The first-ever international Greggs is coming, and Brits abroad will love it
Key Points
- Greggs is opening its first ever overseas shop at Tenerife South Airport in partnership with Lagardère Travel Retail
- The bakery posted total sales of £800 million in the first 19 weeks of 2026, up 7.5% on last year
- Like-for-like sales grew 2.5% in the period, accelerating to 3.3% in the most recent 10 weeks
- The new Chicken Roll, launched in April, has become a standout favourite alongside Matcha and the Tandoori Chicken Pizza Slice
- Greggs is targeting around 120 net new shops in 2026, with new Derby and Kettering facilities coming online over the next two years
Greggs is finally going abroad, and it’s picked the most predictably British destination possible: Tenerife.
The Newcastle-born bakery chain confirmed in its latest trading update that it will open its first shop outside the UK in the coming weeks, at Tenerife South Airport, in partnership with Lagardère Travel Retail.
Tenerife South handles millions of UK passengers a year, making it less of a foreign launch and more of a home fixture played away.
The move lands alongside a strong run of numbers. Total sales jumped 7.5% to £800 million in the first 19 weeks of the year, with like-for-like growth of 2.5% accelerating to 3.3% in the most recent 10 weeks.
Translation: Britain is back at the Greggs counter, and the new Chicken Roll, launched in April, is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
Why Tenerife, of all places? Because if you want to test whether your brand travels, you start where your customers are already going.
The Canary Islands have been one of the UK’s most reliable package holiday destinations for decades, and the airport is full of sunburnt families who would actively prefer a sausage roll to a tapas board on the way home.
Greggs Chief Executive Roisin Currie and her team are not so much exporting British food culture as meeting it at baggage reclaim.
The bakery is also leaning hard into menu innovation to keep momentum at home. Alongside the Chicken Roll, there’s a new Tandoori Chicken Pizza Slice, a refreshed salad range featuring the Chicken Caesar and Chicken, Grains and Greens, and a drinks push that includes Matcha, which Greggs says has proved extremely popular.
The strategy is clear: keep the core Sausage Roll faithful happy, and chase younger, lunchtime, healthier-leaning customers with everything else.
Behind the counter, the company is spending heavily on capacity. A new frozen product manufacturing and logistics facility in Derby is on track to come online this year, followed by a National Distribution Centre in Kettering in 2027.
Greggs is also targeting around 120 net new shops in 2026, with 41 already opened in the year to date, taking the total estate to 2,759.
There are still clouds. Greggs flagged that prolonged conflict in the Middle East could push cost inflation higher into 2027, although forward buying covers roughly five months of food and packaging needs and 85% of this year’s energy and fuel.
Even so, the Board’s expectations for the full year are unchanged, which is corporate-speak for: relax, we’ve got this.
The bigger story here is the Tenerife flag-planting.
For years, the question hanging over Greggs has been whether the brand is too British to travel. The answer, it turns out, is that it doesn’t need to. It just needs to follow the British.
