Greggs Future Technology 2026
Greggs Future Technology 2026: How Automated Is Your Local Bakery Getting?
I’ve been writing about Greggs long enough that I thought the most high-tech thing in my local shop was the heated display cabinet. Then, in the space of about eighteen months, the bakery rolled out touchscreen ordering, a staff-free forecourt format, vending machine trials, a robot-run warehouse and its first ever head of data and AI. So I went through every announcement, trial and results call to separate what’s real from what’s internet noise.
The Quiet Tech Takeover 🥐
Greggs isn’t a small bakery any more, and that changes the question. Turnover passed £2bn for the first time with the 2024 results, the 2,600th shop opened around the same time, and the stated ambition is somewhere north of 3,500 shops. At that scale, “where’s the next high-street unit?” stops being the whole strategy.
The new question is: how do you serve more people, in more places, without building a full staffed shop everywhere? That’s exactly where the automation comes in — forecourts, vending, apps, and warehouses doing the heavy lifting so the sausage roll turns up wherever you are.
Touchscreen Ordering Screens 🖥️
The first visible bit of in-store tech landed in autumn 2025. Shoppers at several North East stores spotted self-service screens letting you browse the menu, order and pay by touch while the normal counter stays open.
Reports at the time put the trial at up to ten stores. Think of it as a fast lane for the person who already knows what they want — a sausage roll, a flat white, out — rather than a replacement for the person who likes a chat with the staff. If you’ve ever watched a queue form behind someone ordering for an office, you can see exactly why Greggs is testing it.
Greggs Express: No Counter, No Queue 🚉
The bigger step came in May 2026: Greggs Express, the first ever staff-free format, opened inside a Motor Fuel Group forecourt just outside Glasgow Airport. You grab your own bake, pour your own Fairtrade coffee and check yourself out. Greggs has said it plans to grow the format “over the coming months” from that first site, though it hasn’t confirmed a specific number of live units yet.
I’ve already written a full explainer on it, so I won’t repeat myself here — but the bit that matters for this piece is the intent. Express exists for places a full shop would never fit: forecourts, travel hubs, the 2am fuel stop. It’s automation as expansion, not automation as replacement.
Vending Machines: The 2026 Trial 🥧
Then came the headline-grabber. At the March 2026 results call, CFO Richard Hutton confirmed Greggs would trial vending machines “very shortly” — both automated and manual versions — aimed at locations where a full store simply isn’t viable.
No dates or locations have been announced yet, so if you’ve seen a photo of a “Greggs vending machine” on social media, check the date. The only machine so far was a one-day Monzo promo unit in Newcastle in July 2024, which gave away free sausage rolls rather than selling them. Lovely stunt. Not a rollout.
The logic, though, is sound. A heated-cabinet vending unit costs a fraction of a shop to run, and it unlocks hospitals, campuses, gyms and midnight motorway services. Pair it with the 24-hour sites already running at places like Glasgow Airport and Gatwick, and you can see the shape of the “Greggs whenever you want it” plan.
The Self-Service U-Turn 🧊
Here’s the twist nobody saw coming: some self-service is going into reverse. In May 2025 Greggs began trialling the removal of self-serve fridges in high-risk stores, moving sandwiches and drinks behind the counter to tackle shoplifting and abuse of staff.
So the honest picture is genuinely mixed. One part of the business is adding self-service where it makes money; another part is removing it where it makes losses. That’s not confusion — that’s what a real-world technology rollout looks like. Trials run in both directions, and the data decides.
The App & the AI Roadmap 📱
The quietest automation story is also the biggest: the app. Greggs’ own results show it scanned in 12.5% of company-managed shop transactions in 2023, roughly one in five (about 20%) in 2024, and 25.7% by the first half of 2025. A quarter of the queue choosing to scan, order or Click + Collect digitally — that’s a self-checkout revolution that didn’t need a single kiosk.
The plumbing behind it is proper enterprise tech too — Click + Collect was rebuilt on Microsoft Azure — and the app’s personalised offers and stamp rewards are the visible end of a data pipeline that gets smarter every scan. If you’re not already stacking stamps, our Greggs App stamp system guide and app hacks roundup will sort you out.
And the roadmap is getting formal. As of late August 2026, Greggs was actively recruiting for its first ever permanent Head of Data & AI, with the company’s own Resourcing Manager describing it on LinkedIn as helping “serve up the next chapter” of Greggs’ AI journey. The role sits within IT & Business Change, and the brief is exactly what you’d expect from a food-on-the-go retailer this size: demand forecasting, waste reduction, and sharper personalised offers through the app.
