Costa Coffee

Costa is the largest branded coffee chain in Britain, with more than 2,700 UK stores and a presence in over 30 countries under Coca-Cola ownership since 2019. Franchised Costa stores do exist here, but the company publishes no UK franchise recruitment page. This is what the evidence shows about who holds those agreements, and which coffee brands do recruit individuals.

Is Costa Coffee a Franchise?
Yes, and that is where most accounts of Costa go wrong in one direction or the other. Franchised Costa stores demonstrably operate in the UK: Scoffs Group describes itself on its own site as the UK’s largest Costa Coffee franchise partner, running more than 110 stores with over 1,000 employees, having opened its first Costa in 2012.

What Costa does not publish is a UK franchise recruitment page, a fee or a capital requirement. Both flat answers in circulation therefore mislead: “Costa does not franchise in the UK” is contradicted by its partners’ own disclosures, and “you can buy a Costa franchise” is unsupported by anything Costa publishes.

Who Can Open a Costa Coffee Location?
Every UK Costa franchise partner identifiable from public sources is an established multi-site business. Scoffs Group works with landlords and developers to convert high-potential spaces into stores, and serves more than 9.2 million customers a year. That is the profile of a property and retail operator rather than of someone opening a first coffee shop.

Internationally the structure is clearer still, because it is master franchising rather than unit franchising. Lagardère Travel Retail took control of Costa’s 142 stores in Poland and Latvia as master franchisee, extending a relationship that began in the Czech Republic in 2008, where it operates 60 Costa stores and 60 Costa Express machines. Agreements of that scale are awarded to travel retail groups covering whole territories.

Costa Express is a different proposition
Costa Express is the brand’s self-serve format, in which machines carrying the Costa name are installed in host locations such as forecourts, convenience stores, hospitals, universities and railway stations. It sits under Costa Coffee Professional as a business-to-business offer and does not describe itself as franchising. A machine in a filling station and a franchised store are separate arrangements, and conflating them is the commonest error on this subject.

The UK has no legal definition of a franchise, no register and no pre-contractual disclosure document of the kind required in some other jurisdictions. Nothing obliges a company to publish its model or its fees, and a directory listing establishes nothing on its own. Where a brand publishes no franchise page, the verifiable statement is that no offer is published, not that the brand does not franchise.