Greggs Opens in Tenerife: First Overseas Store in 20 Years

What’s Actually Opened

Greggs, working with airport retail giant Lagardère Travel Retail, opened its first shop outside the UK in almost two decades on 1 June 2026, deliberately timed to land on Canary Islands Day. The new store sits airside in Terminal A of Tenerife South Airport, right next to passport control, on one of the terminal’s busiest routes for passengers heading back to the UK. It’s a proper-sized shop too, 197 square metres with seating for up to 92 customers, so this is a genuine sit-down-and-have-a-coffee Greggs, not a grab-and-go kiosk.

It matters that this is Greggs’ only shop anywhere outside Britain right now. The chain’s last overseas venture was a run of stores in Belgium, which closed back in 2008. Everything since then, all 2,700-plus of Greggs’ UK shops, has been a purely domestic story. This is the first crack back into international territory in roughly 18 years.

Why Tenerife of All Places?

It sounds like an odd pick until you look at the passenger numbers. Tenerife South Airport handled more than 14 million passengers in 2025, and around 5.5 million of those were British travellers, making the UK by far the airport’s single biggest passenger group. Zoom out to the Canary Islands as a whole and the pattern holds: the islands welcomed a record 18.39 million tourists in 2025, and British visitors are consistently the largest nationality, accounting for close to a third of total tourist spending across the archipelago.

This lines up with what the UK’s own Office for National Statistics travel trends data shows more broadly, Spain has been one of the most popular overseas destinations for UK residents for years, and the Canary Islands, with Tenerife as the single most visited island of the group, sit right at the top of that list. Put simply, Greggs didn’t pick Tenerife on a whim. It picked the one overseas airport where the customer base most closely resembles the one it already knows at home.

Figures are approximate, based on published 2025 Tenerife South Airport and Canary Islands tourism data. Exact splits vary slightly by source and season.

What’s Actually on the Menu

Good news if you were worried Greggs would reinvent itself for the occasion: it hasn’t. The Tenerife store carries the full core range you’d recognise from any UK shop, sausage rolls, steak bakes, sandwiches, and the usual sweet treats cabinet. There are two genuine additions, both aimed squarely at the setting rather than an overhaul of the format.

Greggs described the pairing of the omelette roll and fresh OJ as “a refreshing taste of island life”, which is a fairly modest concession considering how far it could have gone. There’s no full Spanish menu, no tapas-style range, just one new breakfast item and a drink, sitting alongside everything else that’s already familiar. If you’re wondering whether the newer UK additions like the Greggs salad range have made the trip too, that hadn’t been confirmed in reporting at the time of writing, so it’s one to check in-store.

Will Prices Be Different in Tenerife?

This is the bit most other coverage of the story hasn’t touched on, and it’s exactly the kind of thing we track here. Every UK Greggs already runs on three separate pricing tiers: Standard high-street stores, City and London branches (typically 11 to 19% more), and Franchise or Airport locations (typically 27 to 55% more, covering places like MOTO motorway services and UK airports).

No euro pricing for the Tenerife store had been published in UK press at the time of writing. But given that the site is, structurally, an airport franchise location, and every UK airport Greggs already charges a meaningful premium over a standard high-street shop, it would be a genuine surprise if Tenerife landed at anything close to UK high-street prices once you factor in the exchange rate too. If you want a sense of how steep that airport markup already runs on home turf, our Greggs Price Finder tool lets you compare Standard, City and Airport pricing on any menu item in seconds.

The Bigger Picture Back Home

The Tenerife opening landed in the same week Greggs updated investors on its UK trading, and the numbers give useful context for why the company felt confident enough to look abroad. Like-for-like sales at company-managed shops were up 2.5% across the first 19 weeks of 2026, and total sales, including new openings, climbed 7.4% year on year to £800 million. Greggs opened 41 new UK shops over the same period while closing 21, and is working towards a target of 120 net new openings across 2026.

The same update flagged a few of the newer menu trends driving that growth, a chicken roll positioned as an alternative to the sausage roll, growing demand for matcha drinks among younger customers, and a new Chicken Caesar Salad that had launched just days earlier. Greggs did add one note of caution too: continued instability in the Middle East could push up cost inflation through late 2026 and into 2027, which is worth keeping an eye on if you’ve noticed prices creeping at your local shop.

Whether Tenerife turns into the first of several overseas openings, or stays a one-off experiment, isn’t something Greggs has confirmed either way. Lagardère Travel Retail runs more than 5,000 outlets in airports and travel hubs worldwide, so if the format does well with UK holidaymakers passing through, the infrastructure for further sites is clearly already there.