Greggs Launches Eco-Friendly Drive-Thru in Winchester

Greggs has just opened the doors to its first eco-conscious drive-thru in Winchester, a pilot site designed to test how far the food retailer can go in cutting its environmental impact. And if the results are promising? The plan is to roll these initiatives out nationwide.

The site is packed with green features. For starters, it uses rooftop solar panels to power all the digital signage inside the store, even through the darker months. Natural lighting plays a big role too, thanks to specially installed sun tubes that channel daylight into the interior, cutting down on the need for artificial lighting.

Inside, low-energy LED fittings are paired with daylight harvesting tech, all coordinated through a smart wireless system that constantly adjusts lighting based on conditions. Outside, a rainwater harvesting system—capable of collecting up to 3,000 litres—is expected to cut the site’s water consumption by around 13%. The entire location is heated and cooled using a heat pump system, making it more efficient and less reliant on traditional HVAC methods.

This launch builds on Greggs’ eco-shop concept, first trialled in Northampton back in 2022. That initial store served as a testbed for new sustainability practices—and clearly, it worked. Greggs had aimed to roll elements from the eco-shop into 25% of its stores by the end of 2025. But they’ve already surpassed that milestone a full year early: by the close of 2024, more than 700 Greggs locations had adopted key features from the pilot.

In Winchester, the stakes are higher. This drive-thru is not just about sandwiches and sausage rolls; it’s a statement about the future of retail, one solar panel and smart sensor at a time.

Tony Rowson, property director at Greggs, said: “As a leader in our sector, we take our responsibility to do right by the planet and communities we operate in seriously, and we do all that we can to make changes for the better. I’m proud of what we’ve achieved with our first eco-shop, ‘our shop of the future’, which means we can now test further materials and initiatives in this new unit, bringing us another step closer to reaching our net-zero carbon objective.”