At the height of the vegan sausage roll furore, I was idly looking around for other things to like about Greggs, beyond that the bakery giant had enraged Piers Morgan. I was already a fan, on account of its Tottenham cake, an outsized slab of sponge with an unnaturally pink icing. That treat was invented by a Quaker in Tottenham and originally sold for a penny a slice, although that was 150 years ago; the price, at the peak of my fandom (2007), was £1.20.
Anyway, back in the vegan era (2019), I found an employee chatroom praising the chain as a broadly OK employer, with one standout comment that, even though staff were technically allowed only hot drinks for free, they regularly got a load of baked goods as well, with one sales assistant saying he ate £10 to £15 worth of free food every lunchtime. How can anyone get through that many doughnuts, sausage rolls and steak bakes? Unbelievable stomach capacity.
Greggs is now credited as part of the cause of the fall in sales at McDonald’s – the company just suffered its first global profit decline since the pandemic. In the UK, there has been a 1% drop in same-store sales, which is largely being put down to 30% price increases – and yet, simultaneously, enter Greggs and its stealthy transformation from a bakery to a quick-service restaurant. In the end, you can brand-build all you like, but if the offer is “We are the cheapest”, that is something people can count for themselves.
It’s emphatically not national pride that puts me on Greggs’ side in this face-off, more a reflexive rooting for the little guy and a belief that, if called upon to chime in on a culture war, Greggs would choose the vegans over the shock jocks and McDonald’s would say something corporate and lame like: “We value all our customers.”
The vegan sausage rolls are weirdly delicious. If you found out it was all an elaborate hoax and they were actually made of meat, you wouldn’t be surprised; they are that delicious. But Greggs would never hoax you, because Greggs has class.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
