Right. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us. It's good to be back in a room together again, frankly, not just doing this digitally. Our presentation this morning is gonna follow the usual format. In a moment, I'm gonna hand over to Richard, and he'll present our financial results in more details, and that'll be followed by an overview of our strategic progress that I'll give later on. A comment obviously on the current trading and the outlook as we see it. We'll then end the session as we normally do with questions and answers. As you know, this is gonna be my final results presentation before handing over to our new CEO. Roisin is here. She's attending, but she's in observation mode, and she's gonna observe how things go on.
She'll get her chance to make her first presentation at the interims in August. Before I hand over to Richard, let me just run through the key headlines for last year. It was another year dominated by COVID, and our teams once again coped magnificently with unprecedented and rapidly changing conditions that we've all had to cope with. We set out at the beginning of the year to show we could not only cope with COVID but actually emerge from the crisis stronger and better as a business, and I think the results and achievements in 2021 will show that we've achieved both of those ambitions. I'm gonna take this opportunity to, as you'd expect me to do, to once again thank all of our teams across the country who rose so well to meet those challenges.
Just in terms of headline results, total sales grew to a record GBP 1.2 billion, which was a 5.3% increase on the level seen in 2019. We bounced back to profits, so pre-tax profit for the year was GBP 145.6 million, obviously against our first ever loss the year before, so it's good to see us back in profit again. As a result of that, we finished the year with a very strong cash position, and that supports our ambitious plans that we laid out in the third quarter of last year to invest for further growth. It allows us to recommence our dividend payments, which includes a special dividend that we've announced today.
Also, obviously, as a result of returning to profitability, we're able to recommence our long-standing tradition of sharing profits with our employees. We share 10% of profits with our employees each year. Obviously, we weren't able to do that in a year when we made a loss, but we're back sharing profit this month. This month we'll pay out, what, GBP 16.6 million to our people as a result of our performance last year, which is great to see. Strategically, we've made great progress, so I'm gonna return to those key strategic growth drivers in a few minutes, but for now, I'm just gonna hand over to Richard who will run you through the financial results.
Great. Thank you, Roger. First off, Slide 5 here shows you the structure of the P&L account. You'll notice first off we've given two years' comparatives. Obviously, 2020 is a poor year to compare with the year we've just had. We've put up 2019, and I think that's the best comparison to use to give you a feel for the structure of the P&L. I would focus you on the fourth line down, which is the profit or loss before tax and exceptional items, just because if you go back to 2019, we were still bearing some of the costs of the restructuring program that we'd gone through in terms of resetting our supply chain. You'll see there were GBP 5.9 million worth of exceptional costs there.
Really the best comparison for the current year result is the GBP 114 million we made in 2019. That said, there are also some sort of tailwinds within the 2021 number, and I'll draw those out in a couple of slides' time when I show you more about the structure of the P&L and the margin that we made in the year. That's the overall picture. If I move on to sales, then the first slide here, Slide 6, describes the journey through last year and how our like-for-like sales in company managed shops recovered compared with the same period two years before. It's a comparison with 2019 and then as we come into this year, the early part of 2020, all of it comparing with the pre-pandemic level.
You can see that this time last year, we were recovering from the lockdown in January and February, which was quite deep, particularly in Scotland, where our business was even more affected. There was a very steep recovery in March last year, and particularly into April and May, when the retail and hospitality sectors reopened, and we got a real sort of boost from that. Settled back a bit in June and July, and then we had the staycation effect in August, when many more people were in the U.K., and that was a boost to our shops, where there were just more people in the country out and about than normal. That then steadied again in September and October, and then we saw the Omicron effect through November, December.
If we're honest, that was probably better than we'd feared, given sort of our experience of previous lockdowns. The Omicron impact was much less pronounced, and we saw recovery coming into January and February this year. Now, in January, we've got the benefit in those numbers then of some of the price inflation that we took at the back end of 2021. In February, I should also really highlight that we're comparing there with two years before we had floods. It's hard to remember coming into the pandemic seems to have dwarfed everything since, but the U.K. was flooded at that time, and that's reflected in a soft comp in February. You know, overall, pleased with the progress that we've made and the way we've started this year.
Just to break it out though, the performance is not uniform. The slide on page 7 tries to give you a bit of color in terms of how different location types are performing. You can ignore where these dots are on the X- axis. That's irrelevant. What's important is whether groups of shops are above or below the 2019 level, which is 0% on the Y- axis. If you start on the top left, you'll see there's a group of shops. By the way, the size of the dot on this represents their significance to the Greggs company managed estate. A group of shops that have been the out-performers and still are. These are giving you the performance back in November 2021.
