Good morning. I think it's just gone 9:00 A.M., so we will make a start. Lovely to see you all here today. Thank you for coming. The agenda today will be in the usual format. I will outline the results that we've announced today, and I'll then hand over to Richard to take us through the financial performance in more detail. After which, I will then take you through the strategic progress, and we will finish with the outlook for the year before we take your questions. We have continued to make progress despite the challenging market conditions. As you can see in the slide, total sales growth is 7%, and that is 2.6% on a like-for-like basis for company-managed shops and 4.8% for franchise shops. Operating profit is down 7.1% year on year at £70.4 million, and pre-tax profit down 14.3% year to £63.5 million.
Richard will explain that in a bit more detail. We have maintained the interim dividend at £0.19 in line with our progressive dividend policy. In terms of our strategic progress, our brand metrics remain strong, and we maintain our sector-leading value reputation, which is very important to us. We continue to drive innovation in the business focused on menu, value, and convenience, using technology to support. We are making great progress growing and improving our shop estate. So far this year, we've opened 87 new shops, including 27 relocations, and we remain on track for 140 to 150 net new openings this year. As at 28 June, we had 2,649 shops trading, and we continue to focus on being even more convenient for our customers. Our supply chain investment program is on track, supporting our material growth opportunity.
In summary from me, we are making good progress against our strategic plan, which targets profitable growth by making Greggs more convenient for more customers while innovating to evolve our value-led food and drinks menu in line with changing tastes and market trends. Let me now hand over to Richard to take you through our detailed financial performance.
Great, thanks, Roisin. We're on slide 5 of the pack for those of you following online. The headlines Roisin's already given you. I guess the dynamics of the first half were fairly well previewed with the trading update that we gave at the start of the month when we said that operating profit for the full year was likely to be modestly below the level of last year. We did say that that impact would be weighted towards the first half. I'll explain why in just a moment. You can see the operating profit £5 million below the level of the first half of 2024 below the operating profit line. No surprises. We are obviously sort of deploying the cash that has provided a tailwind in terms of interest income for the last few years and therefore the finance income has reduced by about £3 million.
The normal increase as we expand the estate in terms of the imputed sort of interest charge on leases. As we add more shops, obviously we have a greater lease finance charge, but also as we renew leases as well, because as we sort of regear leases, they get recapitalized at a higher interest charge than was the case say 10 years ago when we took them on. That's all in line with what we would have expected. Income tax, I'll show you later on, there's a slightly higher income tax charge in the year which is a bit of a one off and that flows through to earnings per share of 45.3 pence. We'll start by going into the sales a little bit more and giving you a bit more context to the sales.
We've got a bridge analysis which will explain the movement in operating profit, which I think will be helpful as well. First off, to look at sales, obviously we'll start with like-for-like. This gives you the 18 month view on slide 6 of the pack and shows you how really from quarter four last year we faced a tougher market and one where we saw negative like-for-like volumes coming through the first half of this year. We had a broadly improving picture until we reached June. Obviously that was the trigger really when we had that very hot month for reporting the impact that that had on us in terms of the temperature effect on like-for-likes. I did contemplate showing you a beautiful correlation between year-on-year temperature change and like-for-like growth. It's one of the most correlated graphs I've ever seen in my life.
We did some work on June and showed just how the temperature did impact, but I thought it would make us sound a bit like farmers, so we sort of left that out. That is the nature. We've seen it over the years. Hot weather just makes people eat less. That's been a fact. I'll show you in a moment that the context is that it's not just Greggs, it's affected the market overall and it's extended into July. We've only seen marginally positive, like-for-like growth so far in July, but days like today where it's cooling off are much more helpful.
To give you a bit more of that context on slide seven, you can see our relative performance and we've used here a benchmark, which is the Barclaycard data, which gets published on a monthly basis and gives various sort of sectoral analysis of how people are doing in cash and volume terms. The blue lines on here are Greggs performance. It shows for the last nine months, by month, you'll see we've merged March and April. That's because Easter distorts this thing if you don't do that. It shows the total growth in sales for Greggs, which is the dark blue solid line, and then our like-for-like performance, which is the dotted line. We've just shown that against the performance for a sector that's pulled out for takeaway and fast food storage sales, which is where a lot of our competitors sit.
You can see that in the main, Greggs performance has been ahead of that group and followed the same pattern. You can see how it's been volatile and you can see how much impact there was in June when the temperatures rose. You can also see a blip in January when that group in particular went very hard on promotions and obviously did drive some promotionally driven sales in the short term. That hasn't been sustained and the whole sector has seen the same sort of impacts going through. I think it's one way of putting the performance in perspective. We also get market share data from Circana that studies the food to go market. That demonstrates that Greggs market share has held up well in the last quarter. Again, reassurance that in relative terms, Greggs has been at least performing in line with, possibly slightly better.
I think the other thing that I'll come back to in a moment is the difference between total growth and like-for-like growth for Greggs, which has been maintained at about a 5% differential. I think this gives us some comfort that what we're not doing by expanding the estate is cannibalizing existing shop sales. We've got some detail on that later in this presentation, which I think will help you to get an insight into how that works as well. If we move on from sales to profit, on page eight, we've got a profit bridge which bridges profit before tax for the first half of this year with last year. We've grouped together the financing items on the right, which we've already talked about, and then the impacts on operating profit on the left. Clearly, the biggest impact in the period has been cost inflation.
£49 million of like-for-like cost inflation, and with some volume decline undermining some of the like-for-like sales growth, there hasn't been sufficient sales growth from like-for-like sources to fully recover that. You can see there's a sort of a £10 million shortfall between the two big bars on the left-hand side of this chart. We then delivered some of the cost savings that we drive every year. £3.7 million improvement in the cost base from permanent cost efficiencies, and then the growth in the new shops has added about £5 million extra contribution as well. There are a couple of one-offs that are pulled out because, when I said earlier that some of the profit shortfall in the first half was more weighted to the first half than the second half, there's a couple of items here which are non-recurring.
There's £1 million in respect of the phasing of our refit program. We've done more refits in the first half than we did last year, will do fewer in the second half than last year. We've pulled those forward in an attempt to really protect the second half and particularly the run into the busy period around Christmas time. That £1 million headwind in the first half becomes a tailwind in the second. We've got about £3 million worth of what I call capacity costs which are now annualized. We added to the production capacity of Balliol Park by adding an extra production line that annualized during the year. We completed it this time last year and therefore the cost step up from that is annualized. The same is true of some of the expansion work that we did at two of our distribution centers in Birmingham and Amesbury.
A couple of things there have affected the first half that we wouldn't expect in H2. It gives you a flavor of the moving parts at least in first half profit. Moving on to the cost base, there's no new news in here particularly. Cost guidance is as we had it at about 6% like-for-like cost inflation for the year. That encompasses food and packaging, energy, and people costs. In the main, we've got very good cover on food and packaging and particularly on energy, where we're covered for the whole of the rest of this year and 40% of next year. For food and packaging, we've got about three quarters of the second half covered.
