Matt Raynor is stressed. The 53-year-old chair of Raynor Foods has recently approved a £1,200 signing-on bonus for sandwich makers; tonight he will work a six-hour picking and packing shift at the company’s Essex plant because of staff shortages.

“It’s been the worst two-and-a-half years of my life, with the disruption, the chaos,” he says. “We were fighting with Brexit and then Covid hit us.”

Raynor’s family business, founded in 1988, makes 80,000 sandwiches a day for cafés, supermarkets, canteens and hospitals. Once a makeshift operation in his parents’ kitchen, its rise has mirrored the professionalisation of the UK’s sandwich industry over three decades.

Since the 1980s, a large chunk of British sandwich making has moved from kitchens and sandwich bars to chilled, hyper-efficient factories, which produce a wide variety of packaged sandwiches — from the humdrum cheese and pickle to novelty flavours involving jackfruit and plant proteins. The industry’s rapid growth was powered by rising incomes, more women joining the workforce, cheap labour from Europe and workers chasing convenience.

Now, after the pandemic dealt the industry the worst blow in its modern history, it is being reshaped by a combination of labour shortages, souring economic conditions and changes in British working habits.

Before Covid lockdowns temporarily shuttered offices in 2020, people in the UK were eating £8bn worth of sandwiches a year. Kevin Moore, deputy chief executive of the UK’s largest sandwich maker Greencore, says packaged sandwiches had reached a so-called penetration of 84 per cent — meaning 84 out of 100 people bought at least one a year, a rate exceeded only by a few staples like milk and coffee, according to Kantar, a data analytics company.

But the rise of homeworking during the pandemic seems to have driven lasting changes in the routines of the industry’s most important customers: office workers. The British Sandwich & Food to Go Association estimates that, two years on, business is still 20 per cent below pre-pandemic levels.

At the same time, the sector is facing disruption to its supply of cheap labour and ingredients. Brexit closed the UK’s doors to free movement of EU citizens, meaning production workers are scarce and their wages are rapidly rising. Intense inflationary pressure is adding to the unpredictability of purchasing and supply chain hold-ups since Russia invaded Ukraine this year.

“I’m concerned for the whole industry,” says Raynor.

While the sandwich is not about to vanish from British culinary life, the industry fears its pre-pandemic golden age, marked by low cost and seemingly infinite variety, may never return.

When Raynor’s pare