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Greggs boss confirms price hikes to MORE menu favourites amid tax squeeze
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The boss of Greggs has confirmed that the price of sausage rolls and other favourites have been hiked after an increase in wage costs from the Budget.
The price of a sausage roll has been increased once again to £1.30 nationally.
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The rise means that the Brit favourite jumped by more than a third since it cost £1 in 2022.
At some travel locations, such as London Bridge, the price of a sausage roll has increased from £1.50 to £1.55.
Ms Currie said that a number of goods including cups of coffee and steak bakes had increased in price by “between 5p and 10p”.
“We are trying to limit the price increases to pennies and protect entry-level prices”.
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She confirmed that breakfast meal deals, which include a bacon roll and cup of coffee, and pizza evening deals were being kept at £2.85.
“When you look at it from 2022 we faced a number of headwinds, from covid, the energy crisis we were running at peak inflation.”
“We have a price inflation tracker against our food-to-go peers to ensure that we are still number one for value.”
She added that Greggs had recently introduced double points on lunchtime sandwiches for customers with loyalty cards “to help them this January”.
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Ms Currie said that Greggs had increased wages by 6.1% for staff in line with the increase in the national living wage while the Budget’s change to national insurance contributions added around 1% of inflation to the company's costs.
The Greggs chief said that despite the Budget making the cost of doing business more expensive Greggs would not be changing its growth or investment plans for new stores.
How to get Greggs for free or cheap
“There are still places where you cannot access Greggs. We are confident in the continuing growth of Greggs”.
Greggs is still planning to open between 140 and 150 shops this year, adding to its existing 2,618 shops.
Ms Currie said that while “consumer confidence has fallen, disposable income has actually improved so I think we will see an improvement when consumer confidence improves”.
Greggs in numbers
Did you know Greggs sausage rolls have 96 layers of pastry?
The first Greggs opened in 1951 on Gosforth High Street.
There are also 2,473 shops around the country — a thousand more than McDonald’s.
Greggs is now valued at £2.6billion thanks to its budget deals.
Nearly £2 in every £100 spent in UK hospitality is done in a Greggs.
Newcastle still remains the sausage roll capital of the UK, with Geordies scoffing 17.9 million of them a year.
The comments came as Greggs toasted more than £2 billion of sales in 2024 for the first time, a 11.3% increase on the previous year’s £1.8 billion. The firm opened 226 shops last year.
The bakery chain said that it had high demand for its festive flatbreads, festive bakes and gingerbread lattes in the run-up to Christmas.
Its like-for-like sales have slowed to 2.5%, which it said was down to a slip in high street footfall.
Greggs is focusing on more railway shops and travel locations, where the price of some goods are significantly higher, reflecting expensive shop rents.
BUDGET PRICE HIKES
Chancellor Rachel Reeves said during her autumn statement she would raise employers' National Insurance contributions (NICs).
She also announced a reduction to the threshold at which businesses start paying NI contributions from £9,100 to £5,000.
It's estimated that the move will raise £25billion - the equivalent of around £800 per employee for each firm.
At the same time, the minimum wage will rise to £12.21 an hour from April, and the minimum wage for people aged 18-20 will rise to £10 an hour, an increase of £1.40.
Greggs is one of many businesses to say it would hike food costs to pass on the costs of Budget tax rises.
The firm already warned back in November that the move would put pressure on prices.
This morning, Tesco boss Ken Murphy said he would do his "very best” to keep prices low in the face of a raft of cost increases linked to Reeve's Budget.
The UK's biggest supermarket, which has more than 300,000 employees, confirmed it was facing a hit of around £250million a year from the increase in national insurance contributions when the changes roll out in April.
Elsewhere, the head of M&S Stuart Machin said the posh retailer would want to pass on “as little as possible” in costs to consumers, but that the company had been forced to “rework” its plan for the coming years.
He said the company “didn’t plan” for Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s decision to raise national insurance contributions (NICs) for companies in the Budget.
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Any cost inflation “will be small and it will be behind the market”, he said, adding mitigating it is “not easy”.
They join a raft of other popular high street joints, such as Sainsbury's, Next and Halfords who said the move could force them to raise prices.
What is National Insurance?
NATIONAL Insurance is a tax on your earnings, or profits if you're self-employed.
These contributions make you eligible for things like the state pension and certain benefits.
You'll usually pay National Insurance Contributions (NICs) when you're over the age of 16 and earning a certain amount.
For example, if you earn £1,000 a week, you pay nothing on the first £242.
Earn over that and you pay 10% on the next £725 - so £72.50. Then you pay 2%o on the rest, so £33, which works out as 66p.
For the self-employed rates are slightly different.
You can also get something known as National Insurance in some circumstances when you're not working, for example when you have kids and claim certain benefits.
NICs are usually taken automatically by your employer and paid to HMRC, so you don't need to do anything.
You can see how much NICs you pay on your wage slip.
Anyone working for themselves usually has to pay NICs themselves when completing a self-assessment tax return.