You'll see that areas that were accessed by car, retail parks, roadside locations, industrial and supermarkets have all the way through the pandemic been out-performers. They've been sort of 10%-15% ahead of the 2019 level. They are areas that we've been strategically expanding the estate into. They've been the strongest performers through this period as people have preferred to use their car, I think as a response to the pandemic. Also strategically, we think that is the way the consumer on the go is going. If we look to the right-hand side, you'll see that the biggest parts of the estate, what we've called the heartland locations, are the towns, the suburbs, and perhaps the shopping locations that Greggs traditionally was in.
We've been diversifying away from that estate, but actually it's been one of the strong performers. Actually one of the reasons why Greggs has been more resilient than many other food to-go operators, because we have that heartland. You'll see that our town shops are slightly ahead of 2019 level, shopping centers slightly behind. The stars have been the suburbs, where I guess it kinda makes sense that if people have been spending less time in city centers and workplaces, more time in those suburbs. We see that effect both in terms of absolute performance and also through the week when we see that, you know, there are stronger performances in the suburban locations at the start and end of the week, which is the opposite of what we see in city centers.
The most affected locations, bottom left then, no surprise, city centers, offices, and public transport locations, still around 10% below the 2019 level. But actually, we are seeing signs of recovery in city centers. The public transport locations is something strategically we would like to have more of. We're actually taking the opportunity to invest in putting more shops into railway stations, airports, and other public transport hubs because we think they will be strong performers going forward, and this is a good time to be entering. It gives you a bit of color on the overall estate performance. I'll then come back to the profit and margin.
We've talked about the sales line, but we shouldn't forget the fact that, you know, the sales development, and this is over two years again, comparing with 2019, is not just about that like-for-like performance. It's about the growth in new shops and also our sort of business to business relationships that we have in terms of, the relationship we have with people like Iceland Foods, and also our franchise partners who help us get into locations and catchments that we couldn't otherwise access ourselves. At the gross profit level, a key factor has been the development of our delivery business, which is slightly dilutive to gross margin, obviously, 'cause we bear the costs of operating through the delivery platform with Just Eat.
It pays back further down the P&L in margin terms because it's working our asset base harder, and you see the benefit of that coming through in the next line in distribution and selling costs, where we're pushing the additional delivery business through the same shop costs. The distribution and selling cost ratio has also been flattered last year by the business rates relief that finished mid-year. For the first half of last year, we saw about GBP 15 million worth of relief from business rates, which we've now annualized on. A couple of million that we released from impairment provisions we made in 2020, reflecting the improved performance of shops.
Of course, it's one of the areas where, as you'll see when I talk to you about costs, we're seeing reducing costs on rental lease costs as well, as we renegotiate deals with landlords. In admin expenses, again, an improved ratio. It's partly the structural savings that we made coming out of the pandemic, but also looking back to 2019, it was one of our strongest years, and so incentive charges were higher that year, and are reflected in the comparison now. Overall, a much stronger margin in 2021, but we have to bear in mind those tailwinds which will come out of the numbers in the year ahead.
If we look at the sort of like-for-like cost picture, and I'm sure this will be one of the slides we talk about most in this results season, clearly the headwinds are increasing in terms of cost pressure, and we've seen that already this year compared with our expectations coming into the year. This is the latest picture as we have it. The most sort of uncertain area, I guess, is food and energy. We saw inflation picking up at the back end of last year, and we know it's gonna be a significant headwind in the year ahead. On food and packaging, which you can see from the pie chart, the green segment, is 29% of the cost base. We've got about five months forward cover as we speak.
We'd stayed very short through last year, and we've extended that cover quite substantially through the end of the year so that we do have reasonable visibility, as we speak. Clearly there is an element which is uncovered and uncertain. On energy, which is the 4%, the purple segment, we've got much better cover. We have about nine months on average forward, which is very helpful, as you can imagine, in the current environment. Clearly there are a lot of uncertainties, and I'm sure we can come back to some of those in questions. In addition to that, there are a number of elements in the box below, I've highlighted from a tax point of view.
