Stronger, healthier communities
We pledge to build stronger, healthier communities by helping communities facing financial challenges and making it easier to eat well.
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Giving something back
As a food business, we know that hunger and nutrition are the issues where we are best placed to make a difference.
The British people made Greggs the success story it is today, and we have always looked for ways to give something back. Way back in the 1960s we started with our free pie 'n' peas suppers for older residents in Gateshead, and today, we give 1% of our pre-tax profits to the Greggs Foundation.
Even before the pandemic and rising energy prices affected our economy, far too many people were struggling with poverty and hunger in the UK. We’re doing what we can by supporting The Greggs Foundation to deliver breakfast and opportunities to school children; donating surplus food, and opening outlet shops in areas of deprivation.
We recognise that poor nutrition is another issue where we have a role to play and are doing more to guide our customers towards healthier choices.
We are supporting communities to act
We are opening Greggs Outlet shops in areas around the UK where we know the need is high. These shops offer surplus food products at a big price reduction, meaning that families on a tight budget can pick up a delicious bargain. We donate a share of the profits from these shops to The Greggs Foundation who distribute the proceeds through their Community Action Fund.
We are helping customers to make healthier choices
We might be famous for our Sausage Rolls and Yum Yums, but whether it’s a freshly made sandwich, a delicious salad, or a pot of fruit, our menu offers variety and flexibility so customers can make choices that fit their day. Our healthier products are helping us reach a wider range of customers as well as helping our loyal regulars to cut their intake of salt, sugar and fat.
We continue to work towards improving the nutrient profile score of our range through introducing new products and identifying opportunities for reformulation and improving nutrition content of our products.
We are putting an end to food waste
We are looking for ways to reduce food waste right across our business. It starts with taking care with the ingredients we use to make our products, and it ends with us getting any surplus food into the hands of people who need it.
The Greggs Pledge
Download our 2025 report (published April 2026)
Our original Greggs Pledge was created in 2021 with a clear set of goals that we wanted to achieve by 2025. In the five years since then, we have hit almost all the targets we set ourselves, so we have reviewed these original ten commitments and set ourselves new ambitions to work towards in the five years ahead.
Supporting our communities
Pledge 1: By the end of 2030, we will support 150 local organisations to take action that strengthens their communities.
We are supporting local organisations to act.
We believe that community-led action is the best way to tackle the challenges facing local areas throughout the UK. Established local charities have the knowledge and networks to really make a difference in their communities – often, all they need is a little financial help.
We donate a percentage of the profits from our Outlet shops to The Greggs Foundation’s Community Action Fund, empowering local organisations to make a real difference in their communities. In 2025, we donated almost £1.5 million to this fund.
Demand for support continues to grow across the UK, especially as funding opportunities become harder to find. To provide greater stability for the supported groups, the core funding given by the Greggs Foundation has increased from two years to three, giving organisations more time to plan and deliver lasting impact. These grants offer four funding windows each year, ensuring communities have regular opportunities to access support when they need it most. Giving good food a second chance.
Helping customers to make healthier choices
Pledge 2: By the end of 2030, we will report on the healthiness of our food and set a target for further improvement.
Whether it’s a daily-fresh sandwich, a pot of fruit or a tasty salad - our menu offers variety and flexibility so customers can make choices that fit their day. Great tasting and outstanding value food will always be at the heart of what we do and we’re proud that our core range continues to play a role in everyday moments, from quick lunches to well-earned breaks, whatever a customer’s lifestyle goals
We know that people are prioritising healthy eating more than ever before – our customers want to eat more fruit and veg and consume more protein. Our job is to respond to that desire by creating tasty Greggs products that help people eat more of the good stuff and less salt, sugar and fat.
Looking ahead, we are working with NESTA to improve how we track the positive impact that we are having on the nation’s diet. We have started to track our nutrient profile model (NPM) score and want to set ourselves a target to improve this in the future.
We have reformulated our products
We continue to review the recipes of our core products to find ways to deliver great tasting meals and snacks which contain less sugar, calories and salt. In 2017, the UK government published new recommended limits on salt and calories.
By the end of 2025, we had reached 76% of our range met their criteria and we continue to work towards their target. Since 2022, we have removed 2.9 billion calories and 72 tonnes of salt from our customers’ diets without impacting their enjoyment of the Greggs range.
We guide people towards healthier choices
We use a ‘traffic light’ label on our shelves, website and app to help people see at a glance what each product contains – in fact, when we added this information to our website and app, we were the first food-on-the-go brand to do so. We now have traffic lights on every item in our savoury and sweet lines and are working on our ‘hot to go’ products.
