The great Scouse pasty war

An early memory: clutching a sausage roll in the Cherry Tree shopping centre on a summer's day in Liscard, waiting for my nan to buy an Echo from John Menzies. I can’t be ten years old yet, because that’s when WHSmith bought out and rebranded Menzies; also, the roll is massive in my hand, like a flaky baton of hot processed pork.

Although maybe that’s just because it’s from Sayers. The way people in Liverpool especially talk about a classic Sayers sausage roll, you’d think they were beef Wellington-sized pasties with enough steaming protein to nourish both football teams. The famous caff chain, founded in Old Swan in 1912, also sold pies, soups, pasties, bread, and cakes, with vanilla slices and strawberry tarts a particular favourite. Comfort food, in short — tasty and unpretentious.

Alas, in 2025, it’s Greggs – once just Sayers’ Newcastle equivalent – that is ubiquitous on British high streets and the subject of Netflix documentaries. With a turnover of £2 billion last year, it’s overtaken McDonald’s as the go-to breakfast fast-food. Go into Primark and you’ll find Greggs-branded clothing. God preserve us, there have even been Greggs-themed weddings.

Meanwhile, like Liscard’s retail sector, The Echo, and your humble writer, Sayers has gone into decline. (Bizarrely, John Menzies Plc is flying – literally, as it’s now an aviation company.) In 2006, 183 jobs were lost at Sayers’ central bakery on Lorenzo Drive in Norris Green, where the business had been based for 75 years. Two years later, it closed altogether when the parent company went into administration.

What about the stores? First they partially rebranded as Poundbakery after a merger. Then they, too, all-but disappeared from the city centre. Now, unless you’re willing to travel out to Allerton Road or West Kirby, Sayers is little more than a spectre occasionally invoked by nostalgia pages on Facebook. Like the recent EFL Cup final, was this simply a case of Geordies doing it better?

Not according to Scouse respondents to The Post’s call out.

“Sayers' sausage rolls are head and shoulders above Greggs,” says Jez. “They've got a little bit of a kick to them.” “I do prefer it to Greggs,” says Louise. “Pasties and sausage rolls are far better.”

And this supremacy goes beyond mere pastry fillings.

“It was superior to Greggs because the counters were heated,” says Clare, who also considers hipster cafés and artisan bakeries a step down from the Sayers ideal: “Give me a dinky cake any day over this tomfoolery we have now!”

I have nothing against Greggs. In fact, a confession: for years, my morning walk to work went past not one but two Greggs stores, making it doubly hard to resist their then-£2 breakfast roll. While I indulged in Geordie delights, our local hero struggled.

But why wasn’t Sayers the Scouse Greggs? Why isn’t there now a Sayers app, loyalty scheme, or vast, well-greased viral marketing campaigns to rival its North East counterpart? Why isn’t it the Newcastle Echo, or whatever, running pieces titled “Who remembers Greggs?” while American fast-food goliaths sweat over dinky cakes and cheese and onion pasties? Where did Sayers go wrong?

“Cost cut themselves to death,” says Ian. “[The] pasties were empty in the end.” “We still have a Sayers in Belle Vale, but it's small,” says Louise. “Years ago, you used to get a proper plate of gravy and chips. Now it's only a bowl and two chips max.”

Ian and Louise may well be right. But empty pasties and measly chips sound like symptoms rather than a cause. I think we need to go deeper, deeper than the deepest meat and potato pie, until we are a swim in hot, delicious facts and thick, carby truths.

Although Sayers is by some way the elder of the two brands, they share a similar history. Just as John Gregg founded a family bakery in 1939, selling yeast and eggs by pushbike before opening the first shop on Gosforth high street in 1951, the first Sayers kitchen was started in a basement on Prescot Road in 1912 by Fred and Lylian Sayer. Later, the bakery would move to a larger site on Aintree Road, then a factory on Lorenzo Drive in Norris Green in 1931.