The business rates point that I've already made will be a year-on-year headwind in terms of the return of that. The full rate of VAT on hot food and drink will step up from 12.5%- 20% in April. Although that's not a like-for-like cost increase, it is something that we have to react to in our pricing from then on. On the right-hand side of the chart, people costs are more predictable because we've gone through the negotiations on pay awards. Having put through 3% last year, we expect about 4.3% to be the pay and salary inflation in the year ahead.
On top of that, from April, there's an additional 1.25% that relates to the National Insurance increase that we're all expecting. At the bottom of the chart, shop occupancy costs are probably the only area where we're seeing reductions. That really reflects the way we've been talking to landlords about really renegotiating leases as opportunities and breaks come up. Really making sure that we're getting credit for the strong covenant and strong balance sheet that Greggs offers to landlords in the property sector. That's been reflected in an improving cost ratio in that area. It's harder to reflect now that we're all in this world of lease accounting.
Perhaps the easiest way is to actually look at the lease accounting charge as a ratio relative to company-managed shop sales. You'll see if you look at that it's been improving year-over-year, and we expect it to improve further in the year ahead. I think the overall message from this is, if you put it all together, we expect that cost inflation is likely to be 6%-7% across the cost base as a whole in the year ahead. Then there are these year-over-year headwinds in terms of tax changes to take into account as well. An unusually sort of high level, but something that we're very conscious of, and we'll be planning against.
If we then turn to CapEx, it was another relatively modest year for capital expenditure as we came out of the pandemic. You can see from the 2021 numbers that we started to increase the investment in shops because we got back on the front foot in terms of shop openings and also starting to put equipment and replacement equipment back into shops. Still not too much in terms of refurbishment, but that will become a bigger feature in the year ahead. Our supply chain capital expenditure again was fairly light as we completed a number of projects that we'd spent more on in 2020. Overall GBP 57 million spent on CapEx.
That will increase significantly in the year ahead as we both increase the pace of shop openings, the pace of refurbishment, and also start to put down the infrastructure for the significant growth plans we have ahead. You can see those more clearly in context on Slide 11, which gives you the longer picture. This is entirely consistent with the story that we laid out at our Capital Markets Day in October when we described the ambitious growth plans that we have for the next five years and what it would mean to invest in both the retail estate and the supply chain to support that. On this chart, the supply chain investment is the blue segment.
That's gonna be focused on developing a new site in the south of England where we can locate our manufacturing operations and also adding additional primary and radial distribution capacity. When we talk about primary and radial, primary logistics is the way that we move product produced at our manufacturing centers between national distribution centers. Radial logistics is the transport that goes out from those regional hubs to our shops, and we'll need to invest in more capacity on both of those over the coming years. The green element that you see, the retail, relates to the refurbishment program, which we'll start again.
That's something we've taken a bit of a break from in recent years, but that will create the space that we need for servicing the new digital channels, so it's crucial to the growth agenda in like-for-like terms and give us kitchen capabilities for more food preparation as well. A combination of that and the increased pace of shop openings is reflected in the blue segment of this. Obviously these figures will change depending on the progress we make, but that's our best estimate as we stand here today. Just some of the other factors that I should draw to your attention in terms of tax and earnings. The effective corporation tax rate in 2021 was 19.3%.
It was inflated slightly by the need to revalue deferred tax liabilities, now that the increase in corporation tax in April next year has been enacted. It was reduced also by us being able to take advantage of some of the super-deductions which were announced in the Chancellor's budget last year for capital expenditure in 2021. You'll see more of that as you then roll forward into the years ahead. We've relaid the guidance for what we think the effective tax rate will be for the next few years, and you'll see a particularly low tax rate in this current year, 2022, which reflects the ability to use these super-deductions.
In April 2023, the tax rate increases to 25%, and therefore we expect the effective rate next year to be 24%. From 2024 onwards, our best guide is that it'll be about 1% above the headline rate. If the headline rate is 25%, we would expect to be about 26%, and that just reflects disallowable costs in our tax computations. Flowing all that through to earnings for 2021, 114.3 pence diluted EPS, which is important then when we come onto the dividend because we said back in the autumn that we were gonna get going again with our sort of twice-covered ordinary dividend policy.
We've declared or recommended a GBP 0.42 per share final dividend, which would make GBP 0.57 for the year as a whole, because we paid out GBP 0.15 back in the autumn. That means we've got a 2x covered dividend by diluted EPS. Having looked at the cash position, which I'll come on and describe just a moment, we also feel now able to confirm the special dividend, which we talked about at the January trading update. There'll be a special dividend of GBP 0.40 per share paid out in April. Finally, on balance sheet, you'll notice from the results that we're very cash generative in 2021, with GBP 236 million after lease payments coming in from operating activities.