One thing just to pull out, which you'll probably be hearing from others, is the cost to Greggs of the extended producer responsibility, which is a packaging levy that's placed on packaging that leaves your shop and goes into the outside world. For Greggs, that's just over £4 million. The way we've accounted for that is by seeing it as an annual cost, which we've spread across the year. There's £2 million of that in the first half results. There is some debate amongst accountants as to where that should land, and you'll probably hear some people saying they've put the whole lot through in the first half or booked the whole lot in April. We've reflected the liability in April, we've prepaid some of it so that it's spread across the year, and we just wanted to be transparent about how we've accounted for it.
I think if you follow the principle of substance over form, that's the way to do it. Other accountants may disagree. It makes no difference to the full year, of course. Moving on from like-for-like cost, we'll get more into the CapEx and sort of investment side now. A quick reminder of our capital allocation policy on page 10. Maintenance of the business is obviously a priority. Typically, that runs at about 5% of revenue in terms of maintenance CapEx. After that, we look to maintain a strong balance sheet, and our guidance for the sort of cash position that we like to have at the end of the year is about 3%. We'll be below that this year end simply because of the peak of the investment program that we're in at the moment.
We target an attractive ordinary dividend, and it's a progressive policy, normally around two times covered. The progressive point is also important at this point, when earnings have gone backwards year on year. We look for great investments to make great returns to grow. Clearly that's something that we've been investing in heavily over the past period, and we'll talk more about it in a moment. Our target for cash return on investment for new shops is around 25%. After all of that, if there's surplus cash, then our priority is to return that to shareholders, either through special dividends, as we have done in recent years, but we do retain the ability to buy back shares as well. On page 11, there's a reminder here of the guidance we've given on CapEx. We've been playing this chart out for a few years now.
We are eventually in that peak year of CapEx, so we're there in 2025. The guidance remains for the full year that we'll be investing about £300 million as we expand the capacity in our supply chain to fuel the next phase of shop growth. In the first half, we invested £172 million, up from £100 million the year before. You can see that it's effectively now in two phases. We're coming to the end of the high investment phase where we've had net cash outflows and run down the significant cash that we carried into this period, and from next year we'll be into this lower CapEx phase where we start to become cash generative again. We get a net cash inflow. 2026 will be a year when we rebuild our cash balances, and from 2027 onwards we have more optionality over our cash.
You should see 2027 onwards as being more the kind of steady state position. There's still a bit of work to do next year completing at least one of the big projects that we're on. Let's talk about cannibalization because it's been a big question, hasn't it? People are asking us, with all this growth, you've already got one of the biggest estates in the UK. Why would we believe that Greggs can be bigger? Roisin will talk more about why we believe the estate can be bigger. I want to address the question of is it cannibalizing the existing estate. We've already had one clue, which is that the total sales growth is staying steady ahead of like-for-like growth. We acknowledge people need this question answering, so we've done some work that we want to share with you.
Firstly, a reminder of how we look at that cash ROI on new shops. Typically, the shops mature over two to three years, and as they mature, they tend to go on and exceed that target rate of return on investment and get beyond 30% in terms of ROI. I'll talk a little bit about growth locations and traditional locations. By traditional locations, I'm kind of talking about high streets and where Greggs was as a baker. The growth locations are the new areas that we're entering into, and typically there's a difference between the performance on an ROI basis. The growth locations that we're opening more in outperform the traditional estate in terms of ROI and in terms of managing the cannibalization risk. A lot of these locations are in areas where there just isn't an existing Greggs within a mile.
If we looked at 2024's opening, 60% of the new shops, excluding relocations, were in an area where there was no existing Greggs within a mile of that catchment. Where there was a Greggs locally, we studied the impact on the local shops of opening another one within a mile of them. Effectively, the transfer of sales from the existing estate to the new shop was only 5% of what they were taking. That's something that we factor into the shop appraisal. There's a line on the appraisal that forces the retail and property teams to estimate the impact on existing shops if they are opening in the same catchment as an existing store. We take this into account, but it's a very minor impact. The other point to make really is that within a catchment, of course, we will also relocate shops over time.
Sometimes we will actually go up against an existing shop because we know we've got a break in the lease of that shop and we can move it in a couple of years' time. As we reallocate where our shops are, that activity again guards against the risk of cannibalization. You can look at it from a kind of a geographic point of view, and I'll give you a couple of examples in a minute that sort of bring that to life. With our app data now, we can look at it through the customer's eyes, so we can look at customer behavior. What we see through the app data is that being more convenient for customers drives their frequency of visits without impacting on the amount that they visit existing stores.
If you look at the very most recent quarter, quarter two of 2025, we studied about 600,000 customers through the app who'd been with us on the app for a couple of years. They were kind of mature customers, if you like, you know, and could be seen in a like-for-like sense across both years. It's the same population in both years, so they've been with us throughout. If we looked at the customers who visited a new shop and looked at their behavior a year before and their behavior this year, they actually visited the new shop an extra 1.8 times in the quarter, but they at least maintained their visits to the existing shops. Last year they were visiting 13.5 times in the quarter in the existing estate, they visited those same shops 13.8 times.
Those customers who didn't shop the new shop, their behavior is exactly the same. They visited 11 shops that quarter and they visited 11 shops in the same quarter this year. Some evidence that effectively becoming more convenient, as long as you are careful where you put those shops, becoming more convenient can increase the frequency that people come and there's capacity for this. When we did the Capital Markets day back in 2021, we shared the frequency of visit to Greggs and on average that was 13 times per year across our customer base. Best in Class, which is a well-known fast food provider, was 23 times. In terms of the capacity of the market for consumers to visit a brand more often, we felt there was plenty of headroom. You might be looking at these and thinking, that's 13 times in a quarter.
App customers tend to be our top quartile customers and therefore as we shared back at the time, their frequency is actually much higher and typically is about just over 50 times a year. They're kind of weekly customers if you like. That's the sort of people we've been able to study here. Hopefully that gives you some sort of comfort from an overall point of view as to how we manage the risk of cannibalization. We've got a few catchment illustrations which I think also help. The first one I'll share with you is Newport in South Wales. The map on the right shows you the area around Newport which we would consider to be the catchment. The orange pins show where our traditional shops were back 10 years ago.
Pre-2016 we had a cluster of shops in the center of Newport and then two or three out in the suburbs. Since then we've opened on two industrial estates, a drive thru, a retail park, and an additional suburban high street. We've taken the seven shops that we had in 2016 up to 12 shops. In theory, if you were to extrapolate the sort of density we anticipate we would have in the UK, if we had 3,500 shops, then this Newport area has got potential for about 17 shops. That's just using that average sort of density. Looking then at the performance of the shops within the catchment, the traditional shops, if I can call them that, that we had back in 2016 are delivering an ROI of about 29%. Obviously, they are mature shops and therefore they're above the average for our sort of ROI requirement.