Irene, who joined in 1964 at age 16, describes what it was like to work there. "It was very much a family-orientated place," she tells me over the phone. "Most of the people that were there on the factory knew each other, or were families that came and stayed there a long time." She describes the personnel manager Mr Wynn as a kindly man who looked after his staff. Workers would be taken on trips to Blackpool paid for by the company and rewarded with long-term service bonuses. "We worked hard, and they were strict – on hygiene especially, because we were making food – but I never felt intimidated or bullied," Irene says.

Irene's aunt, Kathleen, also worked for Sayers, joining in 1953 aged 15. At 21, she fell seriously ill – "given up for dead", as Irene describes her – and was out of work for two years. When she returned, Kathleen was called into Mr Wynn's office. "She thought she was going to be sacked," Irene explains. "Instead, Mr Wynn gave her a cheque for £10 – a lot of money in those days." Kathleen worked for Sayers for another five years, and when she got married, Sayers provided her wedding cake.

Over in Newcastle, Greggs also stayed a family business. The same year Irene was starting work on Lorenzo Drive, John Gregg died, leaving the business to his sons Ian and Colin. But Ian, especially, had big ideas. According to his book, Bread: The Story of Greggs, while studying at Cambridge he became influenced by the Pareto principle, based upon an Italian polymath’s observation that 80% of the land in Italy belonged to 20% of the population: therefore, in any field, 80% of the effect can be achieved with 20% of the effort. Ian Gregg began installing small ovens in each Greggs shop but moving most of the heavy baking off site. This made Greggs outlets relatively small, nimble and efficient – they could open up pretty much anywhere.

The first real divergence between the two bakery brands came in the Seventies. Greggs began moving beyond Tyneside, buying out Rutherglen in Glasgow and Thurston’s in Leeds. By 1977, when Sayers was bought by United Biscuits, Greggs had already begun its incursion into the North West, buying up Price’s in Manchester a year earlier. No longer a family business, Sayers became one brand among many; Greggs remained master of its fate.

In 1990, Sayers was bought again, this time by Warburtons. Greggs, meanwhile, was peckish again. In 1994, it acquired the Bakers Oven chain from Allied Bakeries.

This was a decisive move. Ten years earlier, Bakers Oven had bought out Carrick’s, an early competitor of Greggs in Newcastle. But as most Bakers Oven outlets were in the south of England, in one fell swoop, Greggs had not only consolidated its hold over Tyneside but also crossed the North/South Rubicon. Greggs' managing director at the time said the audacious purchase had provided ''a unique opportunity for Greggs to expand in its key target areas and to extend its operations into in-store bakeries and seated catering.''

By the end of the 1990s, Greggs had bought out Midlands chain Braggs. Meanwhile, Sayers had been sold again: to Lyndale Foods, the same parent company that would go into administration in 2008. For Greggs, that was just the beginning of its Caesarist ambition. The same year Sayers’ owners went under, Greggs rebranded other chains it had gradually acquired, such as Bakers Oven, as “Greggs”. The stage was set for national domination.

In 2013, Greggs signed Roger Whiteside, the Cristiano Ronaldo of food company CEOs. “Before Whiteside’s time [at M&S] in the 1980s, the idea there was a market out there for pre-packaged sandwiches was basically unthinkable,” chef Lewis Bassett says on his Full English podcast. But by introducing the pre-made sandwich onto their shelves, Whiteside made M&S millions. 

At Greggs, he would better this achievement. Noticing 80% of Greggs’ profits were from grab-and-go customers, and that it was losing out to supermarket brands in the bread and baked goods gig, Whiteside effectively ended its status as a bakery. 

“It was quite a risky strategy,” Sam White, editor of Bakery Business Magazine, told Bassett ten years after Whiteside became Greggs CEO. “But it’s been a hugely successful one.”

Greggs became a food-on-the-go joint, in which the sausage rolls are made in a factory and only heated up in store while still smelling like homemade food: a logical continuation of Ian Gregg’s innovations, and yet somehow radical enough to change the face of Britain’s fast-food industry.

