Flatbread Wrap

Pret a Manger packs its shawarma spiced chicken flatbread with British chicken breast in a shawarma-spiced sauce, hummus, pickled cabbage and carrot, red onion, cucumber and spinach, laid along one edge of a Lebanese-style flatbread and rolled into a sealed cylinder. Lifted out of the chiller, the wrapper is cool and faintly damp, and the bread dents under a thumb and springs most of the way back. The first bite goes through soft, slightly yeasty dough into cold hummus, and then the pickled vegetables snap against the chicken, sharp with vinegar. Because the roll closes on every side, loose chicken, wet hummus and slippery spinach all ride inside one tube.

The build is all about that seam. The flatbread is warmed before filling because cold dough cracks along the fold, and the filling is packed evenly along the line so the tube neither bulges at one end nor sags empty at the other. Hummus matters here as a thick paste that grips the chicken and sticks to the bread, so the roll stays together in the hand. Spinach lies flat along the bread and flattens further under the roll, while the pickled cabbage and carrot supply the crunch a sandwich of soft ingredients would otherwise lack. A tight roll eats like a single object, and a loose one unspools in the hand, shedding chicken into the paper bag.

The same format carries a wide range of fillings. Pret's range includes a Mediterranean-style tuna flatbread with capers, lemon juice, olives, tomatoes, basil and peppers, and a falafel one with sweet potato falafel, avocado, chipotle ketchup, pickled onions and charred corn salsa. In kebab shops across Britain the flatbread comes warm from the grill, blistered and smelling of char and cumin, around spiced lamb or chicken with garlic or chilli sauce and salad. A pitta meets its filling as a pocket held up by the bread's own wall, whereas the flatbread wrap has no wall and depends on the wound seam alone.

Eating one is a standing, one-handed job, usually done on a pavement or a station concourse with the wrapper peeled back a third of the way. The diagonal cut shows the cross-section, a spiral of bread around a stripe of chicken and a green leaf of spinach, and it gives each half a flat base to stand on in the bag. Half a flatbread is a lunch unit of its own at Pret, sold alongside half a baguette or a soup in the mix-and-match range, so a customer can pair the shawarma chicken with something hot. The last bite is mostly hummus and pickle, with the bread gone soft where the two met.

Wraps reached British shops in the mid-1990s through Discovery Foods and held 18 per cent of the sandwich market by 2004, a share that gave chains room to use bread other than a tortilla. The Lebanese-style flatbread Pret uses sits in the middle of that field: softer and more yeasty than a flour tortilla, and sturdy enough to roll without a pocket. That softness shows when the sandwich warms in a bag and the dough turns tacky against the hummus.

Origin and history

Pret's flatbread line runs on a Lebanese-style bread, though the date it replaced earlier wrap breads in the shops is unconfirmed. The shawarma spiced chicken version sits at the centre of the range, with the flavour carried by the sauce and the pickles, so it eats the same cold from the chiller as it would warm.

A flatbread was already a monthly experiment at Pret by August 2017, when the chain launched a Vegan Chilli & Avocado Flatbread as one of its Chef's Specials, with chilli sin carne, avocado, charred corn and black bean salsa, pickled onions, red peppers and spinach. It ran until 4 September that year, and it set the pattern the later falafel flatbread follows, a plant-based filling with charred corn and pickled onion in the same rolled bread.

The format has kept growing. On 10 March 2026 Pret added a shawarma spiced chicken half flatbread and a falafel, avocado and chipotle half flatbread to its mix-and-match range, so the roll that began as a monthly special in 2017 now sells in two sizes, whole or half, beside a half baguette or a bowl of soup.