That was partly driven by the strong operating performance, but also working capital improvement because, with a model like Greggs, when we went through the closures and the subdued trade during the pandemic, you get this sort of working capital outflow, and we benefited from the recovery of that through 2021. Essentially, as we sell more, we sell ahead of paying our suppliers, and therefore you get this working capital inflow. It's a recovery, a resetting of the previous position. I've already said we had relatively modest CapEx and dividends in the year as well. In terms of outflows, there wasn't as much as we would normally expect. By the end of 2021, we had almost GBP 200 million net cash position.
In terms of total liquidity, in addition to that, we had access to our revolving credit facility, which gives us a net GBP 70 million extra to access should we need it. That obviously leads you to the question of capital allocation. The reason for carrying such a large amount of cash is the significant program of investment we see ahead, which will all be self-funded. We will be carrying more cash than normal through the next couple of year ends. We'll also return to the ordinary dividend policy, as I've already described. In a normal sort of scenario, we would expect to carry about GBP 15 million, but we will be significantly ahead of that this year end and the following one as we roll cash over into that CapEx program.
Having taken all that into account, we still felt that it was entirely appropriate to have a rebalancing. We've confirmed the GBP 0.40 special dividend, which was at the top end of the guidance we previously gave. That's it from me for now. I'll hand you back to Roger, and then we'll be back for questions after Roger's given you an update on strategy.
Thanks, Richard. So I think, hopefully you'll all agree that, having been tested to the limits through COVID, Greggs has bounced back stronger. We've embarked on an ambitious strategic program, which we shared with capital markets at Capital Markets Day and shareholders back in October last year. We want to double our sales over the next five years. We've identified growth drivers that we think will allow us to get there. They don't fundamentally change the strategic pillars on which the business are based, but these are the areas that we see being able to drive the growth in the business over the next five years, which will see us reach further into the marketplace than we already enjoy.
I'm gonna canter through those four drivers just to give you an update on where we are and what we've done. The first obviously is to grow and develop the Greggs estate. We've got 2,181 shops as we speak. We opened 131 last year, closed 28. We set a target of wanting to reach 3,000 and more. We need to set these targets 'cause we need to plan for supply chain capacity that goes alongside of that Richard started to talk about then when we talk about our CapEx. To do that, we've accelerated our shop opening program. We want to hit 150 a year net growth, which is 50 more than we've typically done in the past.
The brand's very versatile, so we're able to open all types of shops in all sorts of places. The digital channels that we're opening up now also enable us to extend the reach of each of those shops to more customers. The shape of where we're going, as Richard described in that slide earlier, we've got good representation already in traditional towns, suburbs, and the like, which have actually done us very proud during the COVID crisis. All of the growth opportunities we see are in those new on-the-go locations. Where people work, where they travel, or have access by car typically is where we see most of the opportunity. Central London is one geographic region in particular where we've been underrepresented in the past because of high rents.
Obviously, with the shape of the labor, with the property market post-COVID, we've now got lower entry costs for London, and we've started to open there. Last year, for example, you saw us opening Canary Wharf, King's Cross. We've got a good pipeline of openings still to come this year. We're also chasing the most desired format of all, which is the drive-thru. Just like everybody else, we want drive-thrus as well. We managed to open a few last year, and we've got some more in the pipeline for this year. That's all looking very encouraging. Franchise partners obviously play a key part in our expansion plans because they give us access to locations we can't access directly. We've got 375 so far with franchise partners.
We've got 12 corporate partners that we work with, but we're hoping to add to that roster. We think that over the years ahead, franchise shops will account for about 20% of our total estate. As well as the new shops, obviously, Richard's already mentioned, we're going to be restarting our shop refit program this year. We're gonna aim for around about 200 shops, and the aim is really to reconfigure the space to be able to cope with the multichannel operations in digital, and in food preparation that some of the services we want to offer will command. To do that, we're gonna also look to try and move some of our shops to bigger, better premises to allow us to fulfill more of that demand.
