Let me say up front: I’m not a fan of a pasty. You can keep your flaky pastry. But I do like a Greggs hot baguette, or a coffee, or a cake or two.

Greggs is based here in Newcastle, and I walk past the original Gosforth High Street shop most days. One of the interesting aspects about living in Greggsland has been watching their gradual transformation from a bakery to a takeaway-cum-coffee-shop.

Greggs has long had a handful of ‘Greggs Café’ branches: a large seating area with a pretty standard Greggs counter. These exist mostly, or perhaps even exclusively, in big shopping centres.

If I remember rightly, their first recent major push into a coffee shop model was the launch of ‘Greggs Moment’. This was a short-lived North East chain of coffee shops similar to a high street Costa or Caffé Nero, which also carried a range of Greggs food. These didn’t work. I don’t have any great insight into why, but I suspect the business model was flawed in that the sales volume wasn’t high enough to make a decent profit at the Greggs pricing level. Coffee shop customers tend to hang around.

The next push was into a chain of Greggs branches that were given a bit of an upmarket makeover and had seating installed, branded as ‘Greggs Bakery’. These seemed to work pretty well, combining the high-throughput of the bakery counter with the option for people to buy and eat hot stuff on the premises. A version of this—more extensive hot food plus some seats, minus the upmarket makeover—has now been rolled out to a large proportion of Greggs shops.

‘tasty by Greggs’ seems to be a new approach to creating a coffee shop style business. They are located within Primark stores, and I popped down to the third branch, which has just opened in Newcastle. This branch replaced and extended a former Costa concession within Primark, and the clothing shop has placed a range of Greggs-branded apparel for sale right by the café.

The branch I saw—which I’m assuming was representative—was filled with ‘Instagrammable’ features, like the large neon bridge pictured above, a themed phone box, a branded swing, and seating booths designed to look like giant doughnuts. Beyond the decor, though, they seem to be a standard Greggs outlet with much more seating (114 seats at the Newcastle one). They heavily advertise that ‘take out’ is available, but I can’t imagine this being a roaring trade: nobody is going to trek up to the second floor of a Primark for a Greggs takeaway when the shop is within spitting distance of three ordinary ground-level Greggs branches.

It was very busy, and I didn’t stick around for food or drink, though was disappointed to note that they use disposable coffee cups, even for those dining in. Emmanuel Macron would not approve, though it may be the least of his worries.

Logically, this would seem destined for the same outcome as Greggs Moment given the lack of passing traffic… except for the fact that I don’t think these branches are designed for cash generation. They seem like they are actually there as brand-building tools, generating positive associations with the brand and building cachet through people sharing social media posts.

This seems to play into the Greggs strategy at the moment, which seems to be all about building the brand. It seems to be working for them… but it does feel a bit time-limited to me. Fashions change, and it’s hard to see a bakery riding that wave for long.

But what do I know? I’m only in it for the okay coffee and the alright southern fried chicken baguette.

This is the clock tower of Darlington’s Victorian Market Hall, with a Greggs and a closed down Past Times in the background. I don’t think there’s much else to say about it…!