Robot Warehouses & the Investment Plan 🏭
Now the bit you never see: the supply chain. This is where the serious automation money goes. Greggs has described 2025 as the peak year of a multi-year investment cycle, with capital expenditure of around £300 million — the bulk of it supply chain infrastructure, chiefly the new Derby and Kettering sites.
| Site | What’s automated | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Newcastle manufacturing | Fully automated high-bay frozen cold store — 32m tall, nine levels of automation, six new loading docks | Opened 2021 |
| SmartParc SEGRO, Derby | Frozen manufacturing + logistics with Swisslog’s fully automated robotic shop-order picking; capacity sized for up to 3,500 shops; up to 600 jobs | Coming online across 2026 |
| Symmetry Park, Kettering | New national distribution centre for the whole network | Expected H1 2027 |
None of this changes what’s in the bake-off ovens or the heated display cabinets in store — but it’s the reason a 3,500-shop Greggs can exist without the sausage roll supply wobbling.
Eco-Shop: The Green Tech Lab 🌱
One more strand of “future Greggs” deserves a mention: the eco-shop, the company’s shop-of-the-future testbed. Recyclable flooring, cistern-less toilets, eco-ovens, heat-pump air curtains and solar control glass all get trialled there before rolling out wider, and the first eco drive-thru opened in 2025. The old target was for a quarter of shops to feature eco-shop elements.
It’s not automation in the robot sense, but it’s the same idea: prototype the future in one shop, then scale what works. Our eco-shop locations guide lists where you can actually walk through one, and the drive-through list covers the other new format on the road.
The Automation Timeline 📅
Confirmed vs Rumour: What’s Actually Real? ✅
Half the “Greggs is going fully automated” chatter online is made up. Here’s the honest scorecard as of September 2026:
| Claim | Status | The reality |
|---|---|---|
| Touchscreen ordering screens | Confirmed trial | Around ten stores, from September 2025, counter stays open |
| Greggs Express staff-free units | Confirmed, live | First unit opened May 2026 near Glasgow Airport; more planned, no confirmed count yet |
| Vending machines | Confirmed, coming | Automated + manual versions; trials “very shortly”; no sites named yet |
| Robot warehouse picking | Confirmed | Derby, Swisslog automation, online across 2026 |
| AI demand forecasting | In development | Head of Data & AI role still being recruited as of August 2026; strategy still being defined |
| Cashless, card-only shops | Not announced | Cash is still fine at Greggs — see does Greggs take cash? |
| Fully robot-staffed shops | Internet myth | Nobody’s building that. The counter stays. |
What does it all mean for prices?
Short answer: nothing dramatic, and the three pricing tiers aren’t going anywhere. A standard high-street sausage roll still sits at £1.35, while City-London and franchise airport sites run their own higher pricing — and it’d be no surprise at all if unstaffed travel-hub formats price closer to the airport end than the high-street end, the way forecourt sites already do. Our airport pricing explainer and the full three-tier price guide show exactly how that works today.
On jobs, the honest read is that automation is adding capacity, not removing people. The Derby site alone should create up to 600 roles, Greggs is still adding well over 100 net new shops a year, and the Express trial sits outside those store-opening targets — it’s extra coverage, not substitution. And remember the fridge u-turn: where self-service loses money, Greggs puts a human back in the way.
Frequently Asked Questions ❓
Not right now. The vast majority of Greggs’ 2,700+ UK shops remain staffed with a traditional counter. The self-service experiments — Greggs Express forecourt units, a handful of touchscreen ordering screens, and the upcoming vending machine trial — are all small trials aimed at places a full shop wouldn’t fit, not a plan to replace the counter.
Not quite. Greggs confirmed at its March 2026 results call that trials of automated and manual vending machines would begin ‘very soon’, aimed at locations where a full shop isn’t viable. The only Greggs vending machine so far was a one-day Monzo promo machine in Newcastle in 2024, which gave away free sausage rolls rather than selling them.
There’s no sign of that so far. The new automated Derby manufacturing and logistics site alone is expected to create up to 600 jobs, and Greggs is still adding well over 100 net new shops a year on the road to around 3,500 shops. The tech is about adding capacity and convenience — and in some high-risk shops Greggs has actually pulled back on self-service, moving grab-and-go fridges behind the counter to tackle shoplifting.
The sausage roll, for the record, isn’t going anywhere. But how, where and when you buy it is quietly changing — and on the evidence so far, Greggs is doing something rather clever: using technology to be everywhere the high street can’t, while keeping the counter, the chat and the cash exactly where they are.
