Stronger, healthier communities
We pledge to play our part in improving the nation's diet by helping to tackle obesity, providing free breakfasts to schoolchildren, and giving surplus food to charities.
)
Giving something back
As a food business, we know that hunger and obesity 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 ravaged our economy, far too many people were struggling with poverty and hunger in this country. We’re doing what we can by providing a free breakfast for 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 give at least 1% of our profits to the Greggs Foundation
Our donation, along with support from our customers, colleagues and partners, enables the charity to distribute over £4 million a year to charitable organisations in England, Scotland and Wales.
We are supporting Greggs Foundation Breakfast Clubs
We've been providing a free breakfast to children who need it for 25 years. We know that hungry children find it harder to concentrate and learn so we want to make sure as many as possible are getting a good start to their day, which in turn gives them a good start in life.
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.
We are expanding our network of Greggs Outlets
We are opening Greggs Outlet shops in areas around the UK where we know social deprivation 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 Grants Programme.
We are helping people to make healthier choices
We might be famous for our Sausage Rolls and Yum Yums, but we’re starting to get a bit of a rep for being great at salads and flatbreads too. 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 support a range of great UK charities
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, The Disasters Emergency Committee, and the Royal British Legion’s Poppy Appeal. With the help of our customers and colleagues, we are able to do even more. Our customers and colleagues raise millions every year!
The Greggs Pledge
Download our 2024 progress report
In 2021, we launched The Greggs Pledge, setting out ten commitments to help make the world a better place. Read more about our progress in our latest report, published April 2025.
The Greggs Foundation
Each year we donate at least one per cent of profits to The Greggs Foundation, the corporate charity of Greggs plc.
Our donation, along with support from our colleagues and partners, enables the charity to invest over £4 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
Its principal programmes
Feeding Brighter Futures
For over 25 years, The Greggs Foundation has offered UK primary schools support for their children and families. Since the first Breakfast Club opened its doors in 1999, they have grown their school network to help more than 75,000 children at over 1,000 schools every single school day.
Now called Feeding Brighter Futures, The Greggs Foundation schools programme is expanding to cover even more of the school day. They will be offering funding for breakfast clubs, after school clubs and holiday club provision, and focus on providing children with equal access to extracurricular opportunities to enhance their school experience.
Greggs Foundation Community Grant
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.
Hardship Fund
Hardship funding is 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.
Greggs Foundation Breakfast Clubs
We’ve been providing a free breakfast to children who need it for 25 years.
We know that hungry children find it harder to concentrate and learn so we want to make sure as many as possible are getting a good start. In 2024, we reached our target of 1,000 Breakfast Clubs, serving wholesome, free breakfasts to more than 75,000 children every school day. It was our goal to have 1,000 clubs open by the end of 2025 and we're delighted to have reached this milestone early.
Each school is provided with fresh bread from their nearest Greggs shop and a grant to support running costs and breakfast food to suit the pupils. All schools within the Breakfast Club network also have access to hardship funding.
All Breakfast Club schools can also access Agents of Change, a bespoke free education programme delivered through Rethink Food. The programme aims to reach 50,000 primary school children over three years delivering over one million hours of education.
We will be building on the long history of Greggs Foundation Breakfast Clubs to add even greater value to our network of 1,000 schools. Now called Feeding Brighter Futures, the Greggs Foundation’s schools programme will continue to incorporate Breakfast Clubs for as long as our schools need them, as well as additional support through after-school clubs and holiday club provision.
Pledge 1
By the end of 2025, we will support 1,000 school Breakfast Clubs providing some 70,000 meals each school day.
We work in partnership
Funding comes from a variety of sources, half from Greggs Foundation and half from our partners.
Our partners include shareholders, businesses in our supply chain, trade bodies, social housing groups and independent businesses, each of whom bring their own skills to the scheme. These partners are enormously important to the success of the programme: many play an active role in supporting their local club and we share and learn from each other.
Our customers are big supporters
Twice a year, we run customer appeals in Greggs shops to raise money specifically for Breakfast Clubs.
In 2024, customers donated over £227,000 via our collection buckets and gave a further £246,500 through 25p ‘buy a child a breakfast’ donations made at the till. We also raised over £140,000 through our Jammy Heart biscuits, passing on five pence from every sale.
In 2024, we added new functionality to the Greggs App to allow customers to make this donation on their phones, making it even easier for our customers to do good when shopping with Greggs.
Our teams play a big part
Many of our colleagues also support other charities, as well as the Greggs Foundation, through payroll giving.
In 2024, this helped to raise over £51,000 for both the Greggs Foundation and wider charitable organisations.
At some of our sites, our colleagues choose to fundraise for a particular Breakfast Club. The IT Team at our head office, Greggs House, raised almost £6,000 in 2024 for two Breakfast Club schools.
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.
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.
Pledge 2
By the end of 2025, we will create 25% less food waste than we did 2018 and will continue to work towards 100% of surplus food going to those most in need.
We want to cut production waste
Reducing waste from our manufacturing sites is a key part of our food waste reduction plan and, in 2018 – our baseline year – food waste in our production sites represented about 0.3% of sales. In 2024, we further reduced food waste at our manufacturing sites to 0.18% of total sales. This is more than one third less than in 2018, meaning we have exceeded our 25% target.
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. Some of the product from our savoury production line is now collected and sold in local Greggs Outlet shops. All other waste is put through a number of channels, such as animal feed or anaerobic digestion, ensuring nothing 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 made 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.
