Costa sales boost Whitbread performance

Whitbread, which owns Costa – Marketing Week’s Engage Awards 2011 Brand of the Year – says strong growth at the coffee chain helped drive performance in the quarter to 2 June.

/p/b/w/CostaCup.jpg

The group reported a 9.2% rise in sales. Costa sales increased 22.5% while Premier Inn’s total sales grew by 8.1%.

Earleir this year the group outlined plans to double its Costa and Premier Inn businesses and set out a new five year strategy to accelerate its growth plans. It plans to double its Costa coffee chain to 3,500 stores and £1.3bn in sales worldwide in the next five years.

It plans to grow its recently launched Costa Express self-service business to 3,000 sites.

Whitbread also plans to double the capacity of its Premier Inn chain to 65,000 by 2016.

In the coming year the group plans to open more than 300 new Costa coffee houses, which equates to 15% growth and grow the capacity of Premier Inn by 9% or 4,000 rooms.

/q/f/a/Costa.jpg

Andy Harrison, Whitbread CEO, says: “We are continuing with disciplined investment in our network to deliver our five year growth milestones. We are confident that investing in our strong brand propositions of Premier Inn and Costa and introducing further value offers in Restaurants will enable us to win market share and deliver good returns for our shareholders.”

Costa was named Marketing Week’s Brand of the Year at the Engage Awards 2011 in May.