain's sausage rolls.
Another saw a group of women strip down and bare all in front of a photographer taking
pictures for their naked charity calendar.
Dramatic stuff, you understand.
According to a review in The Guardian,
"[...] there's literally no grumbling, no engineered antagonism, posturing or sneering;
only industrious sorts in hairnets calling sausage rolls 'my little soldiers,'... and
the sort of cheerily naff parochialism that tends to inspire a faint, generalized proud-to-be-Britishness."
What's not to love?
It's difficult to stress just how successful Greggs' has been within the U.K., so let's
put it into perspective.
Greggs has somewhere around 1,850 stores in its home country, and by comparison, there
are approximately 1,300 McDonald's restaurants situated in the U.K.
That means, by number of outlets, Greggs is actually bigger than McDonald's… at least,
in Britain.
There are few chains that have got the edge on Greggs, in fact.
One is Costa Coffee, which, as of 2017, owned 2,389 U.K. stores, while another is Subway,
which opened its 2000th store in the U.K. and in Ireland back in 2015.
Aside from that, however, you'll find few major companies which have quite managed to
match the sheer degree of success that Greggs has achieved… outside of Cornwall, at least.
It wasn't until 2018 that they opened their first store there, much to the chagrin of
locals who didn't appreciate the chain making a knock-off of one of their favorite traditional
foods, the Cornish pasty.
Still, not too shabby, indeed!
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