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Greggs is planning to keep more of its stores open into the evening as people picking up snacks such as steak bakes and vegan sausage rolls after work have driven its sales for the first six months of the year.
Chief executive Roisin Currie said sales made after 4pm at the food-to-go retailer were growing faster than average like-for-like sales, which rose 7.4 per cent in the six months to June.
“We believe this is in the long term, a really profitable part of the business,” she said. “I would say pretty much all of our new shops that we open this year will have that evening offering available because we’re opening in those catchments where evening works particularly well,” she noted, adding that sales were made in person as well as through apps such as Just Eat and Uber Eats.
Almost half of the FTSE 250 group’s roughly 2,500 shops are currently open until 7pm or later. It plans to make 140 to 160 net new shop openings this year, having opened 51 so far this year.
Total sales at Greggs rose 14 per cent to £961mn in the first half of the year compared with the same period last year. Underlying pre-tax profit rose from £64mn to £74mn, supported by lower cost inflation than last year.
The group said overall cost inflation in the first half of 2024 was 4 per cent and it expected 4 to 5 per cent cost inflation for the full year, most notably stemming from wage cost increases in January following the national living wage increase.
Currie said the company had increased the price of a “very few number of products”, such as sausage rolls and sandwiches, by 5p in recent weeks on the back of rising wage costs. But she added that no further price rises were planned.
Greggs’ focus on evening trading comes as it pursues new sources of revenue after its rapid expansion over the past few years. The bakery now has more sites than any other UK food retailer, with a target to achieve “significantly more than 3,000 shops” in the UK.
However, it experienced a slowdown in like-for-like sales, which had risen 8.2 per cent in the first nine weeks of the year.
Greggs announced in 2021 that it would extend trading into the evening as part of a plan to double sales to £2.4bn by 2026, along with delivery and app strategies.
It expects later opening hours to boost sales by £180mn, if it is able to achieve two-thirds of the trade it manages during lunchtime trading.
Shares in Greggs, which have risen about 18 per cent since the start of the year, were up 6 per cent on Tuesday morning.