Add in the new shops that we've opened since then and the ROI for the catchment goes up to 36%. You can see the impact that those new shops are having in terms of they are very strong locations, they bring up the average and deliver a very healthy catchment overall. We're still going in Newport. This year we have opened a Tesco site, store within store. We're up to 13 shops now and I'm sure we'll go much further in time. It gives you kind of a flavor of just, you know, in real terms what we do in a catchment. Two more examples. I won't spend as much time on each of them, but just to give you an idea with different kinds of catchments. Here's Bradford. Bradford's interesting because we're very underpenetrated in Bradford. If I go back, we've got 12 shops now.
We had six shops 10 years ago, but the population's much bigger, more than half a million. In theory, if you apply that same sort of density argument, you could have 29 shops in Bradford and we've only got 12 so far. The ROI on the traditional shops is not as strong, so it's 26% across the average of the traditional shops. Again, when you add in the new shops, it takes it up to 36% for the 12 shops overall. Those new shops are really adding to the performance in Bradford and it's got a lot of potential still to go further in the longer term. Finally, a more densely populated catchment, which is Coventry. We've always been strong in the Midlands and been strong in Coventry for many, many years. In the case of Coventry, we now have 16 shops.
The density is already one for every 22,000 people. On our density argument for 3,500 shops, that suggests 18 shops for Coventry. I think we'll go a lot further because actually, in northern Scotland, our density, as Roisin will show you later, is more like 1 to 15,000. You can go further than 1 to 19, but we're already at 16 there. Again you see the same dynamic. The traditional shops have a 30% ROI, the catchment overall has 37%. The new shops are improving performance. We've got a new shop this year that's opening in a petrol forecourt which will take us to 17 shops in the Coventry area. I'll leave you to enjoy those at your leisure. A quick canter through and I think it just brings to life what we're doing within a catchment.
You can't look at it shop by shop, you have to look at the catchment and I think it helps to focus on a geography rather than thinking about the whole country or one shop brings it to life a bit more. Skipping on, final slide from me on slide 16, just thinking about liquidity, tax, dividends, those sort of things. Continues to generate cash. Net cash inflow of £94 million, less than the first half of last year, and that's mainly to do with corporation tax. Last year we were getting quite a lot of benefit from full allowability of capital expenditure for tax purposes. That's less so this year. We're in a slight net debt position with £2.5 million of net debt at the half year. We are dipping into the revolving credit facility as we planned through this peak part of the capital investment cycle.
We've extended that facility out to June 2028. We've got three years headroom on £100 million committed funds. The corporation tax rate I mentioned earlier, we'd guided you 26% for the year. We now think 26.8%. That relates to primarily the weakness in the share price. With the share price where it is, fewer managers are exercising their share options. We get a tax deduction for the exercise of share options and that's coming through at a lower level and also at a lower price and that's made the difference. I see that as a short term impact. It will push up the tax rate slightly this year, but we're still guiding 26% ongoing because we think that will settle in time. Just to look at earnings and dividend, we've already flagged the earnings at 45.3p.
We've maintained the interim dividend at the same level as last year, so 19p dividend at the interim stage and that's in line with the progressive policy. We would expect the full year dividend to be the same until we get back to two times earnings cover. I'll pause there. Happy to take questions later, but I'll pass you back to Roisin for now.
Thanks, Richard. Hopefully that helps to sort of answer some of the questions that I know some of you have had on cannibalization. Let me just spend a few minutes now updating you on the progress we're making as we further develop our multi channel food on the go offering. In terms of this, this slide shows you where we are from a market leading brand strength and continuing to maintain our reputation for value. Staying focused on the brand relevance is extremely important, and it's great to see that our brand strength continues to be market leading. We remain the number one brand for food to go overall, and very importantly, we remain the number one brand for value. On quality, we are pleased with our position, sitting only behind premium sandwich and coffee shops.
As you can see on the chart on the right of the slide, this demonstrates our value rating at 37.9. We continue to be number one for value, and this rating, as you can see, has been improving despite some of our competitors' ratings falling back. From this strong base, we continue to deliver like-for-like and total sales growth despite a challenging market. What's really important for Greggs is that we work hard to ensure we stay relevant and innovate to drive profitable growth. We have a strong track record of this over many years, transforming from a traditional bakery to a modern food to go brand with more convenient locations. On this slide, we've just reminded you of some of our key developments in recent years. We introduced the delivery service to enable our customers to access Greggs wherever, whenever, and however they want it.
The development of our breakfast and coffee offers, all at great prices, has taken us to number one in the out of home market for breakfast and number two for coffee. We work hard to follow trends, and we've introduced more protein-led hot food lines and plant-based food options. Hopefully most of you in this room will have tried the iconic sausage roll. We're also now seeing strong growth in the new products that we've launched, such as our made to order iced drinks. In addition to expanding our own retail estate, Greggs has developed a successful grocery wholesale business with Iceland Foods. We have also grown a strong franchise business, particularly in roadside locations. Neither franchise nor wholesale feature in our like-for-like sales growth numbers but are part of our total sales growth now.
Our focus on spotting trends and following them fast continues to be a key area of focus for us as Innov continues. Very exciting to say that we are announcing today an extension to the availability of our bake at home range, and you will be able to purchase up to five Greggs lines in over 800 Tesco branches and online from early September. In the second half of the year, we will also be trialling a new Greggs concept called Bite Size Greggs, and that will serve a narrower range of our iconic products to provide us even more flexibility to get into small locations. We will test this in railway stations and retail parks where we know we already deliver strong returns. We're also currently trialling self-service kiosks ordering solutions for those customers who want to choose a different way to shop with us.
The trials are live in six of our shops, targeting both labor efficiency and like-for-like growth. Our menu, which sits at the heart of Greggs, continues to evolve with flatbreads and wraps made to order, chicken burgers, mac and cheese, over-ice drinks, and lots more to come. We have a pipeline of new ideas and menu innovation to continue to ensure we provide our customers with the choice they want at great value and to enable them to shop with us whenever and however they choose. While we continue to innovate, we also stay focused and are making progress on all of our strategic growth drivers, which we've talked about many times before. We continue to broaden our customer appeal. You may have seen some of our recent quirky tongue-in-cheek PR, including the waxwork of the iconic Greggs sausage roll at Madame Tussauds.
Some of you might have seen the collaboration last week with Lewis Capaldi as part of his comeback tour. You might even have queued up to be a Lewis Capaldi lookalike and get free tickets. The Jet2 collaboration where we are having a Greggs plane with Jet2 to take customers to Marbella for a three-day all-inclusive holiday, and lots more ways to ensure that we appeal to customers. There are lots more exciting opportunities in the pipeline. Now on to developing the Greggs estate, a really important part of the strategic progress you've heard from Richard. We remain very confident in the unmet capacity for our shop rollout plans, which are continuing to deliver profitable growth by ensuring we are convenient to more customers.
