Costa coffee must double in size

Coffee bar chain Costa needs to double its number of sites if it wants to meets the targets set by parent company Whitbread.

David Thomas, chief executive of Whitbread, said Costa needed to expand in order to meet the requirement that it contributes £10m a year in pre-tax profit.

The target was set as part of the company's strategic review of its restaurants division, which has just been completed.

At the moment Costa was making only a "very small" profit, said Bill Shannon, managing director of Whitbread restaurants.

Shannon said the company planned to double the number of Costa coffee shops from the current 266 in the next three to five years. Included in the expansion plan are 50 coffee bars at Abbey National building societies around the UK.

The board of directors at Whitbread neither denied nor confirmed rumours that they were interested in expanding Costa by buying the Aroma chain, which is owned by McDonald's. But chief executive David Thomas did admit that if "selected" sites became available it would buy them.

The restaurant review also led to the proposed disposal of Whitbread's Pelican group of 154 high street restaurants, made up mainly of the Café Rouge and Bella Pasta chains.

Whitbread blamed itself for the failure of the Pelican restaurants saying it did not differentiate them sufficiently from their competitors.