Britain’s best-loved purveyor of sausage rolls is finally packing its bags for Costas.
Greggs, the Newcastle-headquartered bakery giant, has confirmed it will open its first store outside the United Kingdom at Tenerife South Airport in the coming weeks, a historic moment for a business that has spent more than eight decades catering to Britain’s high street.
The announcement, which is likely to please sun-seeking tourists in equal measure and City analysts watching for signs of new growth, came alongside a trading update in which the FTSE 250 group struck a cautiously optimistic tone for the rest of the year despite what it described as a “challenging market”.
Greggs told investors it expects to “deliver positive first-quarter earnings progress” and reiterated its full-year outlook. Management indicated that pre-tax profit for the year would likely be flat compared to last year, with any increase “depending on customer recovery”. Analyst consensus pencils in sales of £2.29bn and pre-tax profit of £172.1m for the full year.
Like-for-like sales at company-owned stores rose 2.5 percent in the first 19 weeks of the year, slightly below the 2.9 percent recorded in the first 20 weeks of 2025. Total sales, however, advanced a healthy 7.5 per cent to £800m, boosted by the continued launch of new stores. It is encouraging that the pace of growth increased in the last ten trading weeks, as same sales rose to 3.3 percent.
“We have made encouraging profit progress in the year to date, partly reflecting a weaker comparative period but also good control of operating costs,” the company said.
Greggs added 41 stores to its footprint during that period, 17 of which traded, and closed 21, taking its national footprint to 2,759 stores. Management is aiming for 120 new openings this financial year and is set to grow the chain to more than 3,000 locations in the long term.
However, going overseas has not silenced the critics. Declining like-for-like growth has reignited the debate over whether the Geordie giant is about to reach the point of congestion on Britain’s high street. The shares have lost almost a fifth of their value in the past twelve months, and Greggs remains one of the most shorted stocks on the London market, with around £150m worth betting on further declines.
For now, however, attention turns to the Canary Islands, where cakes and steak biscuits will take their place alongside tapas and tortillas. Whether the format takes off, and whether investing overseas proves a less viable route to international growth than building a directly owned property, will be the question that keeps investors guessing over the summer.
