Greggs or Pret A Manger: Posh sandwiches or bargain bakes: whose business model is making more dough?

Who sells more, and by how much?

Greggs, by about 2.9 times. Its consolidated accounts to December 2024 report turnover of £2,014m, up 11.3 per cent on the previous year. Pret A Manger (Europe) Limited reports £705m to January 2026, down 4.1 per cent.

The shapes behind those two numbers are different. Greggs is a manufacturer as well as a retailer, registered under bakery manufacturing codes and running its own production and distribution into shops it largely owns. Pret is registered as a retailer, and its estate in the filed property data is leasehold throughout. One business bakes and sells, the other buys in and sells, and that shows up later in what each keeps.

The movement lines matter more than the levels here, because the two accounts sit 13 months apart. Greggs is growing revenue and headcount together. Pret is doing the opposite on both, with turnover slightly down and the payroll headcount down almost a tenth, which reads as a business trading a smaller estate harder rather than one expanding into it.

Where does each pound of turnover actually go?

Into payroll first for both, and then the paths separate. For every £100 Greggs takes, about £34.11 goes on staff, £0.70 on interest and £10.13 is left as estimated pre-tax profit. For every £100 Pret takes, about £27.25 goes on staff, £2.13 on interest and £1.56 is left. Greggs spends more of its turnover on people and still keeps six times as much of it.

Why does Pret's payroll cost more per head?

Because of where the shops are, mostly. Pret A Manger (Europe) Limited reports staff costs of £192m across 6,455 people, an average of about £30,000 each. Greggs reports £687m across 32,258 people, an average of about £21,000. That is a gap of roughly 1.4 times per person, on an estate concentrated in London and other city centres against one spread across high streets, retail parks and transport sites nationally.

Turnover per head runs the other way. Each Greggs employee is associated with about £62,000 of turnover, each Pret employee with about £109,000, so Pret's people are costlier and, on these filings, individually busier. Neither figure is a productivity judgement on anyone: a city sandwich shop with a small team and a long lunchtime queue produces a different ratio from a bakery chain that also manufactures and distributes its own product.

The trend lines diverge too. Greggs headcount rose 7.2 per cent over its year, Pret's fell 9.4 per cent. Payroll takes 34.1 per cent of turnover at Greggs and 27.3 per cent at Pret, so the chain with the cheaper staff spends the larger share of its sales on them.

Who owns the buildings, and who rents them?

Greggs owns, Pret rents. The property records attached to Greggs plc are freehold titles going back to the 1980s and 1990s, with disclosed prices where a purchase was recorded, including about £10m for the Enfield site bought in 2015 and £0.1m for a Cleckheaton shop in 2001. Every Pret entry in the same extract is leasehold, and none carries a disclosed price, which is normal for lease assignments.

That choice shows up on the balance sheet. Greggs reports net assets of £571m and £125m of bank and cash, with no borrowings reported and £107m paid out in dividends. Pret A Manger (Europe) Limited reports net assets of £65m, cash of £11m, estimated borrowings of £275m and no dividend. Roughly 8.8 times the net assets, on 2.9 times the turnover.

Who controls each business?

Nobody, in the Companies House sense, at Greggs. The register records no person with significant control, which is the normal position for a listed company whose shares are spread across institutional and private holders. Its board is a plc board, with directors appointed and resigned in the usual rotation.

Pret is a chain of companies. Pret A Manger (Europe) Limited, the trading entity, records Pret A Manger Limited, company number 11391321, as holding 75 to 100 per cent, notified in September 2019. That company, incorporated in 2018 and registered as a holding company, records Pret Holding 2 Ltd, company number 11417685, in the same band. Reporting outside the filings places ultimate ownership with the Luxembourg investment group JAB Holding, which acquired a majority stake in 2018, a point sourced from press coverage rather than from Companies House.

The holding company is where the financing sits. Pret A Manger Limited discloses no turnover and no employees, reports net assets of £759m, estimated borrowings of £420m and interest payable of £52m, and an estimated pre-tax loss of £49m against £56m the year before. It files unconsolidated, so its figures sit alongside the trading company's rather than containing them, and the two are not added together anywhere on this page.

The control bands above are exactly that, bands. They tell you who holds the capital, not the precise percentage or price, and they are not a guide to which figures belong to which set of accounts.

What does each company file?

Three companies carry the story: one consolidated group on the Greggs side, and a trading company plus its holding company on the Pret side.

How were these figures put together?

From filed accounts at Companies House, read one company at a time and never combined across the two subjects.

• Greggs plc files consolidated accounts, so subsidiary turnover, staff and net assets are already inside the group figures shown here and nothing is added on top of them.
• Pret A Manger (Europe) Limited and Pret A Manger Limited both file unconsolidated. Their figures are shown separately and are never summed, because no single filing reports the two together.
• No figure on this page combines Greggs and Pret. Every number is attributed to one company or expressed as a ratio between the two.
• Pre-tax profit and borrowings are estimated from the filed accounts and labelled as estimates throughout.
• The year ends are 13 months apart, December 2024 for Greggs and January 2026 for Pret. This is a comparison of two filings, not of matched periods.
• Amounts in millions are rounded: below £0.1m in thousands, £0.1m to £2m to one decimal place, and £2m and above to the nearest million. Losses appear in brackets.
• The property extracts used here are partial, so the freehold and leasehold contrast is drawn from what is recorded rather than from a complete estate schedule.
• Ownership is taken from PSC records and direct ownership fields, which give control bands rather than exact stakes, and which are not used to merge or de-duplicate any financial figures.

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