Greggs: Striking the Right Balance

On Friday we headed down to Lunch! food-to-go show for a day of meeting food brands and startups, sampling new products, and listening to some of the industry keynote speakers.

We were particularly interested in David Ross keynote, head of category for high street bakery chain Greggs. Love it or loathe it – the pastry giant has become an established and nostalgic icon of food to go on the British high street.

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With the current trends of wellness and healthy eating showing no signs of slowing down – how can a brand famous for selling sausage rolls and pastries for over 75 years adapt and diversify to appeal to a health conscious consumer?

Here we’ve rounded up some of David’s key points from the session:

In changing perceptions and introducing new healthier products the everyday customer click with it straight away – the occasional customer takes much longer to sway their opinions (they don’t visit as often and have a very fixed view of Greggs, referring to it as a ‘Guilty Pleasure’).

We need to shift the opinion of the Guilty Pleasure so consumers know they can come to us on Friday for a bacon roll, but can also come to us on Monday for a healthy yoghurt.

In our marketing we’ve started to put healthy options in our key campaigns, on shelf and in retail, and have included calorie markers on all products including salads and dressings.

To live up to our word that the new Greggs products can be healthy and actually help you lose weight, we launched a ‘Minimise Me’ food plan where customers ate just Greggs products for 30 days all verified by an independent nutritionalist. Everybody who was involved lost weight, we gained unique feedback and insights and the campaign had a reach of 5 billion people.

We have been monitoring social media in real-time to see consumers reactions to healthy product introductions.

Also visited a food festival over the Summer period and created a fake brand in order to test new products on discerning consumers to gauge reactions – this marketing campaign was hugely successful and the video had over 2.5 million hits. (Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tibTtj5vY1Y)