The leading information and business resource for the UK's cafè bar market

This recipe is really simple to make, even in the smallest of kitchens and makes really tasty cookies that we are sure will be a hit with your customers. The ingredients are also relatively inexpensive, meaning you stand to make a good profit too! 450g butter, softened                       … [Read more]

One of the most fascinating social experiments based on coffee house business has more or less collapsed in a whirl of internet ‘flaming’ and abuse. The Jonathan’s Card project was begun by an American, Jonathan Stark, as an experiment in the use of payment methods. Effectively, he took the image of his Starbucks ‘card’ from… [Read more]

Independent coffee shops opening over the past few years are beginning to report healthy survival rates.  The latest of the speciality coffee stores to celebrate two years in business is the Urban Coffee Company of Birmingham, which has thrown a party for regular customers. Urban’s Hannah Wolsey has said that over the last year, the… [Read more]

There has been another of the regular police warnings about thieves who target customers in coffee shops. The area involved this time is Hertfordshire, where there has been a spate of thefts of mobile phones, wallets and purses, almost all from victims sitting at tables having coffee.  Police suggest that customers in coffee shops tend… [Read more]

There will be another tea and coffee festival for consumers in London this year. Yael Rose, whose event at the South Bank Centre in spring was well received by the beverage trade, will run another event at the same venue in November, and probably follow with a third at the South Bank in March next… [Read more]

Coffee shops are now more popular than pubs for out-of-home eating and drinking, according to a survey by Deloitte. For their Taste of the Nation report, they questioned 3,000 consumers, and discovered that all consumers expect to eat and drink out of home a little more over the next year. However, the venue of choice… [Read more]

Branches of Starbucks in New York City have now turned against one of the sector’s least favourite class of customer – the ‘campers’, the ones who open up their laptops, sometimes order a coffee and sometimes do not, and proceed to dominate a table for several hours. It is one of the major factors in… [Read more]

Nine London venues have been shortlisted in the ‘coffee shops’ section of the London lifestyle awards.   Curiously, not all of them are specialist coffee shops as such – some of them are waffle shops and patisseries, but what they all have in common is good coffee. Among the familiar names in the shortlist are Bar… [Read more]

There is a coffee element to the new contest being run by the YBF, the Young British Foodies.  The intention is not to find a best product or best venue, as is the case with so many contests, but to identify and recognise the up-and-coming stars in various forms of food and drink. In the… [Read more]

The new top man for Starbucks in the UK is a former aide to president Bill Clinton, and holds the unique status of being the only person in the coffee trade to have been the role model for a character in a major TV series. He is Kris Engskov, who joined the American coffee chain… [Read more]

In popular modern mythology, the rise of the speciality coffee culture has been largely driven by the ‘young professional’ sector, particularly those in the financial world… which makes it all the more curious that London’s big financial centre, Canary Wharf, is only now to open its first independently-owned coffee house. The reason behind this curiosity… [Read more]

The question has come round again of whether the café trade is approaching the time of the ‘roaster-retailer’, the coffee house which roasts its own beans both for its own use and for in-the-bag sale to customers. This has been predicted on several occasions, and in recent times some of the east London coffee houses… [Read more]