The two biggest competitors to independent café bars are both planning to develop their interest in the ‘drive-thru’ coffee bar concept.

Costa opened its latest bar in mid-June at Lydiard Fields, a busy motorway site at junction 16 of the M4, just by Swindon.  A couple of weeks previously it opened a drive-thru site at Nottingham’s Castle Marina retail park, to be open at least 14 hours a day, all week.  Costa has also designed a drive-thru site near Loch Lomond.  There are to be six of these sites before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Starbucks has referred to plans for a dozen more of its drive-thru sites. The news came as part of a financial report, which showed a loss of £34.2 million in the UK last year, largely due to royalty payments to Starbucks in America, and the £10 million cost of the collapse of Borders bookshops, in which it had cafés.  Otherwise, Starbucks showed like-for-like sales up by five per cent in the year to October 2010, with total sales up two per cent to £396 million.

Another competitive move against the traditional café is that Starbucks has introduced a most un-American snack – the bacon buttie. Of course, Starbucks calls it something else – ‘an all-day breakfast panini’.  In the daily press, the Mirror complained that at £2.85, it is a third more than Greggs’ customers pay for a bacon bap and a hot drink. Generously, Starbucks says: ‘why not add ketchup or brown sauce?’ However, Starbucks was said to have tested 12,000 rashers as part of their research!