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Vegan Sausage Roll Hype Turns To Disappointment

Greggs Fail To Maintain Momentum Of Vegan Working Class Icon

Pathless Pilgrim
4 min readOct 29, 2021

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Vegans Left Disappointed by Greggs Bakery
After A Promising Start, Greggs’ Vegan Range Is Disappointing

It’s been more than two years now since UK bakery chain Greggs launched their vegan sausage roll, to much fanfare and hype. A British working class icon had been veganised and the public loved it!

For those of you outside the UK, sausage rolls are a kind of takeaway junk-food staple here, particularly popular among working class people looking for a cheap yet filling lunch option or on-the-go snack. They are a huge part of our national culture.

Greggs is the biggest bakery chain in Britain with an 80-year history. They sell 1.5 million sausage every week. If you’re a working-class Brit, chances are high that you grew up on Greggs’ sausage rolls. The ubiquitous reliance on the humble sausage roll was perhaps best encapsulated by Ladbaby’s 2018 Christmas Number 1 hit, ‘We Built This City On Sausage Rolls’, a parody cover of Starship’s 1985 single, ‘We Built This City On Rock and Roll’.

Seen as a typical working class family, singing about a beloved working class icon, the public immediately loved Ladbaby and the song shot straight to number one in the UK Christmas charts.

But until relatively recently, Greggs was failing to tap into the vegan market. A rival chain…

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Pathless Pilgrim
Pathless Pilgrim

Written by Pathless Pilgrim

Vegan for almost 40 years with a first-class degree in law. Animal rights, ethics & social justice. Download my FREE eBook at: lllpg.com/Veganism/

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