Thu 16th Jul 2015 - Costa Coffee unveils £36m new roastery to meet demand Costa Coffee unveils £36m new roastery to meet demand: Costa Coffee has announced that it will be building a brand new £36m roastery to support future growth. The new roastery will be built in Basildon and will operate in conjunction with Costa’s existing roastery in Lambeth, reinforcing its ongoing commitment to locating its roasting operations in the UK. Costa’s Lambeth roastery on Old Paradise Street, SE11 (established by the Costa brothers in 1984) is roasting coffee 24 hours a day, five days a week. Costa has roasted its Mocha Italia blend in Lambeth for more than 30 years and the new roastery in Basildon will help to meet expected demand in 2020 and beyond. The UK is the hub of Costa’s national and international business. Unprocessed coffee beans from Rainforest Alliance certified growers are shipped from Colombia, Costa Rica, Peru, Guatemala and Vietnam to Tilbury Docks in Essex, before being transported to Costa’s Lambeth roastery. Costa’s new roastery in Basildon, 14 miles from Tilbury Docks, will be strategically important – enhancing operational efficiency as well as roasting capacity. Christopher Rogers, managing director for Costa, said: “Costa is growing and to meet strong customer demand we need to increase our coffee roasting capacity. Our existing Lambeth site does not have the long-term roasting capacity to cater for our increasing UK and international demand. The solution is to build a second roastery in the London area, which will continue to produce the high quality coffee our customers love in the quantity the business requires.” The new roastery will produce the same Mocha Italia blend created by the Costa Brothers at the Lambeth roastery since 1971. Costa’s current roastery capacity is 11,000 tonnes but the new roastery alone will have the ability to produce 45,000 tonnes – helping to supply the 464 million cups of coffee Costa customers consumed last year. Gennaro Pelliccia, Master of Coffee at Costa, said: “My job is to oversee the roasting process, and, most importantly, ensure Costa’s Mocha Italia and Old Paradise Street blends retain the same great taste as the Costa brothers’ coffee, first produced in 1971. The quality of our beans gives our coffee the unique flavour – setting us apart from the competition and making us the UK’s favourite coffee shop. We are immensely proud of our coffee and our heritage which is why we have worked so hard to ensure our new roastery will continue to meet our high standards. We are investing an estimated £36m in a state of the art new roastery to increase our capacity for future customer demand and to maintain the important traditions that have built Costa to be the success it is today.” Costa is projected to grow significantly over the next five years, increasing demand for its coffee. For its full-year results, Costa announced a 17.9% lift in sales and a new growth target – boosting Costa system sales from £1.4bn in 2014/15 to £2.5bn in 2020. Pelliccia added: “When our new roastery opens in 2017, we will have a cutting-edge roastery supplying the best quality, from bean to cup, right here in the UK.” At the end of June Basildon District Council’s Planning Committee unanimously resolved to grant planning permission. The site for the new roastery is on Christopher Martin Road in Basildon and is a former Visteon automotive plant. The brand new and purpose-designed roastery is being developed for Costa by Prologis, the global leader in industrial real estate. The new roastery is scheduled to open in early 2017. The site which is being developed for the Costa roastery project is approximately 2.1 hectares (5.3 acres). The roastery building will be 10,274 square metres in total, of which 1,582 square metres will be offices and meeting room space.