We're on track this year to deliver between 140 to 150 net new shop openings with a focus on the areas in which we are underrepresented both geographically and by location type. In terms of evening, we continue to be pleased with the steady growth we are seeing in the evening day part. It's still growing ahead of the average like-for-like rate, very similar to the sales growth pattern we established at breakfast. We remain confident in this significant long-term opportunity. The evening food-to-go market is dominated by grab and go and delivery occasions. Therefore, we are well placed to serve those customers both through walk-in and through delivery. I'll talk about delivery channels, the digital channels, in a few moments, but let me just go on to talk about the estates. On this side, you will see us talking about the structural repositioning of the estate continues.
As the chart in the slide shows, you can see how the business has been evolving over the last decade to reshape and move into these new catchment areas, ensuring we are well positioned to be more convenient for our customers on the go. If you went back 10 years, then the blue segment would actually have represented 80% of our shop estate, just showing how much relocation means to us in the traditional estate. Relocation is key to our success and we've relocated 14% of our shops only since 2019. We treat these relocations as new shops, so those numbers again do not appear in our like-for-like sales growth. Relocation brings many benefits. It enables continued shops to significantly increase their sales volume and have capacity for shop growth.
It means that we take an experienced team to serve our customers in that catchment and we stay in the catchment for those customers, but we provide them with an extended range of menu items, such as the Goujons, the Cheese Bites, the Mac Cheese. More importantly, it ensures that we continue to provide profitable sales growth. An expansion into the underrepresented catchments, such as roadsides, retail parks, and supermarkets, has given the estate greater balance and is accessing strong locations. As Richard demonstrated earlier, our new shops expand our reach and continue to deliver very strong returns without affecting the existing shop estates. Why do we have confidence in the market capacity? We know that in the market, a food-to-go market, convenience equals greater frequency.
The app data that Richard shared with you reinforces that our successful expansion strategy continues to target areas where we currently have low penetration, most typically remote from our current shop locations. On the map in front of you, you can see the light green areas where our shop density is lowest, showing just how much opportunity we can still go after. That is the geographical piece. Moving on to the catchments which Richard talked about, our confidence in our new shop pipeline is underpinned by continued success in catchments where Greggs continues to be underrepresented, such as retail parks, railway station transport, roadside supermarkets, and provides us with a clear opportunity for significantly more than 3,000 shops across the UK. Franchise opportunities continue to expand the reach of the brand and we now work with 15 corporate partners helping us reach those catchments that we can't access directly.
The chart just shows you here just how low our current penetration of viable full service locations is, as well as the progress that we've made over the last four years. There is lots more to go after, but we are also working on the flexibility of our current formats. The format flexibility underpins our confidence as we enter new locations and provides even more viable, profitable shop opportunities. We currently operate formats ranging from large drive throughs and cafes through to very small forecourt shops. We've got a new format that we are now going to trial called Bite Size Greggs, which is a very exciting new format. We plan to trial it in six locations and our first opening will be in September this year. It's really exciting as it increases our opportunities in locations where a full service operation just isn't viable.
It could provide us with even more profitable growth opportunities than the previous chart implied. At the heart of Greggs is our range and as I've said previously, we continue to evolve the range to make sure that we provide the new exciting products that our customers want and also extend our reach into the different dayparts which is critical for us. Food is at the heart of the business and menu development is an absolutely critical part of that. We continue to work to make sure that we deliver to customers, changing tastes and market developments. Our new over-ice drinks are proving popular and are now available in over 1,400 shops.
This time last year it was only 500 shops that we had that product in, and our Healthier choice range is seeing good momentum and resonating well with customers, supported by successful launches of items such as the Plenish Ginger Immunity and the Turmeric Recovery Health Shots, the Fat Free Greek Style Yogurt, as well as new additions to our sandwich range such as the Korean Barbecue Chicken Flatbread. The constant evolution of our menu makes sure that we stay relevant, excite our customers with new choices, focus on market trends, and supports the expansion into new channels and the day parts that we offer. Onto Digital, delivery continues to be an important opportunity for us, and we offer the service through both Just Eat and Uber Eats.
It continues to grow steadily, and our focus really now is on improving the technology we use in our kitchens as we work to drive efficiency and offer an even better service to our customers to drive sales loyalty. We now have more than 25% of shop visits being scanned by customers using the Greggs App, and that's up from this time last year when it was at 18%. We know that customers that use the Greggs App increase their visit frequency, but it also means we get to know them better. It means that we can personalize and we can tailor the offers that we send to them.
In store ordering, we're trialing in some of our shops ordering kiosks to offer customers convenience that they want to actually make sure that they can place their order the way they want to place it, drive operational efficiency, and really look at does that allow us to serve our queue faster and also drive the average transaction value. That is in six of our shops currently. CRM activity, I've talked about that before. It's a key area of focus. It's where we can really understand our customers, we can nudge their behavior, and it allows us to engage with our customers more and further build loyalty. Couldn't do the presentation without talking about our technology investments, really important to us. Our ongoing investment in technology continues to enhance the company's growth capabilities while ensuring the robustness of our processes and driving greater efficiency.
We are on track to commence migration to the next version of SAP in August this year, and we are also improving support team productivity by investing in new systems that embrace AI functionality to drive service standards and efficiencies. Customer facing technology I've mentioned, such as the self-service ordering kiosks, will offer alternative service options to our customers. In our shops, technology is helping to automate tasks and drive higher standards. Some examples of that that we've got in place just now are remote temperature monitoring, order consolidation systems, and in-store digital assistants to help our teams. We will continue to focus on CRM and data analytics to support right decisions all across the business. Rich has talked about our capital investment, and obviously Derby and Kettering are a critical part of that.
To support our growth plans, as you know, we've invested further supply chain capacity primarily focused on two new brand new state-of-the-art facilities in the Midlands. Great news, both sites are on budget. Our new Derby site will mirror our northern frozen manufacturing and logistics campus at Balliol Park, including an automated cold store, but with the addition of automated picking of products to shop level. The site's now built, work's progressing to install the automated logistics solutions and the first production line. We're on track to open Derby in the first half of next year. The site will be a consolidation point for our frozen food logistics in the south of the UK, as well as increasing the capacity of our radial distribution sites by supporting them with upstream picking. The manufacturing space that we'll have there will be developed progressively as required to meet future demand.
As a team, as an operating board, we visited the site a few weeks ago. I have to say we were extremely impressed by both the pace and the quality of the build, but also the robotic solutions being implemented. It's a massive thank you to the team. It really is a great team effort. Our new Kettering supply site will be a national distribution center for the storage, picking, and distribution of chilled and ambient goods, and that site's currently in build phased with a planned opening in the first half of 2027. Both sites will also provide white space to develop future logistics and manufacturing capacity if required. Why are we taking that approach to expanding? Actually, this approach to capacity expansion reduces the labor intensity in our supply chain. It will deliver a stronger financial outcome than simply building additional radial distribution sites to match estate growth.
