Initial work has started on Cupar’s Retail Park next to Tesco. When complete, the £8m project on South Road will include eight retail and leisure units – generating around 130 jobs.

Costa Coffee will be one of the first to open at the site after the company signed a pre-let agreement with the Park’s owner and developer – Glasgow-based London & Scottish Property Investment Management.

The development already has agreements with B&M (to include a garden centre) and a drive-through Burger King. Four more units are available for rent at sizes between 1,000 and 5,500 sq ft. Once open, the retail park will have 159 car parking space.

Andy Richardson, Group Development Director at London & Scottish, said: “Having worked with Fife Council to regenerate this derelict site to meet modern occupier demands, we are delighted to have agreed a pre-let with such a well-loved brand as Costa Coffee. This new outlet, with its good parking and proximity to both the town centre and other supermarkets will make Cupar an even stronger retail destination.”

 

Do you know Costa?

The most recent info we have shows that Costa has more than 2,400 outlets across the UK. So we should all know the company?

Here’s a little history that tells Costa’s story from their very start when brothers Sergio and Bruno arrived in London “with a burning desire to make great tasting coffee a part of everyday life”. That was in 1971 …

“Setting up a small roastery in Fenchurch Street, they committed to crafting the finest quality coffee. It was here the Costa brothers blind-tested 112 variations of coffee before they tasted one good enough to be our signature blend. They named it ‘Mocha Italia’ and it remains our signature blend to this day.

In 1978, as demand for their coffee grew, so too did their premises, moving to South London where the brothers transformed a huge plot of grassland into a brand-new roastery. The new site was located on Old Paradise Street, Lambeth, where the Costa Coffee roastery remained until 2017. From here, Sergio and Bruno produced and distributed their signature blend to some of the most esteemed establishments in the city.

In 1981, the brothers opened their first Costa Coffee shop in Vauxhall Bridge Road. It was in this innovative shop that the brothers became the first coffee providers in London to serve Espresso and crafted Cappuccino in porcelain cups so that customers could experience coffee at its best. Soon shops started opening up across prestigious locations in London, becoming destinations for fashionable Londoners.

Fast forward nearly forty years, as Costa Coffee continued to expand across London, the UK and eventually the globe, we needed to find another new home to accommodate demand once again. In early 2017, after two years of construction, we opened our doors to a brand-new state-of-the-art roastery in Basildon, Essex. Our roastery is one of the biggest roasteries in Europe and allows us to produce 45,000 tonnes of coffee a year, quadrupling our coffee roasting capacity compared to our previous home in Lambeth.

Not just content with being the biggest, our roastery is also one of the most sustainable buildings in the world and we responsibly source all our raw coffee beans from 100% Rainforest Alliance Certified™ farms, where they are then ready to be transported to Tilbury Docks, Essex, located just 14 miles away from the Costa Coffee Roastery!”

 

Thanks for reading.