The early bird famously catches the worm. In the case of breakfast, that early bird is Greggs. This spring, the bakery chain overtook McDonald’s as leader in food-to-go breakfast, gobbling up 19.6% of market share.

So it makes sense that Greggs is the target of Lidl’s latest print advertising campaign, which aims to secure a bigger bite of the breakfast market. Here, Lidl is hitting Greggs where it really hurts: on price. As the campaign points out, Lidl’s jam-filled doughnut comes in at just 39p, versus 95p at Greggs.

It’s a strategy that has caught attention. “Things really are hotting up in the battle between retail and food to go,” Nick Downing, non-executive director at agency MinsterFB and former IGD commercial and insight director, wrote on LinkedIn. “Not seen anything quite like this before.”

But equally, it’s an unsurprising move from the discounter. Bakery is increasingly a strong focus for Lidl, and has been instrumental in driving its recent sales growth. Having started the year with 10.6% share in bakery, Lidl had amassed 15.6% by Kantar’s latest 12-week period. That means it’s second only to Tesco in the category – and in April, it was the top dog with 18.2% share. 

Breakfast-to-go growth

Having taken a chunk out of supermarket rivals, the next obvious avenue for Lidl is to challenge out-of-home operators. Especially at a time when the breakfast-to-go market is growing steadily.

In the past year, Brits have carried breakfast out of their homes on 212.3 million occasions – a rise of 8.5% [Kantar 52 w/e 12 May 2024]. What’s more, pastries are a particularly hot area. Brits ate pastries on 287 million occasions during that period, up 20% on the year before.

That morning goods opportunity is only set to grow. As many as 95% of bakery executives expect to see volume increases this year, according to a report out today from LEK Consulting and Houlihan Lokey. Of 40 company heads polled, 74% anticipate their profits will top 2023 by a significant margin. 

So by pitching itself as a cheaper alternative than the king of breakfast – and one that competes on price – Lidl may just be on to a winning formula. It’s not a foolproof one. After all, the discounter will struggle to capture the impulse nature of the trade as well as Greggs, whose locations are carefully designed to capture consumers on the move. It also doesn’t serve the takeaway coffee that fuels this pre-work crowd.

But at the very least, the campaign may persuade more shoppers to see Lidl as a breakfast destination – and make them reconsider whether a 95p doughnut is quite the bargain it seemed.

Pola is The Grocer’s trends editor. She manages our weekly Focus On reports explaining the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind shifting currents in what we eat and drink. Before jumping into retail journalism in January 2024, Pola worked for Times Higher Education, where she was was Asia reporter and co-editor of THE’s global university rankings supplement – a gig that offered plenty of opportunities for fantastic meals in the Far East. Since graduating from Columbia University’s journalism school in 2015, Pola has lived in Japan and rural Alaska, covered the US senate, and written about satellite imagery for Nasa. She has a weakness for biang biang noodles with chilli oil.View full Profile

More from Pola Lem

Topics