We will benefit from productivity improvements from automation and the scale of the operation that we will have in place. We'll increase the throughput of the capacity of our existing radial distribution centers, and they will still continue to deliver directly to our shops. Just onto ESG and our plans there. We continue to pride ourselves on doing the right thing with significant focus and progress on our commitments and the Greggs Pledge, which is our approach to ESG. We're actively engaging now with a broad range of stakeholders to help us shape our future priorities beyond the current 2020. Just finally onto outlook. It has been a challenging start to 2025, but we remain clear on the strategic opportunities that lie ahead.
Hopefully, as you've seen in the presentation, we remain very disciplined on our estate expansion and are focused on innovation to make Greggs more convenient to more customers. Outlook, as Richard says, for cost inflation, is unchanged. Great progress has been made in building the supply chain that I've just alluded to in terms of Derby and Kettering, and the Board's outcomes for the full year outcome remain consistent with the update we gave on the 2nd of July. In summary, in a challenging market, we continue to deliver both like-for-like and total sales growth and make progress against our strategic plan and have very strong brand health metrics. On that point I will now pause. Richard and I will take questions. I will aim to coordinate the questions in the room, and Richard will aim to keep us up to date with the questions that are coming through online.
Thank you. There are a few hands up automatically. I will start here. Jackson, thank you.
Morning all. Matthew Abraham from Berenberg. Just first question to start us off, do you mind just giving us a view of like-for-likes over July since we heard from you last? Just wondering if you know the cooler weather that Richard referenced has assisted.
I think what we've seen probably alludes to what Richard said earlier. It's still been a soft month for us in July, and you see a direct correlation on a hot day—our performance falls back. On a cooler day, like we've had the last few days, our performance is stronger. It directly correlates with that sort of weather temperature. We see that when the temperature goes above a certain amount, you know, once it gets to 28 and above, then actually we just eat less, and we continue to see that pattern through July.
Okay. Whilst weather's clearly been a factor, how much of the deceleration in like-for-like should we attribute to that price increase that was introduced in May? I guess the second part of that question is how do you think about pricing going forward, and has that evolved following the weaker like-for-like trend that you saw following that pricing increase?
Yeah. What we can do, I guess this is where your app data is very powerful because actually you can study the customers that Richard talked about earlier. You can study their behavior and what they buy in the basket before you put through any price rise. You can then study their behavior afterwards. We haven't seen any impact at all in terms of that pricing. Value remains extremely important to us, however, so I don't think we ever put price rises through and not be concerned about does that have any impact at all on consumer behavior. What we will do on a monthly basis is we will benchmark each part of our basket against our competitors. Food to go sector and the supermarkets to make sure that we continue to follow those value credentials. We will monitor the customer behavior. We do that through the app data.
We can see it in our sales numbers in terms of the products that we're selling, but we also look at any customer complaints that come through. Some of those come directly to me, some of those go to the customer care. We have a number of data sets that we will continue to look at. If you look at value in the marketplace, we have still got headroom in a number of areas where we continue to be the market leader on value, but we want to continue to hold that spot. I think what's pleasing when you see the data points that we showed you earlier, our value trend has been improving and we've seen some of our competitors slip back. We do know that in the market it can be challenging around people putting through promotions, but that's a little bit of high, low pricing.
We take the view we want to be the brand that people can trust. Making sure that we offer that great value all through the year is really important to us.
One more, if I may. The second half skew for store openings, you've spoken about it a bit today. What % of the stores that are needed to open in the second half have secured locations, and can you just give a bit of a mix breakdown of where those locations will be?
The locations will continue to be in the underrepresented catchments. It will be the supermarkets, roadside, retail parks, and it will be southern bias. Probably in terms of confidence, when you're in the year you are fairly confident, you're probably 90% confident. The things that could change it is if it's a new build site and sometimes what we find as we get into November, December, we try and protect December. If we've got a site that looks as if it would open maybe the second or third week of December, we sometimes put that into the following year. That can be as simple as the build hasn't yet got all of the communication lines that needed to go in to make sure that customers can pay in a secure way. The small issues can affect you.
We're very confident for this year and we're confident in the pipeline for next year because when you look at doing your property deals, you normally look forward about 18 months and you've got a degree of confidence that you've either done a deal with a property developer or you've done some deals with your landlord. We remain fairly confident for the 18 months pipeline for this year. Very confident.
Great. Thank you, Opal.
I will go to Ben.
Morning. Looking after today's H1, I think the implication is you've got to have a sort of broadly flat profit in the second half. When I look at your bridge in H1, it doesn't feel like, you know, the costs are going to relent much. The gross margins, the momentum there seems to have stalled a bit. What have you got up your sleeve in the second half, other than softer comps that can give us some reassurance that you've got the second half in the bag?
I guess I don't think we would ever claim to have anything in the bag, frankly, Ben, you know, I mean, at the end of the day it depends on the market, doesn't it? I mean, I think we've demonstrated that Greggs' performance has been strong relative to a very weak market.
The latest Circana data suggested the market shrank by 1% in the 12 months to June. I guess we're looking for an improvement in the consumer, and consumer confidence has been fragile. People are nervous, they're saving rather than spending. I think there are things that we can do. Roisin's given you a few clues there about the very strong pipeline of product innovations that keep coming. She's really told you about those which are already in the market. Inevitably there are more coming that we haven't yet told you about. I've tried to demonstrate to you the positive impact that our shop opening program is having on the estate. All of those things are positive, but at the end of the day you also need the market itself to be supportive. It's been going through a nervous phase over the last 12 months and we're still in that.
I guess that's the issue though, is that is it ultimately, and this is more of a sort of broader question, is it really good enough to be tracking the market in this environment? You probably really need to be getting market share, but it doesn't really feel, and you've said it's not a cannibalization problem, you said it's not a market share problem, you said it's not really the prices that you put through, but it doesn't really feel like you're really going all guns blazing on the volume. Is there something more fundamental that needs to change really?
If I think about market share on that, we are outperforming market share in terms of our food to go competitors from the latest Circana data that we have seen, and we have moved forward in every daypart. That's a positive for us. I think what you have to bear in mind is that we are in a world of very challenging market conditions. You just have to look at some data points such as the current consumer confidence indexes, which continue to move back and stay low below. I think you can then look at areas such as the disposable income tracker, and you can see from that that the bottom two quintiles are actually under pressure. You look at some of the data points that are out there around the consumer currently saving and not spending.
There's a sort of plethora of issues that you're having to fight hard against. I think what's important to us is against the competitors we are doing well. I think back to this innovation, you know, we're never resting. Whether it's menu innovation, whether it's format innovation, whether it's self-service kiosks, making sure we're constantly spotting the market trends, we are looking to see what the consumer's looking for, and we are aiming to deliver it. What you probably don't see is the numerous amount of trials that we're doing constantly. The great thing about having 2,649 shops is you can do a trial in 10 shops. You keep it below the radar. If customers start to buy that product, if customers like that service style, you then start to roll it out.
