Costa Coffee plans up to 40 more drive-thru sites in 2026 after opening its 400th, at Norwich Broadway Enterprise Park, and expects to trade from up to 26 Cineworld cinemas by the end of the year. Neither announcement says how many of the new sites will be franchised.
Costa Coffee operates more than 2,800 UK stores. Its first UK drive-thru opened in 2011, and the company says drive-thrus are among the fastest-growing parts of its estate. Over the past year it also refurbished more than 110 high street stores and over 100 stores in shopping centres and retail parks. The 400 drive-thru sites represent about 14% of that estate, and 40 more would lift the drive-thru count by 10%. The company gave no jobs figure for the programme.
The drive-thru programme
Nick Ridley, property and store development director at Costa, said customers value the convenience and that network planning shows continued opportunity for drive-thrus across the UK. Costa has not published a list of the 40 planned sites or the towns involved.
The Cineworld agreement
On 14 May 2026 Costa announced a 10-year partnership under which it will replace the coffee offer in up to 26 Cineworld cinemas. The first sites were due to open in summer 2026, with most trading by the end of the year. Each will use Costa’s current store design, with sit-in and takeaway service and self-service ordering screens.
Staff at the current operator’s sites will be offered the chance to stay and be retrained to Costa’s standards, the kind of specification a brand imposes on every site, whoever runs it, across the networks taking on partners in the UK.Costa will sell its full range of drinks and food at the sites. The announcement does not name the cinemas or say whether each will be a full café or a smaller unit.
Why the operating model matters
Costa runs franchised units alongside company-operated ones, and Costa Express, its self-serve proposition sold through Costa Coffee Professional, does not describe itself as franchising. L’Express Franchise found no live public UK franchise recruitment page for Costa when it last checked in August 2026, unlike the coffee brands recruiting UK operators, which publish their terms. A new Costa site can therefore be company-run, franchised or a Costa Express unit, and neither the drive-thru nor the Cineworld announcement says which.
What to watch
The signals that would settle the question are site-level: a named drive-thru with an operator, a Cineworld opening announced by a franchisee, or a Companies House record for a company running a Costa unit. Costa’s own store locator and local planning applications are the places where individual drive-thru sites tend to appear first. The first drive-thru opened in 2011, so the 400 sites came in over about 15 years, an average of about 27 a year. Forty sites in 2026 would be roughly one and a half times that rate.