That might include, in the right places, more coffee shop seating, where we think we can play a part in that market too. This slide, I won't spend time on it now in detail, but you might wanna study it later, just really summarizes where we see the opportunities by location type. In terms of our pipeline, all of those location types are represented this year and expect to be in future years. That's where we see the opportunities for us to keep opening. More shops, driver number one. Driver number two, evening trade. Typically, Greggs closes around 6:00 P.M., and we don't participate and compete for the dinnertime market. The dinnertime market accounts for about 35% of total food-on-the-go sales, so we're just not present.
We think we ought to be. We've done some trials about that. We think there's no reason why we can't aspire to reach the sort of position in that time of day that we've achieved in other times. We're Number 2 at breakfast, Number 2 at lunch. No reason why we can't compete effectively in the dinnertime market as well. Much of that dinnertime market is takeout in nature by market surveys that we've sourced and presented at the Capital Markets Day. About 86% of demand for that time of day is in takeout, and that's what we do. We're well positioned to compete for it. We know that our menu isn't perfect for it right now, but it's also we're not starting from a zero base.
Customers already believe that what we sell already is the type of food they want to buy in the evening, so that gives us a head start. We know that we're gonna have to do some work to develop the menu. That type of work is already underway with trials out there in limited shops to try and see where we might go next with some of those developments, particularly in the hot food arena, which well, customers want at that time of day. The evening represents a big opportunity for us, and we're going after it. Digital channels is the next one. Back in 2019, back in the day, pre-COVID, we just launched Next Generation Greggs, which is all about us getting after digital channels.
We'd done trials already, which put us in a good position to accelerate the rollout of delivery with Just Eat, which, last year, we got to 1,000 shops with those. There is some switching between channels, but it's minimal. These are customers in a different need state at different times of day. They are additional sales to our walk-in sales. As we see walk-in sales coming back, as COVID hopefully just recedes into the past, he says, fingers crossed, then we're gonna see obviously delivery channels growing alongside the walk-in channel and overall, give us growth in the two combined. Delivery channel has interesting dynamics in itself. Typically, it's much higher basket value, three times the average that we'd achieve in a shop.
It's normally serving more than one person, which is why it drives that level of basket value. It allows us to reach customers more easily rather than just relying on just the customers that are walking by. We're gonna have to invest in increasing our capacity in order to fulfill all of that demand. That's part of what all the refit program is about. We want to extend delivery from 1,000 shops to 1,300 shops this year. We're in the process of doing that and put the two together, and we find that growth opportunities seem obvious to us must come from doing that.
We reckon that if you combine the walk-in channel with the delivery channel, it'll make about 2/3 of our shops viable for late trading over time. We're seeing the combination of the two, unlocking that opportunity for us more quickly than typically relying on just the one channel as we've done in the past. The other thing that digital channels does is open up new opportunities for Greggs to compete in other ways. Because we're daily sellout food, it's fresh food has to sell out each day, Click and Collect is a particularly attractive channel for us.
It offers the customer the ability to browse the menu more easily, guarantee availability, skip the queue, and ultimately, we hope to be able to personalize their orders because they're ordering digitally rather than than, you know, walking in and doing it on spec as such. Last year, we integrated Click and Collect with our new Greggs App, and that puts us in a position this year to start to get more aggressive about the marketing of that channel to customers and start to grow participation in that way. We already offer a made-to-order service. People don't sort of fully recognize it in the sense that it is the core of our breakfast offer. Breakfast is a made-to-order service.
If we can convert some of that online, that will help our breakfast operation because obviously that's where the queues are hardest. We're gonna extend that to other categories, and trials will begin this year with pizza toppings, and then we'll move on to baguettes. In the end, this made-to-order facility will mean that we can offer wider choice from the existing ingredient palette. You're not complicating the process by adding more ingredients. You're simply offering those ingredients in different combinations, which is a way of expanding range without expanding range, if you know what I mean. It should also mean if you can get more people to go that way, it'll speed up the operation because payment will have been done remotely. We're removing the payment operation from the walk-in channel.
There are all sorts of advantages to why that will work for us if we can get it right. The next driver is what we call meaning making Greggs mean more to more people. We've repositioned the Greggs brand in recent years from being a baker to being a customer's favorite for food on the go. Yes, we've been successful, but we still account for less than 7% of customer visits. We've got a long, long way to go yet before we become as big as we think we can be in this marketplace. That we know that three-quarters of our customers visit Greggs less than once a week.