In 2026, we are improving the way we communicate which of our products are high in protein, by adding the amount of grams of protein to products that are high in protein and meet our ‘healthier’ criteria.
New healthier products
As well as having over 30% healthier choices on our shelves, our product development pipeline continues to add tempting new items to the menu and, in 2025, over 40% of all the new products that we added were a healthier choice.
Offering alternatives to meat
Many of our customers want to eat less meat as part of a flexitarian, vegetarian or vegan diet so we have developed vegan versions of our best sellers, attracting new customers and helping existing customers to lower their meat consumption. We had a huge hit with our Vegan Sausage Roll in 2019 and have also introduced more vegetarian options in key categories. We introduced a Red Pepper, Feta & Spinach Bake in spring 2025 which our customers loved.
Putting an end to food waste
Pledge 3: By the end of 2030, we will build on our strong track record of redistributing unsold food and commit to increasing this to at least 50%.
We are looking for ways to reduce food waste right across our business.
It starts with taking care with the ingredients we use to make our products in our manufacturing sites, and it ends with us getting any surplus food into the hands of people who need it.
We're proud signatories in WRAP's Food Waste Reduction Roadmap. In line with our dedication to these efforts, we've pledged to report our food waste using best practices and actively promote waste reduction throughout our entire value chain.
Efficiency is our watchword, and we are always looking for ways to make things work better and create less waste, as we steadily increase production to meet customer demand. Sometimes this is about cementing good habits, and sometimes it is about changing how we do things.
However hard we work, our quality standards mean there will always be a little bit of food waste, but we work hard to ensure no food waste goes to landfill.
We're reducing food waste in our shops
Greggs is a business built on freshness: our customers can taste that our Sausage Rolls and Steak Bakes are freshly baked in our ovens. To manage this ‘daily fresh’ approach we use a sophisticated forecasting and ordering system which calculates, shop by shop, what we expect our customers to buy each day.
Greggs Outlets
We are opening Greggs Outlet shops in areas around the UK where we know the need is high.
These shops offer surplus food products at a big price reduction, meaning that families on a tight budget can pick up a bargain. We have 45 Outlet across the UK. So far, these are largely in the North and West of Britain, stretching from Bristol and London to Glasgow.
As recently as 2020, we were redistributing just 18.2% of our unsold food meaning that 82% was backhauled to our production sites and sent to be composted by anaerobic digestion. We are proud of the work we have completed over the last five years to redistribute our surplus food: by the end of 2025, we were managing to save 45% of our unsold food, with the remainder going to anaerobic digestion.
We give good food a second chance
Anything unsold at the end of a day is surplus. We have many channels for giving this good food a second chance: we sell it through our Outlet Shops; we donate it to charities who can make use of it; we offer it to our customers at a discount, through the Too Good to Go app; and we offer it to colleagues at a reduced price through ‘magic bags’.
We have a national network of over 800 charity partners who collect food from our shops and pass it on to people in need.
We continue to make good use of the Too Good to Go app, with over 1,450 shops now online.
Doing Good Every day
These three Greggs Pledge commitments are the places where we will focus additional effort and resource over the next five years. However, there is a wealth of activity across our business that is helping to build stronger, healthier communities, year in, year out.
Every year, we donate at least 1% of our pre-tax profits to The Greggs Foundation which aims to build stronger, healthier communities in the areas where Greggs operates. We also support charity partners including BBC Children in Need, Children's Cancer North and The Disasters Emergency Committee. With the help of our customers and colleagues, we can do even more. Our customers and colleagues raise millions every year!
The Greggs Foundation
Each year we donate at least one percent of profits to The Greggs Foundation, the corporate charity of Greggs plc.
Our donation, along with support from our colleagues, customers and partners, enables the charity to invest over £5 million a year in a wide range of initiatives that improve the quality of life in our local communities.
The Greggs Foundation is a grant-making charity which aims to build stronger, healthier communities in the areas where Greggs operates. It focusses on three main issues:
Addressing issues of poverty and inequality
Ensuring food is at the heart of communities
Supporting local community organisations to make a real difference.
