Greggs
20 Apr 23
Greggs plc was established back in 1939 with a single store in Gosforth, Newcastle Upon Tyne. Fast forward to 2023, and with over 2,000 stores across the UK, Greggs is now one of the most recognised names in the bakery industry. Greggs introduced the TurboChef product range to their stores several years ago, and have seen great success in terms of product quality and customer satisfaction.
Goals
Greggs PLC required an efficient and effective method for heating ‘hot to go’ products. Whilst the oven needed to be user friendly, faster than their existing mono oven, and had the ability to futureproof (i.e., programme additional items when the range grew), it also needed to have a small footprint on the back bar and be close to hand.
Solutions
Turbochef have supplied SOTA, Tornado, and most recently, Eco ST and i3 ovens. Turbochef and Greggs PLC have worked closely for several years now, and this relationship has enabled Greggs to continuously improve and grow their ‘hot to go’ range. Each Turbochef model was faster, smaller, and more user friendly than other sandwich ovens in the market.
Results
Relationship: Communication with Turbochef has been consistently excellent; any queries are swiftly responded to, and issues discussed through at great length to ensure problems are solved.
New product development opportunities: This year, Greggs PLC launched customised pizza and received excellent support from Turbochef throughout a massive rollout of new programmes; ‘Topped pizza’ and ‘Untopped pizza’. Since the ovens are so user friendly, the majority of updates were able to be completed using USB or smart cards provided by Middleby UK, and Greggs were able to easily train colleagues across the company to manually programme settings onto the minority of ovens that were not able to use the alternative methods.
Benefits to shop operations: When Greggs replaced older sandwich ovens with Turbochef models, we were able to fill extra space on shop back bars with additional coffee machines, and sometimes even more Turbochef ovens; the Turbochef ovens are significantly smaller than models supplied by alternative suppliers. Each oven performs excellently, and our customers love the quality of products they produce. Turbochef’s innovative nature and knowledge of the industry has enabled Greggs PLC to explore new opportunities with new products and reduce labour costs across thousands of stores through faster cook times. Most recently, the Turbochef i3 oven has helped to reduce dead time on bundle pizza products by 65%!
