ABOUT

BACKGROUND
To maintain Greggs’ role as the most-talked about brand both within and beyond its category, we hero'd the Sausage Roll – one of Greggs’ most distinctive brand assets and arguably a national treasure – as a means of reaffirming brand love.

THE IDEA
The Greggs Ta-Pastry.

To show Greggs’ role as part of the fabric of our nation, we’d hi-jack the arrival of the Bayeux Tapestry with a historical narrative of our own: the ascent of the Sausage Roll to the position of ‘national treasure’.

The Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of the conquest of Britain. We would tell the story of Greggs’ conquest of the British high street.

EXECUTION
To create the needlepoint work of art, Greggs recruited Royal embroiderers, Hawthorne & Heaney, an independent embroidery and design atelier consisting of a small team of master artisans and designers.

Using thirteen symbolic thread colours, including Greggs Blue and Pastry Gold, the stitch-perfect piece ended up an impressive eight metres wide.

Its narrative spanned almost a century of Greggs’ heritage, guiding viewers from Ortus Primus (The Early Beginnings) of John Gregg’s humble bicycle rounds to Victor Mundi (Victory of the World).

We positioned the “Ta-Pastry” as a playful response to one of the year’s biggest stories announcing that our artwork would appear at no less august an institution than London’s Design Museum, endorsed as a cultural artefact.

The result was exactly the collision we wanted: high culture and high-street culture treated with equal reverence.

RESULTS
The coverage was wall-to-wall.
There were over 450 pieces of coverage for the campaign from start-to-finish. Critically, over 40 of those came from national media titles – across print and online – demonstrating the cut-through generated by the campaign.
Reach for the campaign was 34.6 million (63% of the UK adult population) from 170mn Opportunities to See (Meltwater), suggesting a frequency of more than 4.5 impacts per person reached.

As a result, Greggs generated greater share-of-voice during launch month than its competitors commanding 40% of the SOV for the quick service restaurant category (McDonald’s: 34%; Subway 12%).

Post-campaign research showed that 67% of the UK population were aware of the campaign.
Of those who saw the campaign, 72.1% said they were more likely to consider purchasing from the brand.

On the week of the launch, Greggs enjoyed a boost across all YouGov media metrics, including a 27% uplift in Buzz scores against the week before the launch, as the Ta-Pastry became the talk of the nation.

The performance in Buzz scores and attention around the brand held over the weeks following launch as the conversation continued post-launch. YouGov brand popularity rose from 71% to 75% over the campaign period – demonstrating that we didn’t just drive fame, we also drove favourability.

Finally, while not solely attributed to this campaign alone, Greggs saw +7.2% year-on-year sales growth to end-June 2026 and its share of UK food-to-go visits increased 0.3 percentage points to 8.7%, despite the overall market declining 1.9% over the same period.