Cold Bakes and Hot Takes: What Greggs’ Trustpilot Reviews Reveal
Some people doubt the value of taking a deep dive into their Trustpilot reviews, but they can reveal some surprisingly interesting nuggets.
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Last week, I walked past a Greggs bakery. I looked at their Trustpilot score and saw they have an average of 2.4, a surprisingly low score for a beloved high street brand.
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Who doesn’t love a Greggs sausage roll? (They even cater to vegans!)
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I looked at their reviews to see what’s driving down their average rating, and one theme consistently popped out at me: Cold bakes.
A Lukewarm Legacy
To understand this, we need to rewind to 2012: Gangnam Style had the world horse-dancing, the Queen jumped out of a helicopter with James Bond at the Olympics, and meanwhile in Britain, people were marching, not for justice or freedom, but for the sacred right to a lukewarm sausage roll without a 20% surcharge.
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The “Pasty Tax” was the UK government’s attempt to slap a 20% VAT on hot pasties and sausage rolls, sparking national outrage because apparently, nothing unites Brits like the right to a warm Greggs without a warm bill. It boiled down to this:
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· If your pasty was accidentally warm, it was tax-free.
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· But if it was deliberately warm, it was suddenly treated like a luxury product.​ Totally normal stuff.​
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Fast Forward: The Cold Truth on Trustpilot
Thirteen years later, and Greggs’ Trustpilot reviews are littered with comments about cold bakes. If I spent the time to do a full analysis of the comments, I would put money on it being the most common theme.
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Customers are not happy:
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• “Turns out the rolls were cold. STONE COLD. Drove Nan mental and ruined the weekend. Wouldn’t recommend.”
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• “Have tried veggie sausage rolls six times and every time they were cold! Will give them up now. Do they not know the meaning of HOT food?”
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• “I eventually threw it in the bin, pastry undercooked and puppynose warm!”
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The real source of customer frustration? The element of surprise.
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Supermarkets sell cold sausage rolls and pasties all the time, and no one’s writing angry reviews about that, because people expect them to be cold. It’s clearly signposted, and the packaging screams “chill me.” No one’s caught off guard.
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Greggs, on the other hand, is set up like a fast-food joint. Bright counters. Queues. Seating areas. The whole vibe says: “This food is hot and ready.” So when your sausage roll turns out to be lukewarm at best (or “puppynose warm,” as one reviewer put it), disappointment is inevitable.
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But it’s a tricky problem. If Greggs were to install hot counters, that would trigger the infamous 20% VAT surcharge, a price hike that’s not exactly welcome in the middle of a cost of living crisis.
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Embrace the Quirk
At first glance, it looks like an unsolvable dilemma. But when brands face a product flaw they can’t fix, there’s one surprisingly effective move: own it.
Some of the most memorable ad campaigns were born from brands embracing their quirks. Take Marmite, a divisive flavour if there ever was one. Instead of tweaking the recipe, they leaned in with “Love it or hate it.”
Or Pringles, whose chemical flavour somehow makes you eat the whole tube in one go. They spun that into: “Once you pop, you can’t stop.”
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So what could Greggs do?
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Maybe an ad campaign built around: “Heat it to Eat it”. Letting people know the bakes aren’t always served hot, and showing folks nuking them in office microwaves, with a cheeky tagline like: “At least it’s not reheated fish.”
Or how about a low-cost, high-engagement social media campaign called #HotOrNot, where customers post their bake temperature reactions for a chance to win a free pastry. It’s playful, self-aware, and probably a lot cheaper than a nationwide ad blitz.
Because This Is Britain
Approaches like these bring awareness to the situation, show that Greggs doesn’t take itself too seriously, and give customers a reason to laugh, even if their bake is stone cold.
Because if there’s one thing Brits love more than a hot sausage roll, it’s a bit of self-deprecating humour.
Get in Touch
This is just one example of the kind of insight that can be uncovered when you look at customer reviews a little differently. I specialise in analysing Trustpilot reviews to identify patterns, pain points, and opportunities that often go unnoticed, from usability and service friction to unmet expectations and untapped ideas.
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If you’re curious about what your reviews might really be telling you, I’d love to chat.
Email jen@offthebenchux.com
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