Some of that's in place just now with things that we're doing on technology back of house with our teams. You sort of try, prove it. Once you prove it, you then roll it out. We're definitely not standing still. We're doing lots, but it is a tough market. Come to Richard at the front.
Yeah, thank you. Morning. Richard Taylor from Barclays. I've got two interlinked questions on the High Street estate, please. Looking at slide 7 and also 18, my question really is what would happen if we extended the analysis, put in supermarkets on the comp group or eating at home. I could understand why you're gaining from food to go, but do you think you're losing share to at home in supermarkets and if so, any thoughts in terms of pricing that in response? Secondly, thank you for the cannibalization analysis. An additional area I wanted to ask about was the High Street locations where there's been no net change in the last decade or so. I know there's been churn with the estate but the net estate stayed broadly similar.
Just given some of the comments you made this morning, and especially that travel's performing better than High Street, do you think that the size of this estate needs to fall over time rather than just stay steady? Finally, a totally different question on kiosk ordering. Sounds like very early days, only six stores, but just keen to hear the early learnings here and any color you can give on labor to sales ratios in those stores. Do you think it's inevitable that the entire estate gets this finally?
Sure. Okay, let's. There's a lot to get through there. Richard, if we start with the slide page 7, the reason supermarkets aren't on there actually is because you cannot pull out if you put supermarkets on. It's the whole grocery supermarket shop. It just does make sense. I have to say we watch the supermarkets carefully. Our aim is not so. Our aim is to be in line with supermarkets on price but with a significantly better quality product. If you think about the products that we have in our range, it's those added value products that supermarkets cannot deliver. It's having the hot wedges, the hot chicken goujons, the over-ice drinks, everything that's on trend and the customer is buying more into it. We see our competition against the supermarkets. It's very much about making sure we have got added value, but we do watch them relentlessly.
Richard alluded to, what else are we doing in terms of our range? We know that snacking is a key part of the supermarket range. You will see over the next few months more snacking products that we will put into our range and that will allow customers to add on those products and build a bigger lunch deal, which again starts to replicate some of what the supermarkets are doing. In terms of your question about high street locations, yeah, it's an interesting one. For us on shop locations, and I probably should make the point, this is never about a race on shop numbers and we are very clear, Richard and I, with the team at Greggs, this is about finding those profitable shop locations. We're a leasehold business, so actually we have great flexibility.
If we look at a high street location and we believe that's not viable opportunity for the future, we just look at when that lease is coming out and we will either get out of that catchment, we will relocate in that catchment, or in some cases, a recent example is actually in Hinckley. We've actually gone from three shops down to two shops because actually we believed that was a more efficient, more profitable way to serve that catchment. We won't come out of high streets altogether because as Richard has shown, they are very profitable locations. What some of these suburban type high street locations also do for you is they allow you to service the different channels so they really open you up to delivery.
We know that we think about the evening day part just now we're doing well on the walk in part of the evening day part. We know that we need to do better on the delivery part of the evening day part. Those high street suburban locations are extremely important to us. Final question on kiosk. I don't have much to tell you other than a significant proportion of our customers are lending themselves to wanting to try the kiosk technology. What I would say just now, it's only six shops and we do have a host in each of these shops. We have a host that stands at the kiosk location just to help navigate those customers. Also, really importantly, you cannot beat getting the feedback at that point of pressing the screen around what the customers like and what they don't like.
We can start to evolve the look and feel. Others out there have been doing kiosks for a long period of time. I guess the benefit we've got is we can watch and see what they've done on their kiosk screens and then we can try and copy in the Greggs way and maybe fast forward some of the learning that they've had. If our customers decide that they want to use these kiosks, then we would look at our rollout plan. I think what I'd say is there's probably certain location types that will lend itself more to having a kiosk location, somewhere that you want to go fast in and out quickly.
Transport locations, busy footfall areas, there could be some high streets and suburban parades where actually they either are at the very end of the rollout or maybe we don't get there because actually it's not worth it. We'll try and make the right decisions again depending on what we see. The one real piece I am, two probably key pieces I'm excited about keeping kiosks. One, it starts to split the queue off for you. One of our issues can be we have long queues, people peel off. Actually, if you have different ways to service your queues, that is a real benefit. We do know that you can drive average transaction value through the kiosk. There's a couple of reasons why we're excited but I wouldn't disclose anything yet because it's too early. Kate Jackson, just benefit.
Thank you. Kate Cavut from Investec. Three questions from me.
The first one is how much of a negative mix impact on gross margin was there in the first half in terms of the hot weather impacting high margin categories. My second question is in terms of outlook for cost inflation going into FY2020, do you have any sort of early thoughts on that? The third question is on the wholesale deal with Tesco. The deals you've got with Tesco and Iceland, are there any restrictions on selling to other players as well?
I'll take the third one and then I'll hand over to you for one and two.
Yep. The mixed question, there is a mix effect when we get hot weather. We see reduced demand for bakery goods fundamentally, and there is some pressure on margin because they're the things we make ourselves. Therefore, we've got the supply chain, the fixed cost. The mitigant is iced drinks, which are very attractive margin and obviously go through the roof in times like that. There is some swinging around. We haven't pulled it out as a particular factor, but obviously there was some impact from that, and overall it was a negative impact. I think the fact that gross margin held up pretty well in the first half, despite that, was a positive. The second question, Kate, was, remind me.
Cost outlook for FY2026.
Yeah. I think there are two big areas where we see cost inflation. One is food and packaging, and the other is labor cost, food and packaging. Everything I read suggests that we might see a less inflationary environment in 2026. We are hopeful that that's the case, but it is dependent on labor costs as well, because a lot of what you're seeing in food, food inflation, is because of the processing cost of foods and the labor costs going into those. I guess we're waiting to see what the minimum wage does. It'll be announced in the autumn for application next April. I think if there was some relief on that, that would be helpful, but I don't think we can guarantee that, and there haven't been too many clues really as to what's coming.
We've seen labor inflation for a number of years now, but I think hopefully we'll see a bit of relief on food inflation at least.
On Tesco for the next 12 months, we will simply be supplying Tesco and Iceland. That's actually partly to make sure that we can see exactly what happens through this period. We've gone with five products currently in the Tesco range, and we just want to see if we've chosen the right five products. Are there other opportunities beyond that? Right, is there anything online that you need to.
Yep, there's a couple. Sorry, Ruben, we'll come to you in just a second. I'll just cover off a few. There's a few good questions coming in. One from Salman, who says, franchise shops, why only net 3 in the first half? We did close a franchise relationship which took out about 10 of our franchise shops. We terminated that at the end of the year and, you know, consistent with what we do, the estate overall, you know, we are pruning the estate. We'll close about 70 shops this year. It was unusual to terminate the whole relationship, but that was the right thing for the brand and therefore that's why there's a small increase in net franchise shops in the first half. You'll see a lot more in the second half. It also asks about operating margin in the first half is, you know, operating margin was 6.9%.
