The number of coffee shops in a bit less than half of the 40 European countries listed in the latest Allegra World Coffee Portal marketing research dropped over the last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. There was also a big fall in coffee shop sales last year — about 30%.
Big companies, such as Costa Coffee, McCafé and Starbucks, actually showed a little bit of growth in the number of coffee shops during the pandemic. These three companies now cover about 22% of the whole European coffee market, while 20 other biggest Europe's coffee chains comprise 48% of the total European market.
Things tend to be the same in the USA: big companies slowly grow during pandemic while small coffee chains suffer declines in the numbers of stores. According to data provided by Allegra World Coffee Portal, Dunkin's and Starbucks are connected to two out of three coffee storefronts.
Many of the big European coffee shop's reduction in the number of branded outlets, with net losses for the biggest local markets of 8.8% in Spain, 6.8% in Turkey, 3.1% in Germany and 1.9% in the UK, 18 out of the 40 European countries suffered drops in the number of coffee outlets after the consistent growth in the last decade.
"We live during a pandemic — it's very harsh and troublesome times by definition, so the decrease in the number of coffee shops was a pretty high probability for the market. But despite the world changing quite a bit, coffee drinking is still an important part of the European lifestyle. We hope that the market will return to its normal state in 2022 or even 2023," said Allegra Group Founder and CEO Jeffrey Young in a release of the report, titled Project Café Europe 2021.
The latest researches find out that, suddenly, while most of the Western European market experienced a huge decline in coffee shops, some coffee chains in Eastern Europe were able to grow through the 2020 year.
Lithuania showed the largest growth in coffee outlets — 34.8%, followed by Romania — 29.8% and Kazakhstan — 20.3%. The largest number of new coffee shops were observed in Russia, led by the 8-year-old quick-service chain Coffee Like