Quite simply, because we use better ingredients than the majority of the competition.
There are lots of tempting shortcuts to take when you're running a food business. One of the main ways to increase your profit is to use cheap stuff. And it's really easy to get hold of!
We could always make our sandwiches using cheap bread - you know, the plastic packeted variety, stuffed full of preservatives and vegetable fats. We're sure you can think of a lot of bakeries that produce it. Actually, it would costs us a lot less - and it's only bread, right? It would hardly be worth spreading it with anything expensive so we'd go and buy some margarine instead.
Instead of buying our meat from the butchers, we could buy in the water-soaked, slimy slices of re-formed meat that you see everywhere. Sometimes they're called "value" packs (which must be a little joke). We could go to the Cash and Carry and buy slabs of tasteless "cheese". We could ditch the free-range farm eggs and buy the cheapest battery eggs instead.
In fact, we could even cut out a lot of the bother of making fillings and just buy them in, ready-made, from a number of suppliers who make a good living doing exactly that. While we're at it, we could ask them to drop us off a few bags of treated, pre-cut salads, some soup powder and a few sweaty factory cheeses to sell in the shop.
We could legally sell you pork sausages with much less pork (and much more cereal and water) in them than Cliff's high-quality produce, "smoked" salmon that's never been near an ember, bacon labelled "produced in England" that has come from a pig kept in a stall somewhere in Europe, "Wiltshire Cure" bacon that has never even been to Wiltshire...
But we won't. You'll already see from our menu that we only use high-quality ingredients - because at the end of the day great food has got to taste fantastic, and not include a lot of trash that is only there to increase profits.
Good ingredients cost us more it's true, but we don't feel that they entitle us to take the mickey on prices - we'd rather have a lot of happy customers paying a fair price than a few who are being taken advantage of. Our prices include more in costs and less in profits - it's as simple as that.
If you'd like a quick way to see what we mean about value, try this experiment (we did):
Buy some cheap bacon (yes, the one that has VALUE!! stamped all over the packet). Then buy some "The Best/Finest/Greatest/Nicest" (or whatever) bacon.
Then buy some of Woodalls Cumbrian from us.
Cook them all up. Watch how the bacon behaves. Does it curl up? Sweat? Shrink? We bet some of it does.
Then, when it's done, take it out. How much of what you put under the grill or in the pan is left?
Finally, (if you're brave), eat some of each. We'd be amazed if you didn't come to the same answer as we did!