Britain has not reached 'peak Greggs', says bakery chain boss amid fears fat jabs could hit sales
Chief executive Roisin Currie said she has faith in plans to expand to 3,000 shops over the next few years as there are still plenty of areas where it does not have a presence.
'I absolutely don't believe we have reached peak Greggs,' Currie said, adding the business would expand into retail parks and supermarkets.
The comments came as Greggs said footfall at its 2,649 shops was hit by 'unusually hot weather' in June, dragging profits down by 14.3 per cent to £63.5million for the first six months of the year.
The heatwaves deterred shoppers from buying hot pastries, a spokesman said.
Currie said the company has a 'watching brief' on how fat jabs are changing what people buy on-the-go.
She said: 'We have to make sure that if you are on one of these drugs, you can still shop at Greggs.'
The group has expanded its ranges to include healthier options, the spokesman added.
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'I heard the 14-year-olds talking about Ariana Grande in Wicked, saying she looks 'really good' in this or that video,' she says, referring to the American singer and actress, whose very slender frame has been much pored over online. Naturally, she says, they then want to be as thin as Grande. But she also points towards 'yummy mummies' with daughters at her school, and their obsession with losing 'half a kilo', thereby raising daughters who are similarly plagued. If you want to feel any more depressed, she says girls are now bringing pens from their parents' fridges and selling them to other girls. One of my brothers, an enterprising if mischievous sort, used to sell cigarettes for £1 a pop during his time at Stowe. This feels quite different. Are the staff at the school having any sort of conversation about what to do regarding this situation, I ask. Not really, she says, because a number of teachers are using the jabs too. I increasingly feel like an outlier writing about this subject, because these jabs are becoming the norm. A weird kind of norm, if you ask me, but a norm all the same. One isn't supposed to criticise anything that anyone does to their body these days, whether they're big, small, tattooed, pierced or whatever. It's not feminist to be unsupportive, many argue. But these drugs are allowing women who've always been unhappily obsessed with their weight to become alarmingly thin. Women who aren't large to begin with. Are we supposed to look the other way and pretend this is healthy? Plenty of men are using these injection pens, too, I should add, but they seem to be particularly dissected and examined and analysed among the women in my friendship group. Isn't it the same as Botox, a friend challenged last week while we discussed this subject (yet again) over dinner. Women don't have to 'confess' if they've had that, she argued, so why should a fat jab be any different? Why should women be continually harangued and criticised for their personal choices? I'm not sure cosmetic treatments are quite the same as injecting oneself with a synthetic hormone, though. I think the jabs are more insidious, because putting on weight is still deemed even more of a 'crime' than ageing. In the past decade or so, we'd supposedly all become so much more accepting of different body shapes than back in the Nineties, when my friends were busy starving themselves or sticking their fingers down their throats at school. Except we haven't. The fat jabs have blown that idea to shreds, and girls are doing it all over again. It's deeply, deeply disturbing.
