Before there were almost 2,800 Greggs shops, there was a van. As a boy, Ian Gregg would sometimes accompany his father John on his rounds through the mining communities north of Newcastle.

John had begun selling yeast and eggs from a bicycle in the 1930s before moving to delivery vans carrying bread, cakes and pies. In places such as Seaton Burn, he would sound the horn and customers would emerge from the surrounding terraces to buy from the back of the vehicle.

Ian also noticed that his father concentrated on working-class communities rather than wealthier parts of Newcastle and Northumberland. Serving one affluent household could mean walking up a drive, taking an order, returning to the van and waiting for payment. In a mining village, several customers could be served in the same time.

Years later, Ian distilled what he had learnt into his first lesson of retailing: “You must be where your customers are – location, location, location.”

It is a remarkably simple idea, but it explains a surprising amount about how a family bakery from Newcastle became one of Britain's most ubiquitous consumer businesses.

John Gregg opened the first Greggs shop on Gosforth High Street in 1951, partly because he wanted his own bakery rather than relying on products bought from other suppliers. Ian was not initially expected to run it.

He studied classics at Cambridge and began training for a legal career. Then his father died in 1964, aged 55. At 25, Ian returned to Newcastle to a business consisting of one shop, a bakery and six or seven travelling shops, with around 15 people working for the company.

Over the following two decades, Ian invested in production and expanded beyond Tyneside. Greggs moved into Scotland, Yorkshire and the North West, using acquisitions as well as new shops to build regional positions. The company was still recognisably a bakery business, but it was learning how to replicate itself.

When Greggs floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1984, it had just over 260 shops and was valued at £15 million. It remained predominantly northern and operated as a decentralised collection of regional bakery businesses.

A decade later it reached 500 shops. Then, in 1994, Greggs bought the Bakers Oven business from Allied Bakeries. The acquisition brought 424 shops and effectively doubled its retail estate.

Greggs had become national in reach before it became the single national brand people recognise today. For years the company operated different regional businesses and brands. By the mid-2000s, management had concluded that the decentralised structure which had helped Greggs expand was becoming a constraint on a business with national ambitions.

Bakers Oven shops were subsequently converted to Greggs and the company increasingly operated under a single identity. The blue and orange shopfront was spreading across Britain, but simply opening more bakeries would not have been enough.

By 2013, Greggs had more than 1,600 shops but the business had run into a problem. Supermarkets had become formidable competitors for bread and other products people bought to take home. At the same time, customers were increasingly using Greggs for something different.

Roger Whiteside became chief executive that year and led a strategic review. It found that around 75 per cent of visits to Greggs were already fulfilling a food-on-the-go need.

The behaviour of Greggs' customers had moved faster than the way the company thought about itself. The food-on-the-go market was growing, but Greggs was underperforming it. Like-for-like sales had fallen 2.7 per cent in 2012 and another 2.9 per cent in the first half of 2013.

Whiteside changed direction. Rather than trying to defend Greggs primarily as a traditional bakery, the company would concentrate on becoming a stronger food-on-the-go business.

That changed the competitors Greggs thought about, the products it sold, the shops it needed and the occasions it wanted to capture. Breakfast mattered more, as did coffee, sandwiches, lunchtime meal deals and food for later in the day. Shops were refurbished with better customer flow and seating where possible, while the range changed.

Greggs also became more selective about where it opened. In 2013, 70 per cent of its new shops were already being opened away from traditional high streets.

This was the company's second major reinvention. The first had taken Greggs from a Newcastle family bakery into a national chain. The second changed what that chain was actually for. Greggs did not so much discover a new market as recognise the market its customers had already put it in.

By the first half of 2014, like-for-like sales were growing again, reversing the decline of the previous year.

Six years later, the transformation produced its most visible moment. In January 2019, Greggs launched a vegan sausage roll.

The product itself was carefully developed. Creating a vegan version of one of the company's best-known products meant thinking about ingredients, storage, transport and handling throughout the supply chain. But the launch also demonstrated that something else about Greggs had changed.

The company introduced it with a parody of an Apple product launch, complete with slick advertising presenting it as the next generation of sausage roll technology. It was timed for Veganuary and designed to generate conversation far beyond existing vegan customers.