We give good food a second chance
Anything unsold at the end of a day is surplus. We have three channels for giving this good food a second chance: we donate it to charities who can make use of it; we offer it to our customers at a discount; and we sell it through our Greggs Outlet shops.
We opened three new Greggs Outlets in 2024, meaning we now have a total of 38 shops where we sell surplus food at a big discount. In total, we sold almost 17% more tonnes of food through our Outlet shops across the year than in 2023.
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 1,000 shops offering ‘Surprise Bags’ of unsold food. These bags contain around £8 worth of Greggs food – a mix of both savoury and sweet products – but cost from just £2.59. In 2024, we began offering bags in the mornings, as well as at the end of the day. Collectively, we sold over 1.37 million Surprise Bags, totalling around 1,700 tonnes of food.
Greggs Outlets
We are opening Greggs Outlet shops in areas around the UK where we know social deprivation 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 added three new shops in 2024, taking the total to 38. So far, these are largely in the North and West of Britain, stretching from Bristol and London to Glasgow.
Pledge 3
By the end of 2025, we will have 50 Greggs Outlet shops providing affordable food in areas of social deprivation, with a share of profits given to local community organisations.
We want to avoid food waste
Cutting food waste is a priority for Greggs (read more here). Making sure we have the freshest possible products on sale means that good food sometimes goes to waste if we don’t sell it on the day it’s made. Greggs Outlet shops are a solution to that challenge – we now have a dedicated channel for unsold food.
Giving good food a second chance
Our outlet shops also help to address a different challenge: too many people in the UK are struggling to put food on the table so we’re helping people to stretch their money further. During 2024, our customers bought more than 2.7 million sandwiches, 2.4 million savoury products and 2.8 million sweet treats through our Outlet shops, which indicates the huge popularity of these discounted shops.
We raise money for the community
A further benefit of Greggs Outlet shops comes from the money they generate for the community: we have chosen to donate a share of the profits to the Greggs Foundation.
The Greggs Foundation Community Grants programme is part-funded by a portion of the profits from the Greggs Outlets. This helps to ensure profits generated in Outlet locations are channelled back into addressing the issues affecting those communities.
In 2024, The Greggs Foundation awarded over £1.85 million in community grants to 75 organisations.
Helping our customer to make healthier choices
Our vision is to be the customer’s favourite for food-on-the-go. To achieve that, we know we need to offer great tasting, freshly prepared food that helps people to stay healthy.
As times and tastes have changed, we’ve continued to add to our range. These days, you may be surprised by our menu. There’s enough choice to keep everyone happy. Healthier choices, balanced choices, sustainable choices, vegan choices. So many choices in fact, you’ll be spoiled. But whatever option you choose, there’s two things that’ll never change – amazing taste and great value.
We know that people are prioritising healthy eating more than ever before – our customers want to eat more fruit and veg, and consume more vitamins. 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.
We are also making it easier for our customers to make healthier choices and make an informed decision about which of our products meet their dietary needs, through better labelling.
Pledge 4
By the end of 2025, 30% of the items on our shelves will be healthier choices and we will attract customers through education and promotions.
We are putting healthier choices on our shelves
We’ve set ourselves a target to make 30% of everything we sell a healthier choice. That means the product must contain fewer than 400 calories and score no reds in the Food Standards Agency traffic light system for fat, salt and sugar.
We exceeded our 30% target in 2022, and again in 2023 and 2024. Our challenge now is to maintain this. on 2025
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, our Vegan Steak Bake in 2020 and our Vegan Ham and CheeZe Baguette was crowned ‘Best Vegan Sandwich’ at the 2021 PETA Vegan Food Awards.
To help our customers transition to a more sustainable diet, we continue to offer a range of vegan and vegetarian products throughout the day. This year, we reintroduced the rotational Vegan Steak Bake, Vegan Mexican Chicken-Free Bake, Vegan Spicy Vegetable Curry Bake and Vegan Festive Bake.
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, and we considered what was possible and set out to achieve 92% of them by the end of 2025.
By the end of 2024, we had reached 85.1% and continue to work towards our target. The impact of the changes we have made to our recipes delivers notable results. Since 2022, we have removed 2.7 billion calories and 48 tonnes of salt from our customers’ diets without impacting their enjoyment of the Greggs range
We guide people towards healthier choices
We know that providing clear information is important in helping people to make informed choices about what they eat. That’s why we’ve put calorie and nutritional information on the shelf, as well as on our website and the Greggs App.
We use a ‘traffic light’ label 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 addition to the label, we are finding ways to help people see the wider nutritional benefits of a product by flagging when something is, say, high in protein or fibre.
We want to make our healthier choices as tempting as possible too.
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 and ears are also on sale, to help supporters look the part.
Children’s Cancer North charity
We’re proud supporters of Children’s Cancer North charity and 2025 is our 42nd year as the main partner of its annual Children's Cancer Run. Since 1979, the run has raised over £40 million to fund research into improving recovery rates of children with cancer.
The Royal British Legion’s Poppy Appeal
Greggs are proud supporters of the Royal British Legion’s Poppy Appeal and have been for a number of years. With the help of our customers, we raise vital funds through our in-shop collections. With over 2,600 shops nationwide, we have made the commitment to be placed on the national list issued by the Royal British Legion to help volunteers organise collections in their area.
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.
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 is 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.