Food retailer Greggs has opened its first eco-friendly drive-thru in Winchester, designed to trial in-store initiatives that reduce the company’s environmental impact.

The company said that successful features will be rolled out to other locations.

The new drive-thru incorporates sustainability measures focused on cutting waste, conserving water, and lowering energy consumption. These include solar panels to power all in-store digital signage year-round, as well as sun tubes that channel natural light from the roof to minimise artificial lighting.

Additional features consist of low-energy light fittings and daylight harvesting technology, supported by a wireless control system that adjusts lighting in real time via smart sensor nodes. A rainwater harvesting unit with a 3,000-litre capacity is projected to reduce water usage by approximately 13 per cent. The site also uses a heat pump system to warm water and regulate air temperature.

This launch follows Greggs’ first eco-shop, which opened in Northampton in 2022 as a testing ground for sustainability innovations. The company aims for over 25 per cent of its stores to incorporate elements from this eco-shop by the end of 2025.

Greggs reports it surpassed this target a year early, with more than 700 shops—a quarter of its estate—featuring these elements by the end of 2024.

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.”

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