Who owns Costa Coffee?
Who owns Costa Coffee?
Costa Coffee is owned by The Coca-Cola Company, the American drinks giant, and it has been since 2019. It is not British owned and it has not been independent since 1995.
This one nearly went out of date while I was writing it, because Coca-Cola spent the second half of 2025 trying to sell Costa and only gave up in January. So the honest full answer is that Britain's biggest coffee chain is owned by a soft drinks company in Atlanta that recently spent months looking for the exit and could not get the price it wanted.
Was Costa nearly sold?
Yes, and it fell apart over money.
In August 2025 Sky News reported that Coca-Cola had brought in the investment bank Lazard to look at options for Costa, including a sale. The Financial Times reported the bidders over the following months: TDR Capital, the private equity firm that owns Asda, ended up as the preferred bidder, Bain Capital's special situations arm was in the running, and Apollo, KKR and Centurium Capital were involved earlier before dropping out. Coca-Cola was reportedly after roughly £2 billion.
That number is worth sitting with for a second, because Coca-Cola paid £3.9 billion for Costa in 2018. It was trying to sell for about half what it paid, and the bids still came in under that. A last attempt to rescue the TDR deal in mid December failed, talks ended, and the FT reported in January 2026 that the sale was off. By the summer Coca-Cola had confirmed it was keeping Costa and restructuring it instead.
Coca-Cola's own chief executive James Quincey put it plainly to analysts in July 2025: "our investment in Costa is not where we wanted it to be from an investment hypothesis point of view." So Costa's owner is keeping it, but not because things went well.
Is Costa British?
The brand is British and the shops are here, over 2,000 of them, but the company has not been British controlled since the Coca-Cola deal completed in 2019, and it has not been independent for thirty years.
It did start properly independent. Two Italian brothers, Sergio and Bruno Costa, founded it in London in 1971 as a coffee roaster supplying restaurants, and opened the first shop on Vauxhall Bridge Road in 1981. The family sold to Whitbread in 1995, when Costa had 39 shops, and Whitbread is the FTSE company behind Premier Inn, so from that point on Costa was a chain inside a plc. Whitbread grew it into the biggest coffee chain in the country and then sold it to Coca-Cola at what was arguably its peak.
If TDR had won the auction, Costa would now be owned by the same private equity firm as Asda. Instead it stays American corporate rather than becoming private equity owned, which as far as our definition goes is the same answer either way.
How did Costa end up like this?
It started as two brothers roasting coffee and then it got sold twice, nearly three times. Here is the whole thing in order.
- Sergio and Bruno Costa start Costa in London as a coffee supplier to restaurants and caterers.
- First Costa shop opens on Vauxhall Bridge Road in London.
- Whitbread buys Costa for £19 million when it has 39 shops, and spends the next two decades growing it into thousands. 2018 to 2019. The Coca-Cola Company buys Costa from Whitbread for £3.9 billion to get into coffee against Starbucks and Nestlé. Deal completes in early 2019.
- Coca-Cola appoints Lazard and runs a sale process. TDR Capital emerges as preferred bidder at a price around half what Coca-Cola paid. January 2026. The sale collapses over price. Coca-Cola keeps Costa and moves to restructuring it instead.
Where can I get a coffee that isn't Costa?
An independent coffee shop, and unlike some categories on this site, most towns still have several.
None of this page is a comment on Costa's coffee, which plenty of people are perfectly happy with. The point of these pages is only that ownership is a fact you can check rather than something you can guess from the shopfront, and Costa's shopfront says British high street while its accounts say Atlanta. If you would rather your coffee money stayed with someone who owns their own shop, that is what we built Highstreett for, and everything listed on it has had its ownership checked against Companies House first.
Questions people ask
Was Costa Coffee ever independent? Yes, from 1971 until 1995, when the Costa family sold to Whitbread at 39 shops. It has been corporately owned ever since.
Is Costa owned by Whitbread? Not any more. Whitbread owned it from 1995 until the Coca-Cola deal completed in 2019. If you remember Costa being a Whitbread business, that was the period when most of the growth happened.
Who owns Costa Express machines? Same answer, Costa Express is part of Costa, so The Coca-Cola Company. The self-serve machines in petrol stations and shops are the same ownership as the high street stores.
Is Coca-Cola American? Yes, The Coca-Cola Company is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
How do I check who owns a coffee shop myself? Search the company name on Companies House and look at the persons with significant control register, which shows who ultimately controls it, and it is free. Independents resolve to a person quickly. Chains take longer because the chain goes up through holding companies, and with something Costa's size you are several layers down from the top.
Last checked 15 August 2026. Coca-Cola only abandoned the sale this year, so if circumstances change and this page goes out of date, email alex@digitalhighstreett.com and I will fix it.