Latest news with #Gail'sBakery
Daily Mail
05-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
Gail's Bakery boss fears Employment Rights Bill may hit jobs
Jobs will be put at risk by Labour's plans to impose more rules on companies when they hire staff, a leading businessman has warned. Luke Johnson, chairman of the Gail's Bakery chain, said the economy was in a 'precarious' state and putting additional regulations on firms, especially smaller ones, would deter them from hiring as costs rise. 'Government talk a good game about growth. But the reality of what they are doing is the opposite. Unquestionably, this Employment Rights Bill will destroy jobs,' Mr Johnson said. He called on ministers to rip up the rules, which are making their way through Parliament. Speaking to James Reed on the employment agency boss's All About Business podcast, Mr Johnson added: 'I would completely scrap the Employment Rights Bill... given the precarious conditions of the UK economy is not what job creators need.' The comments come as businesses face a barrage of extra costs after measures unveiled by Chancellor Rachel Reeves came into force last month. These included a 6.7 per cent rise in the National Living wage to £12.21 per hour alongside an increase in National Insurance Contributions from employers. Mr Johnson, who was previously the boss of Pizza Express and currently sits on the boards of firms such as Revolution Bars owner The Revel Collective, said ever-increasing costs risked forcing entrepreneurs out of the UK. 'Fewer people will want to start a business,' he also told the podcast. 'People will outsource or automate jobs, or they just won't bother. 'If you burden those risk-takers... and you tax them too heavily... eventually the talent will go.' The Bill includes rights to guaranteed hours and flexible working. The Government has estimated the plans to expand workers' rights will cost firms an extra £5billion a year. Mr Johnson last year told MPs Labour's proposals risked 'crushing' the private sector and that he feared some of his businesses would not survive. There are already signs that firms are beginning to buckle under the pressure of rising tax bills, which will be made worse by the disruption caused by Donald Trump's tariffs. Restructuring experts Begbies Traynor last month reported that the number of companies in 'critical' financial distress rose by 13 pc in the first three months of the year. It followed figures from the Government's Insolvency Service that showed the amount of firms going bust in March rose by 9 per cent compared with the same month in 2024.
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Birthday freebies: how to cash in on UK retailers' gifts and discounts
Celebrating your birthday isn't just about getting presents and cards from family and friends. Signing up to loyalty schemes and newsletters can give you access to a host of freebies, deals and discounts from retailers to mark the big day. With my birthday on the horizon I decided to look at what was on offer, and see which gifts came with some small print. In one day in central London I collected £10.15 of sweet treats from four retailers, although the sad thing was that no one had actually wished me a happy birthday. A further £44 of free goodies were available from skincare and chocolate brands, although they would have involved a minimum spend. Then there were money-off vouchers for items such as trainers. Of course, unlike friends and families, companies are after something when they give us these gifts. Here's my guide to the deals worth signing up to before you get older. Many restaurants, coffee shops, cafes and retailers offer a free sweet treat on your birthday if you've signed up to their loyalty programme and entered your date of birth. There are often conditions, such as the need to have signed up a certain number of days in advance. Some require you to spend a minimum amount, but here are some of the goodies you can grab without touching your purse or wallet. Greggs Once you have downloaded and signed up to the Greggs app and added your date of birth, you will be offered a free treat on your birthday every year. This can be anything from the confectionery range, such as a cookie or doughnut. I chose a sugar-strand ring doughnut that would normally cost £1.40. Your birthday treat voucher will normally expire within a month. The voucher will appear in the wallet section of the app around the time of your birthday. Gail's Bakery With the Gail's loyalty programme, you need to download the app and sign up to get a free sweet treat during your birthday month. This includes any of the cakes, muffins or cookies. I picked a chocolate muffin normally costing £3.30. Ole & Steen This Danish bakery chain offers a free muffin, brownie, cookie, banana bread or plant-based social slicewith its app. When you sign up, you will be asked to add your birthday details. I went for the chocolate chip and hazelnut cookie, which would have normally cost £1.75. You need to be quick – the voucher expires seven days from your birthday. Krispy Kreme Once you've signed up to the Krispy Kreme rewards scheme, either online or via the app, you should get a voucher for a doughnut of your choice if you add your date of birth. It is only redeemable at Krispy Kreme stores. I picked the strawberry sundae doughnut, which was normally £3.65. Space NK At this luxury makeup and skincare retailer, you get a free birthday gift bag when you join the Ndulge loyalty programme online and add your date of birth – but only if have made a purchase within your birthday year. Different tiers of gifts are available based on your membership level , which is determined by the amount you have spent, and the standard tier still gets you a free gift. If you order it online, there is a unique promo code you can enter on checkout, but this requires a purchase. In-store, you can collect it without buying anything on the day, but you have to have bought something within the last 12 months – you just need to show your Ndulge membership (I logged in on Safari) and