Our Story
Costa Coffee's History & How It Compares
The Costa Coffee Story
Costa Coffee's story starts a long way from the high street. In 1971, brothers Bruno and Sergio Costa, whose family had moved to London from Parma, Italy, in the 1950s, set up a small wholesale coffee roasting business, supplying Italian-style blends to caterers and restaurants around the capital. Roasting for other people's shops, not running their own, was the original trade.
It took another decade for Costa to open a shop of its own. The first Costa Coffee cafe appeared on Vauxhall Bridge Road in London in 1981, built around the same slow-roasted blend the brothers had been selling wholesale for years. Growth after that was steady rather than explosive, and by the mid-1990s the chain had reached 41 stores.
That is when Whitbread, then the UK's largest hotel and coffee shop operator, bought the business in 1995 and used its scale to turn Costa into a proper national brand. The store count climbed through the 2000s, passing its 1,000th shop, in Cardiff, in 2009. Later that same year Whitbread paid around GBP36 million for the Polish chain Coffeeheaven, adding roughly 79 stores and giving Costa its first real foothold in Central Europe.
The next major turn came in 2018, when Whitbread announced it would demerge Costa from the rest of the group. That decision opened the door to one of the biggest deals in coffee retail history: in January 2019, The Coca-Cola Company bought Costa Coffee outright for 4.9 billion US dollars, giving the world's biggest soft drinks company its first serious presence in coffee.
Today Costa is one of the largest coffee chains in the world by store count, with thousands of locations across dozens of countries, and it remains the UK's most extensive dedicated coffee-shop network. Beans are still roasted at a large facility in Basildon, Essex, with the head office based in Loudwater, Buckinghamshire. Reporting through 2025 suggests Coca-Cola has been weighing its long-term options for the brand, but more than fifty years on, the coffee itself is still built on the blend the Costa brothers started with.
Sources: company and industry reporting, including Whitbread and Coca-Cola company announcements, as available at the time of writing.
Coffee Shop Landscape
How Costa Compares to the Competition
Costa doesn't operate in a vacuum. The UK's branded coffee market is one of the busiest in Europe, and a handful of chains are competing for the same high streets, the same commuters, and increasingly the same loyalty apps. Industry tracking from Lumina Intelligence put the top ten branded coffee, cafe and dessert operators at a combined 5,751 UK outlets by the end of 2025, worth around 6.1 billion pounds a year in turnover. Here's how the main names compare.
Starbucks
- Founded: 1971 in Seattle; first opened in the UK in 1998
- UK footprint: Around 18.7% of UK branded coffee-shop market share (Dec 2025), the fastest-growing of the major chains
- Positioning: Premium, largely US-style format built around its rewards app and seasonal menu drops
Starbucks has been adding outlets faster than almost any other major UK chain recently, growing around 4.7% year on year even as some rivals held flat.
Caffè Nero
- Founded: 1997, built out from a single shop opened by Ian Semp in 1990, and grown by owner Gerry Ford
- UK footprint: Around 790 stores group-wide and roughly 9.1% of UK branded market share
- Positioning: Presents itself as a European-style coffeehouse rather than a fast-service format, still serving its original Classico blend
Nero markets itself as the largest independent coffeehouse group in Europe, with stores across eleven countries.
Greggs
- Founded: 1939 as a bakery; coffee became a serious focus only in the last decade or so
- UK footprint: Over 2,700 outlets, and by some 2025 counts the single largest coffee-serving estate in the UK
- Positioning: Value-led and convenience-first, pairing low-cost coffee with its bakery menu and newer drinks like iced matcha
Greggs is not a dedicated coffee chain, but its sheer store count means it now sells more cups, in aggregate, than most specialist rivals.
Pret A Manger
- Founded: 1986 relaunch by Sinclair Beecham and Julian Metcalfe; owned by JAB Holding since 2018
- UK footprint: Around 474 UK stores (September 2025), close to 7% of branded market share
- Positioning: Built around fresh, handmade food alongside coffee, with its Club Pret subscription offering discounted drinks
Club Pret was restructured in 2024, dropping its monthly price but also cutting food discounts, a change that drew criticism from regular members.
Add it up and Costa still runs the UK's largest dedicated coffee-shop network by most counts, with a store estate in the region of 2,600 to 2,700 sites and close to two-fifths of branded market share. But the gap is narrower than it used to be: Greggs' bakery-and-coffee model has closed in on Costa's outlet count, and Starbucks has been opening new stores faster than any of its major rivals. Caffè Nero and Pret hold smaller, more specialist positions, built around a European coffeehouse feel and fresh food respectively, rather than trying to out-scale the bigger players.
Figures above are drawn from public company reporting and industry trackers, including Lumina Intelligence and World Coffee Portal, current as of late 2025 and subject to change as chains report newer results.