Salman's asking, would it stay that way in the second half or is there a reason to believe it would go up? The headwinds I showed you to the first half margin, I one answer to that. There were some one offs in the first half which we don't expect in H2. There is also a seasonality to our margin, first half to second half. We traditionally have a stronger margin in H2. That's driven by the seasonality of sales, it's driven by where the school holidays fall. Also from a cost point of view, there are more bank holidays in the second half of the year which result in premium pay in our supply chain. A few factors go against that. Sorry, more in H1 than H2.
Just to cover off a couple of quick ones, Suleiman says, given the substantial decline in the stock price, wouldn't a stock buyback be a good use of capital? Yes, I agree. I think it would be. If we weren't already committed on the cash, I think that's something we would absolutely be looking at. What we won't do is go out and borrow money to buy back shares. In different circumstances, I would absolutely agree with that.
Great, thank you. Ruben.
Morning everyone. Just one from me, Reuben Fosa from Peel Hunt. In terms of return on investment, how does it differ between the franchise shops and the company-managed shops? In terms of the case study you showed, particularly for the Newport example, how many of these new shops were franchise shops?
There weren't too many in the Newport catchment, actually, as it happened, Reuben. If you look beyond there, typically if you close in on an urban catchment, you don't get as many of the franchise shops as if you look more broadly on the arterial roads and obviously the motorways as well. With Moto, the answer to the question on return on capital is they're relatively similar, actually. Although it's a lower capital investment for us when it's a franchise shop, the return is also proportionately lower. They tend to be fairly well aligned.
From time to time we've published the average new shop return for a franchise shop and a company-managed shop and showed that we get very similar ROI.
Hi, morning. Richard Stupa from Deutsche. Just a few from me, please. First of all, in terms of the full year cost savings, I think you did £3.7 million in the first half, could you say what you expect the full year cost savings to be? Second question on the Bite Size Greggs.
Could you talk about sort of how many would you expect Greggs Bite Size.
Of the total estate, any sort of early ideas in terms of the economics? Are they sort of.
Half of the revenue, but the same.
sort of return on investment? Presumably these are all incremental to your 3,000 target. In terms of the Tesco contract, could you give an indication roughly of the potential size of that versus Iceland? Is it going to be much bigger than that or at the moment it's just sort of fairly small and incremental. Thank you.
Let you start the full year.
What was the first question? Full cost savings. Yeah. We set a management target, typically, which is in the range of £5 million to £7 million for a full year. I think there's probably more momentum in it than that. We delivered £11 million last year. I think, and particularly management are very focused on cost efficiency at the moment. Although that's the official target, we've driven the team harder than that and we're very focused on delivering more than that for the full year. I suspect it could be more in the direction of what we achieved last year.
In terms of Bite Size Greggs, we've not got any up and running just now. What we see Bite Size Greggs as being is an opportunity that will not replace viable full service Greggs. That is our ambition still, you know, and the numbers that we're talking about, more than 3,000 shops across the UK, is still a full service Greggs opportunity. What Bite Size Greggs will do for us is there are some opportunities that come up, particularly in railway stations where you just cannot get it and you can only get consumer sales space. You cannot get any back of house space. What Bite Size Greggs will do for us is it will allow us to go into those locations. We will service a much narrower range of products.
It will be our drinks, our hot drinks, potentially our over-ice drinks, it will be our savouries, it will not be our sandwich range, it'll be some of our sweet treats and therefore from our returns, it should be very strong. We've not trialed any yet. First one or two openings will be in September. Once we've got six under our belt, we'll then sort of start to understand. It won't replace the ambition to get to beyond 3,000, but it may give us other viable opportunities that we've looked at just now. The chart that I showed, where I showed what the opportunities were in places like petrol forecourts, industrial locations, that's all predicated on a full service shop job. Actually, if we can come up with this format and make it work, there will be significant other opportunities that aren't currently on that chart.
On Tesco, interestingly, we are going into 800 of their largest shops across the UK. Iceland Foods, currently we are in about 1,200 of their shops across the UK. Iceland Foods are actually the number one in the market for frozen savoury products, which is interesting if you think about the size of the supermarkets just now. We've been quite prudent in terms of what we believe that we'll be able to sell through Tesco and they've done the same. I think we will do a lot of activation and lead up to the 8th of September and we'll see where it goes in terms of the volume. If you look at the Tesco estate, we're starting in 800 of the largest shops. They have got over 3,000 shops across the UK.
If we can prove the concept and it does well, then I guess the conversation will be where would you roll out beyond the first 800?
Hi there, it's Comrade Gaynor from Bloomberg Intelligence. Just going on the like-for-like volumes, I mean Greggs has been through, say, difficult times before with respect to the connection to the consumer. I think the story has always been we may lose some people at the bottom end, but we also get the trading down effect because of our value brand. Why do you think the trading down impact maybe isn't playing out quite so prominently this time around? That's the first one, and then the second one is just going back to the self-service kiosks. Why is now the right time? Is it a case of maybe your hand's been forced a bit because of the higher labor costs?
Start with the trading down. I think we are still seeing customers trading down out in the market. I think there are a variety of factors in the market conditions just now and a variety of data points rather than simply just that trading down impact. If I look at our market share and the robustness of it, that gives me confidence that people are trading down or trading. I don't like to talk about trading down, trading into Greggs in terms of that quality and value proposition. I think you just need to look at the disposable income trackers, consumer confidence and saving, not spending.
That says there are other effects going on just now. There have been a lot of reports published in the last few weeks talking about the fragile customer, the cautious customer, and the fact that potentially, if you look at the bottom two quintiles on the disposable income tracker, they probably aren't eating out at all out of the home, they're probably making at home, having breakfast at home. That shifts the dynamic. Therefore, you're having to fight hard for less footfall that's out there in the market. The fact that our market share has stayed robust says that we are continuing to win in that marketplace. On kiosk, it's interesting. We actually have trialed kiosk before. We trialed it back in, I think it was 2019, in a shop up in Coatbridge, just outside Glasgow. We got some of the proposition working.
We didn't get the payment and the loyalty proposition working well at all, so we decided to fold it. I think our loyalty proposition now and the strength of technology that we've got in the business says actually we believe we can do a better job of it than we previously could have done. Your point on labor costs, absolutely. If I think about it, you're always looking for the opportunities to structurally change how you run the business and try and focus on actually making sure we get the right labor costs to make sure we continue to deliver value to the customer. We've always had this view of the sort of secret sauce of Greggs is partly that personality, the being served at the counter. We still believe that's the case.
I guess when you just look at some of the demographics coming through and some of the trends around Gen Z, actually they look for less of that interaction and more of that tech serving their needs. Therefore, if we look at the customer of the future, we're trying to make sure that you can choose how you'd like to be served at Greggs, so you can still go to the counter. As we see in the trial shops, a lot of customers still choose to do that, but you can also go to the kiosk as well. I wouldn't underestimate the complexity of a kiosk in a Greggs, because we are very different to McDonald's, where everything's behind the counter for us. You pick up some of our range and you order some of our range at the counter.
