National Sausage Roll Day

International Sausage Roll Day was earlier this month, June 5. What does it take for a holiday like this to go international? Was it a grassroots effort, with sausage roll lovers across the globe coming together to petition the UN governing body on holidays? Or was it a scheme by a pastry-slinging marketing cooperative or lobbying group? Or, perhaps most likely, it’s one of those technically international holidays, on account of it being celebrated across the four nations that make up this United Kingdom.

Wait a moment. I’m just getting word now that it was, in fact, National Sausage Roll Day, making this line of questioning entirely moot. Ah, well—I already wrote the introduction.

Regardless of its geographic spread, it was a holiday, and I had to celebrate the only way I knew how: eating a Greggs vegan sausage roll.

This is not a particularly difficult nor out of the ordinary thing for me to do. There is a Greggs a 20-minute walk from me, and nothing ruins the positive physical benefits of a short walk quite like a Greggs vegan sausage roll. But I wanted to do something a little special to mark the occasion. The holiday called for more than just your run-of-the-mill Greggs store experience. For fuck’s sake, Madame Tussaud herself made a wax sausage roll for Greggs. Least I could do is put in some extra effort to treat the holiday with the unique dignity it called for.

So I went to my local Iceland and picked up a box of four frozen Greggs vegan sausage rolls. Iceland, if you’re unfamiliar, is a British supermarket chain that specializes in frozen goods. Not unlike a morgue, you navigate through long aisles of waist-height freezers, but instead of the recently deceased, you pick up ready meals for one, various innovative new potato products, and Iceland-exclusive Greggs pastries.

After first partnering with Iceland in 2011 on a line of frozen sausage rolls, Greggs have expanded their frozen offerings to bakes, melts, wraps, pies, cookies, and even store-exclusive mini-rolls. Outside of the exclusives, the products you get from Iceland are identical to what is delivered to Greggs shops around the country. You just get the privilege of baking them yourself, and oh, what a privilege it is.

The baking process will, if you're dogmatic about suggested cooking instructions, take 30 minutes in your oven. Yes, 30 minutes! Perhaps a little excessive for a single sausage roll. Don’t feel like you have to follow the instructions, of course, or even aim for what society tells you is the ideal sausage roll experience. It’s your Greggs Team Member cosplay, and you can bake your vegan sausage roll however you like.

How much do you save by taking on the responsibility of baking? A box of four frozen vegan sausage rolls comes in at £3.50, so at just £0.88 a piece, these rolls appear significantly cheaper than what you’d get from a London-based Greggs, which charge anywhere between £1.30 and £1.55 depending on the location.

But there are hidden costs. Electricity, for example, which I have learned costs money. I can’t isolate my oven’s electricity usage, but my entire flat used 1.68 kWh of power in the time I pre-heated the oven and cooked a single sausage roll. That translates to £0.41 of electricity at our current unit rate. Add that to the unit price of the sausage roll and we get £1.29, just a penny shy of the lowest in-shop price.

Even worse: by skipping the shop, I’ve missed out on crucial Greggs Rewards stamps. If you visit Greggs on a semi-regular basis and aren’t part of the Rewards program, you’re leaving money on the table: for every 9 bakes you buy, you get one free. Baking my sausage roll at home has lost me a £0.14 share of a future free bake, bringing the total cost of my celebratory holiday sausage roll up to £1.43.

Worth it? Absolutely. There’s no compromise on taste here—the home product maintains all of the faultless flavor and flakiness that makes Greggs vegan sausage rolls famous. And to be able to celebrate National Sausage Roll Day by actually taking part in the baking process? Now, that’s priceless.