Greggs Bakery, Clydesmill, Cambuslang, Scotland, United Kingdom

Greggs plc is one of the UK's best-known bakers and the largest bakery retail company, with its chain of 1,331 Greggs and Bakers Oven retail outlets across the UK selling an extensive range of baked goods including pies, pasties, doughnuts, cakes, bread, rolls and scones. The company first started in Newcastle and has a large base in the North East and Scotland, with 149 Scottish stores.

In June 2006, as part of an expansion and update of facilities, Greggs decided to relocate the company's main Scottish bakery from the Rutherglen bakery in Glasgow to a new purpose-built site 2.5 miles away on the Clydesmill Investment Park.

Plots 2, 4 and 5 of the Clydesmill Investment Park, Westburn Drive, Cambuslang were sold to Greggs for £730,000 in May 2005. South Lanarkshire Council granted planning permission for the new bakery in mid-2006.

The 340 staff of the Rutherglen bakery will be transferred to the new facility. The new expanded bakery will give a good base for a rapid shop expansion programme across central Scotland and will also increase production efficiency.

The bakery required an investment of £15m and was officially opened on Tuesday 27 November 2007 by Ian Gregg.

CONSTRUCTION

The construction of the new Greggs production factory began in the second half of 2006. The general contractor for construction was Cleggs Food Projects. The lighting, power, fire alarm and emergency lighting systems were installed by SCS Building Services.

The Clydesmill factory has also become the first facility to install a commercial fire protection system able to extinguish burning polypropylene bakery trays.

The system combines water and foam in a sprinkler unit. This is because burning polypropylene quickly melts and cannot be easily extinguished with just water; that is when the foam component is useful. Insurance on facilities of this kind can be high and this system will lower premiums.

The system was supplied by Tyco Fire and Integrated Solutions. The new bakery equipment in the facility was installed by various machine manufacturers: Newsmith (traywash), Spooner (travelling ovens), J.B.S (roll plant), Double D (rack oven), Rademaker (pie machine) and Belshaw (doughnut fryer).

The new equipment will allow the production of an extensive range of rolls, sweet bun goods, doughnuts and supply other divisions with pie lines.

UPGRADE OF RETAIL SYSTEMS

Greggs upgraded its retail shop systems with new EPOS hardware from J2 Retail Systems in June 2006. The upgrade has included the installation of 550 integrated touchscreen terminals to an initial 300 stores.

The intention is to roll out the same systems across all 1,331 of the stores by the end of 2007. This will make J2 the company's main hardware provider.

The Linux red hat operating system is being retained. The terminals will use VIA chipsets and will not require cooling fans. In addition, they will work using flashcard technology and will not require hard drives.