Retail Leader of the Year
Roger Whiteside
From hotcakes to hoodies – how Roger Whiteside transformed Greggs
Retail Leader of the Year Roger Whiteside spearheaded an impressive post-pandemic recovery at Greggs while 'doing the right thing' – and he leaves the chain well equipped to conquer London and beyond
“It’s a little oasis right in the heart of London, isn’t it?” Roger Whiteside says, admiring the surroundings from the window of Greggs’ newest store in the capital.
Looking out on to the Paddington Basin and Floating Pocket Park, surrounded by plush apartments, upmarket bars and an open-air cinema, it is not a setting customers would typically associate with the value food operator.
But times have changed – and so has Greggs. Its Praed Street shop is kitted out in a manner that visitors might usually expect from Greggs’ great food-to-go rival Pret a Manger – light wooden finishes, sleek spotlights, digital signage, dedicated click-and-collect and hot food counters, and a large kitchen behind the tills.
Even during the late morning too-late-for-breakfast-but-too-early-for-lunch dip in trading, the store attracts a steady flow of customers stopping for coffee, snacks or taking away larger lunch orders in preparation for afternoon meetings.
It is no wonder that Whiteside affords himself a smile as he pulls up a chair and sips from a flat white. His relaxed demeanour marks a welcome contrast from just two years ago, when Whiteside feared that Greggs might not even survive the coronavirus pandemic.
Discover all the Retail Week Awards winners
“At the point we were closed, the working assumption had to be that if you didn’t get funding, you might go under,” Whiteside recalls. “We had no debt and the wherewithal to take on debt and get shareholder support if we needed it, so it would have had to have been a very extreme scenario, but we just didn’t know what was going to happen. When you’ve got no money coming in and all the outgoings still due, who knew when that would end?”
Whiteside stuck to his well-trodden mantra to “plan for the worst, hope for the best”. Greggs made various preparations for ways to raise cash if needed, including setting up a loan with the Bank of England.
“It turns out we needn’t have bothered – we didn’t need to draw on the bank facility or raise money in any other way because we did manage to reopen,” he says. “Once we reopened again, we got to break even almost immediately and I knew that, while we may not make any money, we wouldn’t go under.”
Roger Whiteside calls the area around Greggs' Praed Street store 'a little oasis'
Roger Whiteside calls the area around Greggs' Praed Street store 'a little oasis'
''You’ve just got to expect the unexpected, haven’t you? Whatever comes, the evidence is that Greggs is resilient''
But Greggs has done so much more than simply stay afloat. No UK-listed retailer delivered more profit upgrades during the past 12 months than the five issued by Greggs between May 2021 and January 2022.
In the 52 weeks to January 1, 2022, pre-tax profit jumped 34.3% from pre-pandemic levels to £145.6m, while total sales increased 5.3% to £1.23bn. Equally noteworthy is how the business re-invested those profits into all stakeholders – investors, communities and colleagues.
Greggs paid a final ordinary dividend of 42p per share and a special dividend of 40p. It spent £31.5m on stores, fitting out new locations, refurbishing existing sites and acquiring equipment. And, having hit the pause button during the pandemic, it recommenced its policy of sharing 10% of profits with its workforce, handing out £16.6m to staff across the company.
The impressive scale and speed of Greggs’ recovery, achieved while “doing the right thing” by its people, convinced our judges to crown Whiteside the Retail Leader of the Year at the Retail Week Awards 2022.
The honour is a fitting end to Whiteside’s nine-year tenure with the high street chain – he retired just a couple of days ago – and is a testament to the scale of change he has overseen. Under his stewardship, Greggs has been transformed from a decentralised bakery business cooking bread rolls in individual stores, to a centralised food-on-the-go powerhouse selling salads, sandwiches, pizzas – and, of course, vegan sausage rolls.
Whiteside attributes Greggs’ robust performance over the past year to “the fact we had the plan in place before the crisis hit”, including centralising its manufacturing and supply chain, developing click and collect, and relaunching its smartphone app.
“That’s the difference,” Whiteside insists. “We weren’t making it up and thinking: ‘Shit, there’s a crisis, what are we going to do about it?’ I had just launched ‘Next Generation Greggs’ as the strategy; I had just signed the Just Eat contract so we didn’t have to negotiate it – it was already done. We had already made our mind up about how we were going to progress the delivery channel and that obviously became very important, very quickly.
“Layer on top of that the fact that we had grown the shop base and spread beyond the high street into where people need to travel – putting all of that together – we are a business that has got a lot of bases covered.”
“If you search hard enough you’ll find a picture of me decked out in the Greggs x Primark gear. White socks and the sliders – that’s the look”
"The supermarket of clothing is Primark. It’s a fabulously busy operation, so we thought we’d experiment and they were happy to do the same"
Customers queued out the door for Greggs' fashion tie-up with Primark
Customers queued out the door for Greggs' fashion tie-up with Primark
Greggs has covered an increasing number of bases over the past year, testing, learning and innovating despite the pressures of a pandemic hangover, supply chain problems and rampant inflation. Whiteside’s desire to continue driving that change and expansion agenda also impressed the Retail Week Awards judges. Its tie-up with Primark in February – launching a cafe in the fashion retailer’s Birmingham flagship and unveiling a limited edition clothing range that drew crowds to a pop-up shop in London’s Soho – stood out.
