Money saving is on everyone's minds at the moment and shaving a few pennies off here and there makes all the difference. Expensive meals out are the first to go in a cost of living crisis but for those of us already buying cheap food, Greggs is now even cheaper.
Greggs Outlets have been popping up across the country, selling discounted items from the entire bakery line up. There are now 30 of these stores across the UK in Birmingham, Newcastle, Leeds and London to name a few.
In honour of the 30th store opening near London's ExCel Centre, we decided to take a trip and see if the hype was worth it - or if the cheap baked treats were too good to be true.
My expectations were high as I walked to the 30th Greggs Outlet, which is nestled unassumingly in a small estate shopping row on Cundy Road in Newham.
I arrived at the store and made the plunge inside - straight away I noticed that the familiar scent of a Greggs bakery was missing, making the space feel oddly liminal.
An employee was stocking shelves as I walked into the small shop so I expected big things, thinking I had beaten the lunch rush by arriving at midday and would get all the good stuff - I was wrong.
The offerings for lunch were sparse at best, with a total of three festive bakes and one vegan festive bake on the shelves. These were individually priced at £1.25 - a generous 55p saving when compared to a regular Greggs store.
As cold bakes weren't whetting my appetite, I turned to the fridge hoping to find a plethora of discounted hot and cold sandwiches to choose from. Again I was disappointed as the cold selection was limited to some tuna rolls, ham and cheese baguettes or egg sandwiches.
For a hot meal I had only one option - a Vegan Bean and CheeZe Toastie. The sandwiches were all undeniably cheaper than the regular stores - with the baguettes priced at £1.05 and the toastie coming in at 30p more, but the savoury department was distinctly lacking on this Wednesday lunchtime.
Where things picked up was the selection of sweet treats on offer, all for the impressively low price of 55p per box. Usually the doughnuts would set you back £2.55 so these four packs for a fifth of that was a steal, even if they were a day old.
There were boxes and boxes of twin packs of Yum Yums as well as Belgian Buns and the jam doughnuts. What there lacked in savoury, the Outlet made up in sweets.
The idea behind the Greggs Outlet is to sell unsold items at a discounted rate in an attempt to make food more accessible for those struggling and to cut down on food waste. Greggs want 50 of these stores opened across the country by 2025 and some of the profits from each Outlet go to The Greggs Foundation and are given to local community groups.
Unsold food is shipped to the Outlet from other Greggs stores in the area so what's on offer will vary from day to day, depending what was left over elsewhere. I definitely hit it on a bad day for sandwiches - reportedly their opening day on Saturday, December 3, 2022, was much busier with items selling out across the board.
A spokesperson for Greggs told The Mirror: "It very much depends on what's left over from the day before. So they do work a little bit differently to a normal shop but that is the caveat of having day old food being sold through the outlet shops."
They added: "These Outlet shops are helping to support those most in need, it enables those with a tight budget to be able to spend less while still being able to buy food."
Greggs chief executive Roisin Currie said: "As a leading food on the go retailer in the UK, it's important that we do our bit to put an end to food waste and help to tackle poverty, hunger and deprivation across all the communities we operate in.
"We have three channels for giving good food a second chance, we donate it to charities who can make use of it. we offer it to our customers at a discount via the Too Good To Go app and we sell it at a discount through our outlet shops."
While the sentiment behind the outlets is a positive one, the reality of their 30th store was a bit restricted when it came to lunch on a budget.