birthday gift barcode, which was emailed to me. I had to visit two shops as the first had run out of gifts (which I was told was quite common). The bag I received had a Juliette Has a Gun perfume sample (1.7ml), which typically costs £25 for an 8ml bottle, a 25ml Sol de Janeiro Brazilian Bum Bum Cream, usually £21 for 75ml, and a 5ml Laura Mercier pure canvas primer, at £21.50 for 15ml. Very roughly, that comes to about £18 worth of goodies. Each month the products change. You have between the first of your birthday month to the 14th of the following month to redeem the voucher. Rituals This beauty and wellbeing brand offers a free birthday gift when you download the app and become a My Rituals member. To redeem it, you must be subscribed to the newsletter before your birthday and make a purchase. I was offered the Ritual of Mehr handwash, which usually costs £13.90. The cheapest things to buy were either a 50ml bottle of cleansing hand gel or some cleansing wipes, both costing £4.90. Sephora You don't get a gift when you sign up to the MySephora programme in the UK, but are offered 25 points on your birthday with the bronze membership – the lowest tier. You get the choice of a £5 reward or beauty gift every 100 points. The higher tiers, which you reach through earning enough points, offer a free beauty product. Hotel Chocolat Here, you needed to spend at least £5.50 to redeem your 'birthday reward', which is £5 off. You need to download an app and join its membership programme with your date of birth. The £5 voucher can be used in-store or online, but sale items are excluded. The 'Everything Mini Selection' – four of the chocolatier's most popular chocolates – costs £5.95. If you buy this and use your voucher, you get the chocolates for 95p. If you order online, UK standard delivery starts at £3.95. Lindt When you sign up to the chocolatier's MyLindt Rewards membership programme, you get a 200g box of Lindt Lindor milk chocolate truffles on the day you have registered as your birthday. On Lindt's website, the box cost £7.50 when we looked. To redeem the treat, you need to visit Lindt's own shops or website and spend a minimum of £10 in-store or £20 online. Burger King You can get a free Whopper or Plant Based Whopper burger if you're signed up to the Burger King Rewards scheme online or on the app. According to the Ts and Cs, your date of birth must be provided at least seven days before your birthday to receive the gift. At the Burger King near Holborn, central London, a Whopper costs £6.59. Zizzi You can get a free main course on your birthday as long as you buy another main at this pizza chain. The cheapest is free. You must be signed up to the Zillionaires' Club online. The voucher will appear in your 'Perkz Wallet' and is valid for 28 days. Fashion retailers are typically offering discounts rather than freebies – but some are quite generous. H&M If you sign up to become an H&M member and put in your date of birth, you can get 25% off one item on your birthday. This is valid for two weeks, and you must have one store or online purchase registered to your account. Nike As a Nike member, you will get 25% off eligible products at the checkout on your birthday. You must have joined as a member at least 10 days before your birthday. Adidas With Adidas's loyalty programme adiClub, you get points added to your profile on your birthday, based on your membership level. You can use your points to get money off purchases. The amount varies based on your membership level. Camper If you join the shoe retailer's Walking Society, you get 25% off full-priced items on your birthday. You also get 10% off for joining. When you sign up to these loyalty programmes via an app or online, you normally hand over personal data such as your name, email address, date of birth and phone number. Dr Maryam Mehrnezhad, a reader in the information security department at Royal Holloway, University of London, says companies can collect a host of other information about you on top of that. Data such as the time zone, the language and keyboards that someone uses to access the app, the unique ID of the phone and the location can all be collected to build a profile of the user. This information can be used for marketing purposes and is often sold on to third parties for a profit. 'Usually, somewhere along the way, the user has ticked a box that enables companies to collect, store and sell on this data,' Mehrnezhad says. While this 'third-party tracking' is common with big retailers, it could breach laws to protect individuals' rights to privacy or data protection, Mehrnezhad adds. 'A lot of online services don't offer a pathway to withdraw consent from previously accepted privacy settings,' she says. Even if you opt out, it can be difficult to enforce the right to remove your personal data. Make sure you check the retailer's policy on this before you sign up. Prof Alan Woodward, computer security expert at the Surrey Centre for Cyber Security at the University of Surrey, says you should remember that 'the bottom line is, there's no such thing as a free lunch'. 'It is that old adage from the internet: if you're not the paying customer, you're the product,' he says. With this in mind, you can take simple steps, such as creating a dummy email and having two birthdays: your real one and the one you use for sign-ups. However, you need to keep in mind that using fake information may violate the terms and conditions. Mehrnezhad says she takes a paranoid view of online services in general, and recommends we all do. Here are her tips to protect yourself when signing up for offers: Use strong passwords and up your account security. 'Look out for two-factor authentication, and regularly check account information is accurate.' Read the terms and conditions. 'We should really read them to know what we're agreeing to.' Control app permissions. 'You can turn off certain features such as locations..' Uninstall apps you no longer need. These may still be collecting data about you, so if you no longer need an app, remove your account and delete it.