What you have to do is make sure that your kiosk is capable of being able to allow the self-service customer to use it and the kitchen management system that provides the product in time for the customer having placed their order. There's more complexity in our shops than simply if everything's behind the counter.
Thank you.
I'm conscious of time, but I think we've probably got time for another couple to treat her.
Am I going to jump in front? No, morally I should hand it over.
Thank you. Maybe just to follow up a couple of sort of numbers related questions and a bit more bigger picture. June impact. I mean you showed £39 million operating profit growth from like-for-like. Is that a way for us to think about what would have been clearly a negative impact from June, £3, £4, £5 million in that sort of range. Is that a reasonable thing to think about? Secondly, I guess in terms of your outlook, going back to perhaps Ben's question more obliquely, what sort of like-for-likes are you sort of embedding into the outlook that you're talking about today for the second half? Lastly, I think it's clear there's a lot of innovation going on. Can you talk about innovation versus complexity both in the supply chain and in the stores?
I guess is that making the business more difficult to forecast and maybe more volatile with weather? Is that introducing sort of new things to the mix that you are unable to really kind of see as well as you did in the past, perhaps?
Sure. Let me start with innovation and then I'll hand over to you. I think actually the question innovation is simplicity, not complexity. If I look at where we started to, we were running hot in the capacity in the supply chain a couple of years ago, actually we had introduced a lot of complexity in our picking operation and supply chain because we just didn't have enough space to service the shops. Now that we've got Birmingham and Amesbury up and running, that complexity has gone. Having been to Derby and seen it recently, the automated robotic solution that we've got there will make our operation significantly simpler. It doesn't just impact Derby because Derby will do the upstream picking for our regional distribution centers.
What it means is in those sites they would just have to cross dock in and add a small number of products to the stack. We will move, we should move to a much simpler and less complex supply chain than we've currently got just now. What we will still do exceptionally well is that daily delivery to our shops. Therefore we won't stop the sort of how we service our shops, but everything upstream will become simpler. In terms of our shops we are very careful when we roll out something like over-ice drinks, and that's a very easy one for our shops to do. That's why the rollout has gone from 500 shops to over 1,400, because we know our shop teams can deliver it very well. It adds to like-for-like, adds to sales growth and it helps the profitable returns in that shop.
Something like made to order, we are much more cautious. Made to order, we've got in 340 of our shops just now. The reason for that is not all of our shops have got the kitchen facilities behind the scenes. We won't roll out a shop if we believe we'll make it more complex to them. Delivery is probably a good example as well. On delivery, you service catchments and what we've been doing in delivery is if a shop is below a certain sales level, we've been taking delivery out of that shop and giving the volume to another local shop, which again makes it simpler for the shop team, because if it's a growing channel over a certain level of sales, you can deliver it better. I have to say it's innovation to try and make sure that we are doing the right thing for our shop team.
Some of the tasks that we're currently focusing on just now are things like remote temperature monitoring. Would you believe that across our shops they need to take something like 3,000 temperature checks on a monthly basis? We've got a trial going on just now that removes all of the temperature checking of equipment, and it would only be food products the teams need to temperature. That removes a massive task from our team. We talk about something called cognitive load. You try and just reduce how much the team member has to think about. Our quest on innovation is simply simplicity, not complexity.
Just going back to June, June hit us much harder than we were expecting. It was close to £5 million in terms of the contribution impact of the slower trade in June versus what we had planned for. That was the trigger for the profit warning that we put out at the start of this month. Looking forward, we at that time built in some cover for the summer because we could see already that July had suffered from the same conditions as June. We're building a lot of caution over the summer and really expect to start making some like-for-like progress again through the autumn. That gives you a flavor of the shape of what we're expecting. Anyway, Sridhar, if I very quickly take one online, just to be fair, Bradley asks, has the engagement with over-ice drinks been mainly inside the meal deal?
Only recently, I think so far over-ice drinks have been all outside the meal deal. We've just started to include it. I think we have in the lunchtime deal.
We have just started to include it at the lunchtime deal, and we've just started to include it as part of the Greggs App sign-off, where you can choose your free product to be.
The iced drink, and in terms of daypart behavior for iced drinks, probably afternoon biased I would say, and you know, again temperature related obviously and interestingly the.
Sort of top selling product is the iced coffee, which sells well, and the breakfast deal as well because that's a product people. Last question we will take from Andy. If there are other questions, apologies, but we'll try. Richard and Dave will probably stay behind for a few minutes after the meeting, but Andy, we will come to you.
Thanks very much. Last questions. First one, just following up on Richard's one on share versus supermarkets. I know you understand the complexities there, but do you think you are gaining or losing market share or holding market share against the supermarkets in relevant categories? The first one. Second one, on your YouGov brand metrics chart, we can sort of see obviously you've made great progress longer term, but in FY2025, in particular, the quality and satisfaction metrics were a bit down year on year. Any concerns there or any reasons why you think that might be? Then the final one, six months ago we were here and you'd been talking about or you'd outlined why FY2026 and FY2027 were going to see incremental margin headwinds of 60 basis points cumulatively one year after the other. How does that play through now?
Because obviously we got a weather-affected period during this year, which we can't pencil in repeating next year, so presumably we're not expecting a 60 basis point impact from where we are now. Just what help you can give us on that would be good.
Yeah, I think on that that's a fair assumption, you know, unless this is the future and of course, you know, heat could well be something that we just see lasting for a bigger proportion of the year, couldn't it? I mean, that would be, I think, a reasonable planning assumption going forward, but we will have to make sure that our range adapts to deal with that. I think the guidance that we gave for 2026 and 2027 on the margin headwinds from the new capacity still stand and are not connected with current trading.
Sorry, still stand. As in, we're going to see an incremental 60 basis point hit from where.
We are now or from wherever we.
Otherwise, we would have been.
Because I can't tell you where we'll be next year, but wherever it is, you've got this. Yeah.
To be 100% clear, it's not where we end at FY2025 and then 60 basis point hit on that.
No, it's from where you would otherwise be with normal trade. Yeah.
Okay, thanks.
On your other two questions on supermarkets, currently, we can see that we're holding market share on the food to go piece. We can see that some of our competitors have lost. That's the most recent three months that we got through from Circana just last week. That's positive for us. On the YouGov survey, there's actually a new entrant into the YouGov survey. That's what's changed some of the quality of perception. A new entrant's come in and they've gone to the top by quite a sizable level. Therefore, it's just pushed the rest of us down a little bit on those quality metrics. Nothing that we're worried about. What I would say, though, is we continue to track that metric because as you introduce new items, you want to make sure the customer is seeing that that's great quality product.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you for the time. Sorry it was a little bit rushed there at the end. I think I need to go to a press call, but Richard and Dave will stay around for any quick questions. Lovely to see you all. Thank you.