A new documentary airing tonight takes a deep-dive into the biggest secrets behind beloved bakery Greggs, detailing a number of interesting factoids which sausage roll lovers and fast-food fans may not know about the North East-founded company and its success. With a million sausage rolls sold each and every day, there's no doubt that the nation favours the cheap and easy bakery which bolsters over 2,000 stores nationwide.
Greggs: Secrets of Their Best Bakes airs this evening at 8pm on Channel 5 and explores a world-rarely seen by the general public with regards to the famous blue and yellow bakery, with Grace Dent hosting. And with more than 30 stores across Newcastle alone, the 49-year-old says it's no wonder that John Gregg's 1939 start-up has become such a Northern success story.
She said: "Geordies feel they absolutely own Greggs - 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!"
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The Mirror reports that she continued: "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 over 70 items on the ever-bolstering menu, the chain has well and truly cracked its sales pitch and product placement. First and foremost, it's cut all of the extra frills.
The sausage rolls are produced in massive batches from a central factory, before being loaded onto lorries and sent to every corner of the country. Each fresh box is then baked in store for 18 minutes - no more, no less - before being presented behind the famous glass counter, warm from the oven.
Once bought, the rolls are wrapped into their iconic blue and white bag, containing the trademark 'Greggs fold' - a vertical crease along the length of the pastry allowing ease of access to punters while they are on the go. And with numerous amounts of beige bakes, there's another secret that staff use to distinguish the difference between the tasty treats.
Each bake has a different marking on the top, so you can automatically tell what's inside. The steak bake holds diagonal slashes on its crust, while the chicken bake sports wavy lines. Arrows are present on a cheese and onion pasty, while sausage and bean melts have horizontal lines from side to side.
The beef and veggie pasty has a 'humptiback' which is Geordie slang for pinched frills along its arched top. And the secret markings aren't just for coding purposes either, but they also allow steam to escape in the cooking process to retain a moist, but not soggy texture.
“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,” said 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. Supply Chain Quality Manager, Errol Eland, added: "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."
A single layer more than 96 and you’d start to see cracking at the sides.
Another secret is that the vegan products are all handled by yellow tongs to avoid cross-contamination with the carnivorous products. Also shown in the documentary, the Newcastle bakery opened up its top-secret lab to cameras for the first-ever time, allowing viewers to see the wizardry behind the scenes first hand - as well as the unsurprising science at the heart of the products.
One final life hack from the experts is to study your filled doughnut next time you get one, says bakery manager Mark Moody. He winked: "If you can spot the injection site you should eat that side first, as that’s where the filling will ooze out."
There are, or course, a number of things that 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.
Greggs: Secrets of Their Best Bakes airs on Wednesday at 8pm on Channel 5.
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