Telegraph
18-03-2025
- General
- Telegraph
How snacks changed the British way of life
Remember a time when your only treat was an orange-wrapped Breakaway after school, and eating between meals signified the decline of civilisation? If so, you grew up before the golden (wonder) age of the snack. The sad news is that your Breakaway was finally taken away in February 2024 when Nestle took the 'difficult decision' to discontinue the biscuit after 54 years. There is no shortage of new snacks to throw into your trolley, however. In the latest figures from YouGov, 34% of us eat one sweet treat a day, while 12% admit to consuming multiple every day. That's a hell of a mountain of Twixes, KitKats and Dorito packets to be left scrunched up on the train seat opposite. We Brits have always been a nation of snackers – but the first snack foods were actually boiled peas sold on the streets of Victorian England. The origin of the word 'snack' is thought to come from the Middle Dutch word 'snacken', which meant 'to bite.' 'We started to use the term 300 years ago to mean a small piece of something, such as a 'snack of cake'', says Annie Gray, food historian and the author of The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street. 'In the late 19th century, we had the first 'snack bars', which sold oysters, cheese, baked potatoes or pies to passers-by. These were often cheap substitute meals.' Back then – as it arguably has now – snacking had class connotations. 'People in the upper classes had four meals a day – breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner,' says Gray. 'But the poor didn't have time for this: in many cases they didn't have ovens or even kitchens, so workers would grab things on the go. These days, people who are on their feet all day, or who work shifts, have a similar need for convenience food.' But whatever your net worth or occupation, we all occasionally have a hankering for a snack – be it a Greggs apple Danish, or a pistachio, lemon and rose cake from Gail's Bakery. Why our favourite snacks are sweet Modern day snacks have mutated significantly since the days of oysters and peas. The McVities chocolate digestive was born in 1899, 14 years after the Jacob's Cream Cracker. The late 1980s saw the advent of the Kettle Chip: these days, the shelves groan with protein bars and salted caramel chocolate. According to 2025 research from Statista, our favourite snacks these days are sweet. Chocolate biscuits make up the largest sales category, with people consuming them at four to five times the rate of savoury biscuits or crackers. The faithful pack of crisps – first sold in pubs just before the First World War – isn't far behind. In 2022, consumers purchased 66 grams of crisps per person per week (the equivalent of two bags), a rise of 18 per cent from the previous five years. The road to Snacksville began after World War II. 'We already had 'elevenses' and the tradition of stopping for tea and biscuits,' says Gray. 'But in the middle of the 20th century, snacking was rebranded as 'grazing' – which sounds better but actually turned out to be worse for our health.' Pen Vogler is a food historian, and the author of S tuffed: A Political History of What We Eat and Why it Matters. 'There's nothing intrinsically wrong with snacking and it's perfectly possible to do this healthily on apples or nuts,' she says. 'The problem is that over the past hundred years or so, the ingredients in our snacks have become less good for us. After the war, our snacks became made from extruded (or high fructose) corn syrup,' says Vogler. 'They were cheap to make and incredibly full of sugar.' It will come as no surprise to learn that the snack invasion started in America. 'From the 1950s onwards, this was driven by marketing people creating new, segmented audiences,' says Gray. 'So, for example, we suddenly had the teenager, the 'tired mum', and the parents of children who got their way through 'pester power'.' Vogler agrees. 'Food advertising wasn't particularly new, but by the 1970s, we had a 'surround sound' of advertising,' she says. 'This coincided with the rise of affordable luxury, the 'little treat' which was often full of sugar, because sugar is cheap. And so, snacking was rebranded as socially acceptable.' (To illustrate, the basket of snack foods on the table in the photo accompanying this article came to £30 in total from Tesco.) The advertising campaigns were legendary: from Flake adverts of girls in baths (below) and on gypsy caravans, to Toffos: 'a man's gotta chew, what a man's gotta chew'. Somehow, Mars persuaded us their Milky Way was 'the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite.' Only Yorkie Bars were manly enough for lorry drivers, and in 2023, Gary Lineker celebrated 30 years selling Walkers Crisps by driving around Battersea Power Station as 'Father Crispmas' in a sleigh full of salt and vinegar. 'We also had the rise of snacking in the office, as colleagues rolled Maltesers to one another across the floor,' says Gray. The rise of convenience snacking With the rise of the supermarket, it became easier to load up on snacks to have 'for later'. 