Ciabatta, paninis and wraps are stocking shop shelves to cater for upmarket tastes, Marks & Spencer reports.

The busy shoppers are selecting expensive bread and organic or free-range fillings, often spending  more than £2 just for a pack of sandwiches.

Demand is growing because people have shorter lunch breaks and want to treat themselves, the chain says. Sales of their “premium” packs which cost over £2 have soared by 60 per cent in the last year.

This compares with an upturn of just two per cent in sales of under-£2 packs such as cheese and onion, smoked salmon and egg and cress.

And sales of sandwich packs costing £2 or more are up 15 per cent across all retailers, says independent market analysts TNS. M&S sandwich specialist Annette Peters said: “Our customers now demand a lot more – they are far more particular about what type of bread they want, for example.”

Chicken salad is the nation’s most popular filling, followed by prawn mayonnaise and BLT. Egg and cress comes fourth and ploughman’s is fifth.

Those top five fillings have been unchanged for five years. But shoppers are choosing expensive types of bread. They spent an estimated £4.1billion on sandwiches last year.