Whiteside also had the idea of taking the mountain to Muhammad, popping-up Greggs outlets wherever consumers might be found: railway platforms, service stations, airports, and high streets. Even Queens Square bus station in the heart of Sayers’ home city is now a Greggs: Merseytravel employees have had to shift over to make space for steak bakes and sausage, bean and cheese pasties. From there, I catch the bus to Allerton Road to visit one of the last Sayers’ outlets in Liverpool.

While almost quadrupling their profits in the last decade, Greggs has “retained its charming, underdog, little bakery [image],” as food writer Josh Barrie told a recent Channel 4 documentary, “when in fact it’s a monster” – on its way to having twice as many outlets nationally as McDonalds, and tweaking the red nose of Ronald at every opportunity. Meanwhile, Sayers has clearly rebranded from what I remember, trying its hand at a more upmarket and perhaps nostalgic logo.

But even Sayers’ advertising now references Greggs, bragging that their pasties are 30% bigger. Analogous, perhaps with Wimpy’s, also bought by Warburtons in 1977. Wimpy’s could always justly claim to have larger, meatier, juicier burgers than McDonald’s or Burger King. Even today, you can go to one of their last remaining outlets in Birkenhead and buy a tastier quarter pounder than you’d find in any Maccies. But that wasn’t the point: flexibility, consistency, and ambition were.

Does the decline of Sayers matter? I speak to Kieran, whose parents actually met while working at Sayers’ Lorenzo Drive bakery: his dad was a “master baker”, while his mum made custard tarts.

“There’s something about the vanilla slice or the sausage roll that was just in my blood,” Kieran says. “I loved it on a Proustian level.”

Not for the first time, I get the impression Sayers was an important part of the Scouse social fabric: Kieran’s nan also worked at the Norris Green factory, and later “four or five” of his family at any one time.

“Norris Green was always a bit of a factory town,” Kieran says. “Everyone lived within walking distance to the factory. And it was a big, lively, social and cultural thing: they'd all go to the same pubs and the Broadway club and places like that.”

In 2008, the same year Greggs spread their brand across the south, Sayers’ Lorenzo Drive factory was hit by an arson attack, after its closure had left 270 people out of a job. The site where Kathleen and then Irene worked, my wife's aunt met her husband, and Kieran's parents first courted – where a thousand human connections had happened and the Norris Green community was bound together – that place burned. Thirteen fire crews struggled to control the flames while dark smoke billowed out into the residential area. Not long after, the building's useless, blackened husk was torn down. You'd never know it was there: an Aldi now stands on the same site.

According to its website, Sayers still claims to be the biggest independent retail baker in the North West, with over 150 shops throughout the region, so maybe they’re doing OK. But they’re no longer Liverpudlian: Sayers’ main bakery is now based in Bolton, and while shops persist on Breck Road, Bootle, and the Dingle, the brand has no city centre presence.

When I began this journey, I thought I might uncover a “pasty wars”, two bakery brands battling through cost-cutting, BOGOF deals, recipe switching, or underhanded corporate practices. But Sayers vs Greggs, it seems, is a bit like the England vs Germany football rivalry: it exists only in the minds of the less-successful team. Worse: it was over before it even began. Sayers’ equivalent was never Greggs, but Braggs or Thurston’s – one of the many smaller chains Greggs chewed up and swallowed. It never had a chance to compete.

As for my Allerton Road trip? Feeling like I’m heading back in time, I buy a sausage roll, a pasty, and some dinky cakes to take home. But although I agree with Jez that there’s a spicier flavour to the sausage meat, it’s not the massive pork sword of Scouse yore. Nor can I claim any kind of madeleine-in-the-tea moment like Kieran, transporting me back to 90s Liscard. The pasty is big – bigger than anything you'd get at Greggs – but, taste wise, nothing to write home about.

Above Mossley Hill, the sky bruises, followed by a trickle of rain as I catch the bus back to town. It's only June, but summer's already been and gone.

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