'From the 1960s onwards, you no longer had to queue in a shop and be served over a counter,' says Vogler. 'In the past, this had served as a useful break when people were buying snacks, it made them think harder about what they were eating. A child could go into a supermarket and load up on crisps and chocolate now.' Midlifers may complain that Wagon Wheels have got smaller, and Curly Wurlies have been retracted, but the range of foods available has exploded and this shows no signs of slowing down. 'The supermarkets have to sell more food to grow their businesses, so we have to eat more food,' says Vogler. 'Products got bigger, and then we had multi-packs of crisps. And don't even get me started on the meal deal.' (The supermarket meal deal typically consists of pre-packaged sandwiches, crisps and sugary drinks.) This is before we mention the explosion of vending machines, which first sold chewing gum on the streets of New York in the late 19th century. But in 1972, the first glass-fronted vending machine was invented: now these mobile confectioners spew out crisps and chocolate bars day and night, in our stations and hospitals and schools. 'Snacking is a fast fix, like the equivalent of a social media post,' says Gray. 'You just can't get away from snacks – even Weight Watchers has branded bars now. The newest thing in the past 10 to 20 years is evening snacking – caused by home-working and the erosion of the nine to five work-life. All this together is really leading to a public health problem.' A 2019 study published in the British Medical Journal showed that snacks made up a fifth of all calories we eat at home – around 370 calories per day. And this figure doesn't include snacks consumed outside the home, so the true figure is likely to be closer to an extra 500 calories per day. A round-the-clock obesity crisis All the experts concur that round-the-clock snacking is leading to an obesity crisis. In 2022, 27 per cent of children between two and 15, were overweight or obese, compared with 19 per cent in 2004 and 12 per cent in 1995. In the early 1970s, only five per cent of children were obese. The evidence suggests we underestimate the calorific content of our snacks. For example, in a 2022 study from think tank Nesta, 75 per cent of respondents underestimated the calories in a sausage roll, with an average guess of 228 calories. And 95 per cent of respondents underestimated the calories in half a sharing bag of tortilla chips. The average guess was 214 calories, less than half the true value of 447 calories. And with this extra weight comes serious health problems such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease. 'The problem of the eternal snacking is that your body doesn't have a chance to recover,' says Vogler. 'Your insulin response is constantly triggered. Snacking may have short-term enjoyment but it can also lead to long-term illness.' The new science looking into ultra-processed foods (UPFs) is young, but it seems these are having a deleterious effect on our microbiome, or gut bacteria. 'There's also a school of thought that snacking leads to anxiety and mental health problems,' says Vogler. 'The emotion of guilt is part of the snacking market. 40 per cent of people say they feel 'guilty' when they have a pack of crisps or a bar of chocolate. Why is this a guilty pleasure? Pleasure shouldn't make you feel guilty.' But this could all be about to change. According to a survey published in The Grocer magazine, 40 per cent of adults in the UK are now motivated to make healthier life choices and six in 10 consumers are actively trying to choose healthy snacks to hit their fitness goals. 'This is seen in the value of the healthier snacking market which has seen 15 per cent growth in the last 12 months, taking it to £148 million,' says The Grocer. The protein bar area is the fastest growing – up 31 per cent in the past 12 months. 'It's certainly true that the Zoe app discourse around snacking – where people track their blood sugar after eating – puts an emphasis on quality,' says Gray. 'There are encouraging signs that people are turning to satsumas, apples or nuts, rather than a muffin mid-morning.' Experts believe that the solution lies in a change to the 'food environment' – offering consumers healthier choices when travelling, or an alternative to fish and chips or pies at a football match. 'It's also important to realise that anything that comes with a list of health claims on the packet is not healthy,' says Gray. 'The healthiest foods come without a list of ingredients: indeed, without a packet at all.' And yet, there will be moments in all our lives where only a pack of Quavers or a HobNob (or two) will do. 'The manufacturers are entirely open about their intentions,' says Vogler. 'Look at the Pringles slogan: 'once you pop, you can't stop.' It's an acknowledgement that we will snack until we die. But at least they are hiding in plain sight.'
