Little Chef has been busy in recent years transforming itself from over 200 struggling sites to just 90 with a very different offering.
Now it has announced that it will partner with Lavazza to offer motorists quality Italian coffee served by highly trained barista staff. The partnership takes its hot beverage offering to a new level, and is designed to position Little Chef as the first choice for coffee and quality food-on-the-move for all motorists, eat-in or takeaway.
Little Chef is already proud of the fact that it offers one of the best cups of tea on the A roads – in fact, it sells 4 million cups each year.
Little Chef’s chairman is Graham Sims, who introduced the Wild Bean Café concept to BP roadside sites. And Lavazza has recently been at work successfully introducing coffee and training staff across the entire JD Wetherspoon pub chain. Both parties therefore have the necessary experience to ensure that motorists can confidently expect a genuinely ‘good’ coffee when they stop at Little Chef – including a ‘flat white’, said to be difficult to deliver to the right standard.
And the pricing looks good: all coffees will cost between £1.99 and £2.29.
Commenting on the announcement, Chairman Graham Sims said:
“It’s true to say that customers pretty much have access to quality coffee on every corner of every UK high street today, what was missing is really great coffee whilst travelling on our A-roads; this changes that. Customers want first rate beverage products and we will now serve it up to them, just like the best on any high street. Lavazza is a major player in the food and drink market and we now offer a product that is sourced and made by the bean sourcing experts. If you’re going to offer quality coffee, it might as well be Italian quality coffee, they are after all famous for it.”