Students from Newcastle University created the group out of love for the ‘haven of baked goods’ – with the so far 50 members hopefully able to expense snacks in the future
Sausage roll loving students have started the UK’s first ever Greggs Society.
The pastry fans from Newcastle University bond over savoury favourites during daily visits to the city’s 33 shops. Trips are planned to the food giant’s HQ while a recent ‘Greggs crawl’ had students on a roll.
Luke Phillips, Louie Horn and Esme Heath created the group to celebrate their devotion to the brand. They have 50 members after launching last week. Members may be able to expense their favourite snacks through the new society.
Co-founder Luke, 19, a psychology student of Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, admitted: “Since we started the society, we have been to Greggs every single day. We each go two or three times a week so between us it’s around nine trips.
“We have just got our student loan so we’re feeling very rich and can go often. We’re hoping we can claim back a small amount of our Greggs expenditure through the society. We were planning a trip to Belgium to go to their Greggs but we found out they shut down.”
Louie, 19, a computer science student, of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, added: “We have a society budget which we can use for our socials. We just started this because it was funny but everyone else finds it funny as well. I’m honoured to have started the first ever Greggs society.”
Esme, 20, of Tunbridge Wells, Kent, helped set up the group, which describes Greggs as a ‘haven of baked goods’. “The salvation at the end of a night out,” society members are told. “Our saviour in times of desperate hunger. A light in the darkness of the fast food industry. A light that arose from the fine city we find ourselves in.”
Louie joked: “It’s hard to find someone who can’t eat anything at Greggs. I have found my calling in life, which is the Greggs society. I would never turn down a warm steak bake. The Freshers fair was completely bonkers, everyone would walk past and do a double take of the Greggs society. I would like a Wikipedia page for us. I would love to see more Greggs societies popping up at other universities.”
The bakery is regarded as one of the UK’s great retail success stories, selling 130m sausage rolls a year. That is enough for one person to eat a sausage roll every day for 365,000 years, according to figures released in 2023.
Founder John Gregg started it as a door-to-door service in 1939, before the first shop opened in Newcastle in 1951. It has gone on to become a mainstay of the British High Street. In 2016, the bakery was hailed as a brand that had “conquered Britain”, selling 2.5m sausage rolls a week. Now it makes and sells around five sausage rolls every second, the equivalent of 1 million per day or 7 million a week.