“That had a double whammy – that had a PR value that both businesses benefited from, but also, from our point of view, it's just a pure common-sense location issue,” Whiteside explains. “There are some retail destinations that are so busy that they represent mini-catchments. That started with the out-of-town supermarkets – they are destinations in and of themselves. For me, the supermarket of clothing is Primark. It’s a fabulously busy operation, so we thought we’d experiment and they were happy to do the same.
“Hopefully we will get the chance to do a few more if we get the right opportunities. It won’t be every Primark, that’s for certain, but some of the bigger ones where they feel they have sufficient space to be able to rent to us and where we can see there is enough demand.”
Whiteside, wearing a sharp navy blue suit and blue and white checked shirt, smiles as he reveals: “If you search hard enough you’ll find a picture of me decked out in the Greggs x Primark gear. White socks and the sliders – that’s the look,” he jokes. “Down with the kids, I am.”
It might be a tongue-in-cheek quip, but the manner in which fast-food giants such as McDonald’s and Burger King have been left playing catch up developing their vegan menus perfectly illustrates how Whiteside has remained on the pulse of changing tastes among younger consumers.
It seems the retail veteran is “down” with Greggs’ young shopfloor workforce, too. As Whiteside takes a breather to pose for photographs, a member of the Praed Street team, Mohamed, asks for the Retail Week verdict on the new store. “Greggs is such a chill company,” he adds. “I love working here.”
Mohamed joined Greggs last July and moved to the Praed Street store from its Church Street branch, half a mile away, at the end of March. Operating two stores in such close proximity in the heart of London would have been unheard of for Greggs prior to the pandemic but Whiteside is keen to seize the opportunity presented by lower rents in the capital. Prime locations will open in Leicester Square and The Strand, both in the heart of theatreland, in the coming weeks.
''As an outgoing CEO, it’s not my responsibility to replace myself... The best person won the competition''
Whiteside admits that Greggs has always been “underrepresented” in London but sky-high rents meant the business “had not had the courage to press the button on London” prior to the pandemic. Two years on, that outlook has changed dramatically.
“We took the view that there will never be a better time to take the risk than now when the rents are so diminished because of the Covid effect,” Whiteside explains. “I think [rent levels] will come back, so we said: ‘Let’s go as hard as we can now.’
“We know we can afford these low rents but what we need to find out is whether we can afford the full rent when it comes back. Now is the time to go so that we don’t lose money finding out. If it turns out that the landlord wants his old rent back again in five years’ time and we’re out of here, then fine – we’ll have learnt that we can’t get enough demand per unit in London to afford those rents. I suspect there will be some locations where we say ‘it doesn’t work, we don’t take enough money there’ and there will be other locations that take us by surprise.”
Whiteside is reluctant to make predictions about how far Greggs’ London portfolio could grow, or the future more generally, after such a turbulent two years. “We were forced to close and no one had that on the risk register. First a global pandemic, then war in Europe. So this is my next official prediction: an alien invasion within 18 months,” Whiteside laughs.
“You’ve just got to expect the unexpected, haven’t you? Whatever comes, the evidence is that Greggs is resilient. We certainly are feeling confident now that we can survive all but the alien invasion. Although I bet even aliens eat sausage rolls; or, if not, they will discover them and find it was worth invading the planet for that alone.”
Whiteside, who turns 64 in June, will not be the man charged with leading Greggs through that uncertain, but hopefully alien-free, future. He has handed the baton to Roisin Currie, Greggs’ retail and property director, to oversee the chain’s next phase of growth.
Whiteside, who was made an OBE in 2019 for services to women and equality, says it gives him “great pleasure” to know that he is being succeeded not just by an existing member of his leadership team, but by a woman – government data published earlier this year showed there were just 18 female chief executives in the FTSE 350.
Although Whiteside is proud that Greggs will be playing its part in shifting that dial, he insists: “It’s not positive discrimination, that’s for certain. The best person won the competition. As an outgoing CEO, it’s not my responsibility to replace myself, it’s led by the board and they employed a global headhunter, searched the market for potential candidates and put the internal candidate, Roisin, up against the best the external market was offering. There were some really great people who showed an interest in Greggs, and Roisin came out with flying colours.”
Sitting in the shadow of the Paddington head offices of Marks & Spencer – the business where he started his career in 1979 – Whiteside can now look to a future beyond retail. He will remain on the board of Card Factory for “a few years” and aims for “a full retirement” once that non-executive role ends.
“I’d like 10 years of decent health to get out a bit,” Whiteside says. “The term I’ve picked up which I saw on the back of a motorhome once was: ‘Adventure before dementia’. Get out there and see the world and spend time with friends and family.”
There will be more than a tinge of sadness as Whiteside waves goodbye to his Greggs family, but after an impressive year, he leaves them on something of a roll.
Built with Shorthand