The Greggs Foundation's principle programmes
We continue to support Greggs Foundation Breakfast Clubs
Over the past 25 years, The Greggs Foundation has supported Breakfast Clubs in over 1,000, feeding 79,500 children every school day. Offering children a free, nutritious breakfast every school day not only stops them going hungry, but also encourages them to get to school on time and settle in before lessons begin. Parents and teachers tell us what a positive impact Breakfast Clubs have on a child’s attendance, readiness to learn, and wellbeing.
Every school receives fresh bread from their local Greggs shop, and half of the programme’s funding comes from Greggs plc and the incredible fundraising efforts of our colleagues and customers. The other half of the programmes funding is supplied by more than 140 partner businesses and organisations who choose to donate to one or more local schools.
In April 2026, the UK Government begins the roll out of its breakfast club programme to English primary schools. As our schools transition to this free breakfast in the years ahead, we will continue to support our network of schools and our financial support will be used to help school children in other ways.
Feeding Brighter Futures
In 2025, The Greggs Foundation launched a new programme – Feeding Brighter Futures – which supports schools by funding places and programmes outside of the classroom to engage children in new extra-curricular opportunities.
We’ll work with schools to focus support where children will see the greatest impact from a Feeding Brighter Futures grant. Nurturing potential should never be limited by a cost barrier. Some schools may use the grant to fund school trips; others might run camps in the school holidays; and some will use it to fund after-school clubs to provide sports coaching, play, skills or wraparound care for working families
Community Action Fund
We want to ensure local organisations can really make a difference, which is why we donate a share of the profits from Greggs Outlets to The Greggs Foundation. This enables them to offer grant funding to community organisations of up to £20,000 per year.
They look to support organisations tackling a clear local need. That could be providing space and opportunities for people to come together to overcome social isolation, building connections, improving the health and wellbeing of the local community or helping to alleviate food poverty.
Relief Grant
Relief grants are available to help children and families with small grants during times of financial hardship. This can include food and clothing vouchers, beds and bedding, as well as essential home appliances including cookers, fridge freezers and washing machines that can make a significant difference to people’s lives.
Our customers are big supporters
Throughout the year we run appeals in our Greggs shops specifically to raise money for their Feeding Brighter Futures programme, which helps to lift the barriers to children’s potential by supporting breakfast and after school clubs, holiday clubs and schools trips so all children have equal access to food, learning and play.In 2025, customers donated over £227,000 via our collection buckets, donations at our tills and through the Greggs App. We also raise money through our Jammy Heart biscuits, passing on five pence from every sale.
Our teams play a big part
Many of our colleagues also support other charities, as well as The Greggs Foundation, through payroll giving and directly supporting schools with fundraising.
Charitable giving
Greggs has a proud reputation of giving back. Since John Gregg founded the business in 1939, we have always tried to do the right thing and support our communities.
In addition to giving money to the Greggs Foundation, we also support certain charities year after year because they deal with issues that our people and customers feel passionate about.
BBC Children in Need
Greggs has been a partner of BBC Children in Need since 2006. In that time, we have raised over £14 million for the charity - something we are really proud of.
Our colleagues get behind BBC Children in Need each and every year with a whole host of weird and wonderful activities to raise money, whilst having plenty of fun along the way.
As well as this, in the run up to appeal night, our customers get the chance to sink their teeth into our BBC Children in Need Novelty Buns, Pudsey Biscuits and Pudsey Jammy Biscuits. There couldn’t be a tastier way to fundraise! Pudsey pin badges, pens and ears are also on sale, to help supporters look the part.
Children’s Cancer North
We’re proud supporters of Children’s Cancer North charity and 2025 is our 43rd year as the main partner of its annual Children's Cancer Run. Since 1979, the run has raised over £9 million to fund research into improving recovery rates of children with cancer.
The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC)
When major disasters hit countries without the capacity to respond, the DEC brings together 14 leading UK aid charities to raise funds quickly and efficiently, enabling our member charities to rapidly scale up their operations on the ground. We have worked with DEC for a number of years supporting its urgent appeals through in-shop fundraising, helping to raise funds for essential food, water, and medical treatment – most recently we supported for victims of Myanmar earthquake disaster. Through the generosity of our customers and colleagues, we have raised over £400,000 for DEC campaigns throughout the years.
Volunteering with causes that are close to our hearts
We know that communities, charities and community organisations need more than just financial support. Every year, each of our managers are invited to spend one working day volunteering in support of a local organisation. We aim to match our peoples’ skills with the needs of that organisation so they can benefit from the specific knowledge and skills of our management team. Our people benefit too. In addition to a sense of achievement and wellbeing, a day spent applying their skills in a new setting helps with their professional development.