Obviously, there's a core, there's the quarter that visit frequently, but there's three-quarters that visit us very infrequently, and it's those people that we want to persuade to use us more often. Digital engagement will allow us to connect with those people in relevant ways and increase frequency and average transaction value, which is effectively what that program is designed to do. That rewards scheme, plus the Click and Collect services, is really important to the future as we see it. Downloads of the new app are now in excess of 1 million, so it's already underway. We're growing rapidly, and that means that we can start to deploy these CRM tools, as they're called, at scale.
We've been doing trials up until now, but we can now start to scale up this year and hopefully start to see that make a difference to the bottom line in driving for our ambitions. Overall, we're very excited about what the prospects for all that will bring. Now, of course, to maximize or to achieve those objectives, we need capacity and supply chain because we're vertically integrated. Not many people are. We've transformed our supply chain in recent years, investing in the systems and in centralizing manufacturing, so we're making better use of space and automation, and that's given us a step change in the quality of what we sell and also in the supply chain cost structure. That's a template that we're now gonna replicate as we get bigger.
We're gonna need more manufacturing capacity and more logistics capacity to cope with our ambitions. Last year, that included opening our first automated frozen distribution center in Newcastle. We completed the extension work of Welsh Bakery in just outside Cardiff, and we increased capacity at our savory plant in Balliol Park in Newcastle. All of those things are needed for what our ambitions are for the future. SAP systems are at the core of what we've done in the transformation. We're nearly there. We've got all but just two last manufacturing distribution sites to convert to SAP, and we'll achieve that in the first half of this year, and then that program is complete.
We're now working on where do we go next, which includes a southern-based manufacturing facility, likely, and then we've got teams working on where would that be, how big would that need to be, et cetera, et cetera, and the additional primary and radial distribution capacity Richard's talked about earlier. With SAP done, we're obviously then moving on now to build on that platform. More capacity and resilience in our IT network. Microsoft BI, which is now embedded in the business. We see the opportunity to build on that modern systems base to become more efficient and more effective with continuous improvement process improvement programs over time.
One of the key things we delivered last year was the new sandwich labeling system, which was to do with Natasha's Law, so that we're able to label all the sandwiches that we sell off because we make those fresh on the premises. That is good for customers because obviously it gives them the information they need to make safe choices. Strategically for us, it's the system we'll then use to deploy in made-to-order food. There's a double benefit from the work that was done there, and it was a major exercise which the teams completed very well. Last is the Greggs Pledge, which we launched last February.
I'm not gonna go into detail now as it will take too long, but we set out those ten ambitions to make ourselves a better business. We want to help build stronger, better communities, healthier communities, make the planet safer, be a better business. We set these ten objectives. We achieved most of them last year, and a couple that we didn't, we can take questions on that later. We'll be setting new objectives this year and it will all be reported in a separate sustainability report, which we can spend time with shareholders in more depth as we travel around. Just to finish then on the current trading. We started well.
Obviously we're up against a low base in 2021, because there were still COVID restrictions in place then. I didn't think I'd ever find myself saying this, but I hope we'll never see like-for-like sales of 44% ever again. Quite nice while it lasts. On a two-year basis, which makes more sense, it was just pre-COVID in those nine weeks in 2020, so that's a reasonable guide at 3.7% higher, that we're still moving in the right direction. Obviously, the thing dominating the headlines now is cost pressures, and we're gonna have to cope with that in this year. They are more significant than we thought at the beginning of the year. Obviously, we could see inflation coming, and we'd signaled that at the end of last year.
They're obviously getting worse. We're gonna obviously have to work very hard to mitigate that as much as we can and protect customers from the impact of it. It's gonna be tough. Given that dynamic, we don't expect material profit progression in this current year. That all said, we remain as excited as ever about the opportunities for Greggs over the longer- term. The business is in a great place given how we've invested in recent years. We think we can drive for those ambitious plans that I've outlined already. Overall, we're feeling despite the pressures right now very confident about what the future holds.
This, as you know, is my final year as the Chief Executive for Greggs, and I'm gonna take the opportunity you'd expect me to say that it really has been a privilege for me to lead the business for the last eight years. I've tried my best in that time to change the things that needed changing and not change the things that didn't need changing. That's protecting the culture of the business. That's the most important bit, which is why I'm delighted that Roisin is sat here at the front now, has been appointed as my successor. I mean, I've worked with Roisin now for many years. I know she's she embodies the values that the business works to, and she's gonna continue to protect them as we get after these growth opportunities in the future. Okay.
Well, thank you very much, everybody. You won't see me in this environment again, but you will see Roisin.
Thank you.
Thanks so much.