Around 25,000 Greggs employees will share in a £7m one-off payment for playing a huge part in the firm’s “exceptional” success last year.
The Newcastle food-on-the-go favourite announced that 19,000 staff members will get an extra £300 in their next monthly pay packet – with the remaining 6,000 who joined last year getting payments depending on when they first started.
The payments come on top of the annual profit bonus they share, with most staff set to take home around £600 in total.
CEO Roger Whiteside said: “2019 was an exceptional year for Greggs. We’ve made a special dividend to shareholders and we’ve made an additional payment to say a special thank you to the employees without whom none of this could have been achieved.
“We’ve tried to keep it as simple as we can, so it’s £300 for everybody who joined the business before March 31st last year and about 19,000 get it. For those who joined after March 31 the payment goes down by 25% depending on which quarter of the year they joined.
“It’s really to say thank you to the people on the front line of our supply chains, shops and in head office and in total 25,000 will benefit. Everybody gets the same payment, whether they work six hours a week or 40 hours.
“And that’s on top of the 10% of annual profits that we share with staff. That’s more complicated in structure, based around amount earned and time served, but that’s typically more than £300.
“We have always strived to be the type of business that allowed employees to share in the success of the business alongide its owners, so we have long shared 10% of profits. We’ve done that since forever, certainly since flotation in the 1980s.
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“That’s still quite unusual in the market and it signals the type of business we try to be, the kind of business that shares in joint enterprise to create values.”
Greggs announced the one-off payment within the firm’s fourth quarter trading update, which revealed total sales have risen 13.5% this year, a significant rise on the 7.2% increase in 2018.
Company-managed shop like-for-like sales were up 9.2% – up on 2018’s 2.9% – and, as a result, underlying pre-tax profit will be ahead of the £111m it originally expected to announce in March.
The growth, Mr Whiteside said, comes through growing numbers of customers discovering that Greggs is much more than just sausage rolls, with the firm’s sales having been given a huge lift by the success of its vegan sausage roll, launched at the start of 2019.
The vegan steak bake last week joined its vegan range which also includes a soup, a doughnut and a bean wrap, and the firm is currently working hard to create more vegan treats.
“We want to see if we can come up with vegan versions of all of our bestsellers,” said Mr Whiteside. “I’m not entirely sure if we want to restrict the launches to Veganuary – when they’re ready they’re ready – but they take a while to get right.
“I’ve been quite impressed by what I’ve seen in chicken but there are a number of challenges. So we are working away, but I’m not going to make any promises now as to what’s next on the stocks.”
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Greggs opened 138 new shops in the year while closing 41, bringing its total to 2,050 across the 海角视频 and it plans to add a further 100 throughout 2020.
It is also looking to open more shops later in the evening, having experimented with later openings in a range of locations.
Looking to the year ahead, Mr Whiteside said the firm face strong sales comparatives and cost inflation headwinds, including the increase in national living wage costs and the rising price of pork.
Last November Mr Whiteside revealed he had been trying to live on a vegan diet, saying avoiding meat had proved easy, but avoiding dairy had been almost impossible. He said he had attempted to have a vegan Christmas dinner, but that it had proved difficult.
“I did my best but I wasn’t 100% successful,” he said. “I tried to get vegan variations to cook alongside the food my family was eating, but unfortunately there were a number of things that didn’t pass the flavour test and I wasn’t prepared to starve.
“I have surprised myself as to the extent I’ve been able to stick to being vegetarian, but avoiding dairy has been difficult.”