It sells one million perfectly uniform sausage rolls each day, fans wear its yellow and blue logo unironically on bucket hats, and Line of Duty ’s Vicky McClure once brought a van full of its pastries to feed her crew. As a nation we are in love with Greggs.
With more than 2,000 stores around the UK, and its jam doughnuts flying off the shelves at just 85p a pop, Greggs has become the high street favourite nationwide for hot or cold treats on the go. And now it’s the star of its very own tasty TV show, Greggs: Secrets of Their Best Bakes on Channel 5.
Launched in 1939 by Newcastle baker John Gregg in Gosforth, its hometown alone still has more than 30 stores. Grace Dent, who fronts the documentary, says it’s no wonder the bakery has become such a Northern success story.
“Geordies feel they absolutely own Greggs,” she reveals. “We tried to find a Geordie who had never tried a Greggs, with the idea we’d take them there for the first time. But everyone we asked laughed in our face! Geordies have this real persona of being chirpy, down to earth and always tell the truth, and that always comes through in the Greggs brand.”
With more than 70 different items on the menu - the most expensive, at £9.20, is the pepperoni pizza sharing box, with six servings - the chain has got its sales pitch down to a fine art.
First, it’s cut the extra frills. The sausage rolls are produced in vast batches in a central factory, then loaded onto lorries and distributed around the country. Each fresh box is baked in store for 18 minutes precisely, then presented to the customer behind glass display cabinets, still warm from the oven. Once bought, the roll will be wrapped into a paper bag with the trademark ‘Greggs fold’ - a vertical fold along the length of the pastry to allow for easy access to the tasty treat while on the go.
And with a huge range of beige bakes, it would be easy for busy staff to get confused between the various pastries while serving customers. Greggs has solved that too: each bake has a different marking on its top so you can tell at a glance what’s inside it.
The steak bake features diagonal slashes, while the chicken bake has wavy lines. Arrows denote a cheese and onion bake, and the sausage and baked bean melt boasts horizontal slashes across its width. Lastly, the beef and vegetable pasty has a ‘humptiback’ - Geordie slang for the pinched frills along the arched top of the treat. The vegan sausage roll - which caused such controversy when it was first introduced in early 2019 - is only handled by yellow tongs to limit cross-contamination with the meaty stuff.
For the first time ever, the Newcastle bakery chain has also opened its top-secret lab up to cameras so we can see for ourselves just what wizardry goes on behind the scenes. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, science is at the heart of all its products.
The secret markings aren’t just for coding the products: they actually allow some steam to escape in the oven to keep the pastry moist but not soggy.
“You’re looking for some breakage in the pastry but as you can see they’re evenly spaced for even lift on the product. It’s always science,” says Sukina Coyle, Regional Process Development Manager.
And there’s no egg wash used; instead, a glaze is applied to show the “highlights and lowlights” of the roll.
“Every time you’re eating that pastry, you’re biting into 96 individual layers of flakey pastry, and that’s what contributes to this flakiness in terms of the textures you experience each time,” explains Supply Chain Quality Manager Errol Eland.
A single layer more than 96 and you’d start to see cracking at the sides.
There are some things Greggs will never give away. The sausage roll seasoning mix remains a closely guarded secret - not even the workers on the production line are allowed to know precisely what’s in it. And the white sauce of the chicken bake is souffled using a ‘high shearing’ technique to help with aeration, which could never be replicated at home.
No matter its secrets, Greggs has built up an enormous fan base over the years. It’s not just businesspeople and tradies who flock to its stores: celebrities including rapper Stormzy, singer Ed Sheeran and Oasis rocker Noel Gallagher have all confessed their obsession with Greggs, and even Hollywood star Jake Gyllenhaal has admitted he can’t stay away from the bakery when he’s in the UK.
One final life hack from the experts is to study your filled doughnut next time you get one, says bakery manager Mark Moody.
“If you can spot the injection site you should eat that side first, as that’s where the filling will ooze out,” he winks.
Greggs pastry code:
Steak bake - diagonal slashes
Chicken bake - squiggly lines
Cheese and onion bake - arrows
Sausage and bean bake - horizontal stripes
Beef and vegetable pasty - a ‘humptiback’
* Greggs: Secrets of Their Best Bakes airs on Wednesday at 8pm on Channel 5.
