Despite being a country primarily associated with drinking tea, the United Kingdom has a long history of coffee shops and cafes stretching back to the 17th century. As integral parts of the UK’s quick service restaurant (QSR) market, coffee shops and cafes primarily serve coffee, but some shops also offer a variety of other items such as tea, snacks, baked goods, and small meals. Over the last two decades, the market for hot drinks in the UK has experienced a sharp increase, with
having more than doubled. However, in the wake of the
, consumers appeared less inclined to buy hot drinks from coffee shops and cafes, with the
dropped from 130 milliliters in 2020 to 27 milliliters in 2021.
How has the cafe and coffee shop sector recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic?
Although cafes and coffee shops were heavily impacted by the social distancing measures put in place during 2020 and 2021 in the UK, there have been indications of the industry recovering. For instance, while around half of adults in Great Britain
did not buy any food or drinks at cafes between July 2020 and January 2021, levels began to return to what they were like before the pandemic in 2022, and as of January 2024, more Britons made a food or drink purchase at a cafe at least once a fortnight than in July 2019. Financially, however, the sector has struggled to bounce back. While the
estimated value of the UK’s branded coffee shop market increased by around half a billion British pounds annually from 2021 onwards, the 2023 market value was only around half of the 2018 figure.
Key players in the cafe and coffee shop industry in the UK
Despite the market value of branded coffee shops struggling to recover from the pandemic, coffeehouse chains continue to dominate the UK’s cafe and coffee shop industry. The
leading coffeehouse chains in the UK included Costa Coffee, Greggs, and Starbucks as of 2024. Costa Coffee is a major British multinational coffee shop chain, and in 2022 was also ranked as the
biggest coffeehouse chain in Europe. Despite Starbucks ranking below Costa in the UK market, the UK claimed the
largest share of Starbucks stores in Europe in 2023, with over 200 more stores than Turkey, the country ranked second. The prevalence of coffeehouse chains in the UK does not appear to be stopping any time soon, with the
estimated number of branded coffee shop outlets in the UK growing to over 10 thousand in 2024.
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