Greggs will move its self-serve food and drinks to behind the counter to stamp out shoplifting at the High Street bakery.

The company is trialling the measure at a handful of stores which, it said, are “exposed to higher levels of anti-social behaviour”.

These include Whitechapel in east London which is one of five shops that will try out the new policy – the others are in Peckham and Ilford.

It is not expected that the change will be implemented across all Greggs’ 2,600 bakeries in the UK, but it may be rolled out to sites where there are high levels of theft.

In 2024, shoplifting offences recorded by the police rose by 20% to 516,971, according the Office for National Statistics.

But the number of thefts recorded by retailers was far higher – for the year to last September shops saw a 3.7 million rise to 20.4 million, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) said.

Greggs said customers can expect to see its full range behind its counters but added: “The safety of our colleagues and customers remains our number one priority.”

Some retailers, including supermarkets, have reported been targeted by organised gangs who wear bluetooth headsets to communicate with each other and set off alarms in stores to create a distraction allowing their fellow shoplifters to escape.

Andy Higginson, chair of sportswear and trainer retailer JD Sports and the BRC, recently told the BBC that some see shoplifting as a “way of life”, allowing them to trade or sell what they have stolen.

“There is an element of society that is starting to take stealing from stores as a way of life and that needs to be stopped,” he said.

Shoplifting incidents have risen in recent years, with a sharp spike in the number of retail crimes reported after the Covid pandemic, some of which has been attributed to higher household bills and the price of food.

Mr Higginson dismissed the idea that it might be due to people struggling with cost of living pressures. “People are not stealing the food to eat. They’re stealing very high value items that can be traded and sold,” he said.

However, the boss of a firm that provides security for shops and supermarkets said that the type of shoplifter his staff is seeing is changing and now includes pensioners who are struggling with living costs.

John Nussbaum, director of service for retail at Kingdom Security, said: “We’ve seen a massive increase in pensioners shoplifting, putting a jar of coffee in their bag and one in the trolley, that sort of thing.

“For us over the last 12 months, we’ve got this different level of crime now. We’re now experiencing something different – pensioners, people who don’t normally shoplift.”

He added: “We’ve had instances of mothers caught shoplifting when they’re with their kids.”