Costa Coffee - Venturing Across the Pond

Update #1: Costa Coffee replied briefly on Facebook. The article below has been altered to reflect that.

Costa Coffee has come up more times than I can count while I’ve been researching coffee. They’re the second largest coffee chain in the world and the largest coffee chain in the United Kingdom. Yet, their brand hasn’t ventured out of the UK. Some of their products are available on Amazon.

This fact is disappointing to me. I, for one, don’t like spending a great deal of money on small packages of coffee. I drink so much of the stuff that the idea of my supply coming and going in a flash is demoralizing. I would buy their product in a second if they sold a bigger version. I love coffee and I want to try as many types as I can get my hands on.

Coffee in the UK is something completely new to me. I’ve reached out to companies across the UK. To this day, I have received no response. I’m hoping that this post will change that fact not only for Costa Coffee, but also any other company that's wants to reach out to me. My email is allenglines@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from anyone who owns or works in a coffee-related business in the UK.

I am the biggest supporter of little coffee you will ever come across. I want every independent coffee company to experience tremendous levels of success. I am also not one of those people who automatically excludes anything that comes from a big coffee company. I realize that the success of bigger coffee companies threatens their smaller counterparts. I am willing to try something before I decide to exclude it once and for all.

I don’t like it when a big company decides that they want to stay out of the internet game. They have the power and resources to be able to do anything and everything. For some reason, they don’t want to make the transition from their regional dominance to international supremacy.

For some reason, I feel like Costa Coffee’s reluctance to come across the pond has something to do with the power that Starbucks wields in the United States. I would never knock Costa Coffee for any reason. I admire their position in the world of coffee. My admiration is so profound that I wish they were in my backyard.

Not all coffee is created equal. Each company does it differently. A drink might have the same ingredients, but if the person who’s making it changes, the drink will taste different each time. It doesn’t matter if it’s Starbucks or any other coffee place.

Any time I come across a different coffee place I want to go to it right away. I ask them what drink they would recommend and I try it. I tend to limit myself to a few drink choices, which makes my view of a coffee place kind of limited. That's why I ask for which drink I should sample. They work there and they’re more likely to tell me what I should check out.

The problem I’m having with Costa Coffee is they’re a smaller company that's contained under a parent company called Whitbread. I have nothing against companies that are part of bigger organizations. It’s part of the corporate culture.

I have searched for emails for company representatives from either Whitbread or Costa Coffee. So far my efforts have been unsuccessful. I would love to talk to anyone who works for either one of these entities. I don’t know where these conversations will go. All I know is I want to know more about Costa Coffee.

This post is the first part of an international effort. I am looking into more companies that I want to cover. While it’s difficult for me to travel to each of these locations, I believe that a great deal can be learned through interviews and other forms of communication.

Coffee is a wonderful thing that does not have any geographical borders. I am a curious person. I can’t ignore a company that comes up as frequently as Costa Coffee. I need to reach out to them. Consider this post as me reaching out.