On the morning of 30 September, Greggs told the market two things. Sales in the thirteen weeks to 26 September were up 7.7 per cent, 3.4 per cent on a like-for-like basis, and the company now expected a modestly improved profit for 2026 rather than the broadly flat outcome it had previously guided to. It also proposed closing four manufacturing sites, with around 740 jobs at risk over the next two and a half years.
The reaction was split in the way these things usually are. Panmure Liberum upgraded the stock to buy and lifted its target to 2,440p. Deutsche Bank raised its target and kept a sell rating. The shares did both, rising as much as 7.5 per cent in early trading before giving it back later in the week.
The restructuring costs about 60 million pounds, including redundancy and disruption, and is expected to deliver roughly 20 million pounds of annual savings by the end of the decade. Production consolidates into six sites. Distribution stays at Enfield. The retail estate is untouched, and the company is still opening shops at a rate of 100 to 110 net a year against an identified ceiling of at least 3,500 UK locations. Of the roughly 33,000 people Greggs employs, the overwhelming majority work in the shops.
Read in sequence, the two halves are not a contradiction. They are a single sentence about where the business now lives.
Greggs has spent a decade turning itself from a bakery that happens to have shops into a food-to-go retailer that happens to bake. The thing growing fastest is drinks. A few weeks before this update the chain was counted as having more coffee outlets in the UK than Costa, which is a sentence nobody would have written about a Tyneside bakery twenty years ago. Iced drinks and menu launches did a lot of the work in the quarter.
Manufacturing, meanwhile, is a cost centre that exists to feed the shops. When your shop count rises and your product mix shifts toward things that are not tinned bread, the factory network you inherited is sized and shaped for a company you no longer are.
The painful part is that the people who built the thing that worked are in the half being closed. Vertical integration was a genuine Greggs advantage, and the pride in making its own products is not marketing. Roisin Currie’s framing is that the proposals strengthen the network rather than retreat from it, and the company has committed to consultation with staff and unions. That is the right posture and it does not make the week any easier in Enfield, Penrith, Kelso, Seaham or Treforest.
There is a warning tucked into the good news too. Cost inflation is running at about 2 per cent for 2026 and well managed, but Greggs flagged signs of greater inflationary pressure in 2027, particularly as energy costs feed through. The factory consolidation is not a reaction to a bad quarter. It is a company that has just had a good quarter, looking at next year’s energy bill, and moving while it still has the cash and the confidence to choose the timing.
That is the whole lesson in the release. The moment to restructure is the moment you are strong enough that the decision is yours.
Most businesses wait until it is not.
Source: Nation.Cymru, “Greggs to axe around 740 jobs and shut four factories”