Demand exceeded Greggs' expectations. The sausage roll initially went into 950 of its then 1,950 shops, but stores rapidly sold out and production had to be increased. Whiteside described it as the fastest-selling new line introduced during his six years running the company.

The more important effect may have been what happened after people walked through the door. Whiteside later explained, “People arrived looking for that product. But once they were in Greggs they saw what else we did.”

The vegan sausage roll made a transformation already under way much more visible. By 2019, the food-on-the-go strategy was six years old. A business still associated by many people with traditional bakeries, pasties and cheap sausage rolls suddenly found itself at the centre of a national conversation without abandoning the humour, accessibility or lack of pretension that made the brand recognisable in the first place.

Greggs had modernised without trying to become premium. A flat white could sit next to a sausage roll. A vegan product could attract a different customer without removing the steak bake. Shops could look more contemporary while the proposition remained based on convenience and value.

The company had broadened the reasons people might visit without asking existing customers to stop recognising it.

There is an irony in saying that Greggs took over the British high street. It did so partly by learning how to depend on the high street less.

By 2019, around 35 per cent of its shops were already in locations such as retail and office parks, railway stations and petrol forecourts. Management wanted the proportion outside traditional high streets to grow further.

That process has continued. At the end of June 2026, Greggs had 2,773 shops, including 627 operated by franchise partners. More than half of its new openings in the first half of 2026 were in places such as petrol forecourts, supermarkets, retail parks, hospitals and university campuses.

There are smaller Bitesize Greggs formats for locations that cannot accommodate a normal shop. Greggs Express is testing self-service food and coffee in convenience locations. There is a Greggs at Tenerife South Airport and new shops are being pursued at some of Britain's busiest railway stations.

The logic closely resembles what Ian Gregg observed from his father's van. Rather than asking customers to make a special journey, Greggs keeps putting itself into journeys they are already making.

Increasingly, the same principle applies beyond physical location. Nearly a third of transactions in company-managed Greggs shops in the first half of 2026 involved a scan of the Greggs App, up from just over a quarter a year earlier. Customers using the app also visit more frequently, according to the company.

Three-quarters of company-managed shops now accept delivery orders through Just Eat and Uber Eats. Greggs has also added Click + Collect and customer relationship management technology as it tries to increase the number of occasions on which someone might consider the brand.

Technology is also moving further behind the counter. As Review North reported in August, Greggs is recruiting a Head of Data & AI at its Newcastle headquarters to create an AI strategy and machine-learning roadmap. The job description said machine learning was already being used for forecasting and stock replenishment, while AI tools were being deployed in areas including software engineering and internal support.

John Gregg had to judge which communities generated enough demand to justify driving his van there. Today's Greggs has thousands of shops, millions of transactions and a loyalty app feeding far richer data into the same kind of decisions. It can use that information to understand where demand is, what customers want and how much product each location needs.

At some point, making Greggs more accessible risks simply moving sales from one Greggs to another. The company does not believe it is there yet. It sees scope for at least 3,500 UK shops, compared with 2,773 at the end of June, and is developing new national distribution centres to create the capacity needed to service a larger estate.

Greggs says 62 per cent of new openings in the first half of 2026 were in areas without another Greggs within a mile. Even where a new shop opened within a mile of an existing one, less than 5 per cent of sales on average were transferred from existing stores. On those figures, the new shops appear to be creating additional demand rather than simply dividing the existing customer base.

Expansion is also contributing more to overall growth. Like-for-like sales in company-managed shops grew by 2.1 per cent in the first half of 2026, while total sales rose 7.2 per cent to £1.1 billion.

Finding the eventual limit to Greggs' physical footprint will be one of the next tests of the strategy. But the company is also broadening what a Greggs location can mean.

A full-sized high street shop, a counter inside a supermarket, a petrol station franchise, an airport outlet, a small-format store, a delivery order and an app transaction can all reach customers in different circumstances.

Chief executive Roisin Currie describes the objective as giving customers what they want, “where they want it, and at a price they can afford”.

Ian Gregg might recognise the thinking. More than 80 years after his father learnt which communities generated enough demand to justify a delivery round, Greggs is applying the same principle across shops, franchises, apps and delivery platforms. Its target of at least 3,500 UK shops suggests the company believes there are still more places for it to go.