High-street coffee-bar chain Costa has confirmed that within two years, all its coffee will be certified by the Rainforest Alliance. By September of this year, a third of its coffee will be RFA-certified.   In 2006 the company founded the Costa Foundation to support coffee growing communities, and last year the foundation raised more than £300,000, which was invested in building schools, providing teacher housing and teaching materials in Columbia, Ethiopia and Uganda.

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As always happens, the general media has got in a tizzy about the source of the latest ‘most expensive coffee in the world’, which was put on sale this week at £50 per cup. 

The world’s media gets agitated iwhenever they hear the name of Kopi Luwak – the coffee trade is going to be rather more interested in the practicalities of what roaster David Cooper of Yorkshire has achieved.

The creation of Caffe Raro,  ‘the world’s rarest coffee’,  is a joint project between Coopers, deLonghi, and the Peter Jones espresso bar and brasserie, in London’s Sloane Square.  All proceeds from the sale of the coffee will be donated to Macmillan Cancer Support, and so David Cooper, charged with blending a suitable coffee, went for a combination of the world’s two most expensive coffees – Kopi Luwak, and Jamaica Blue Mountain. 

In this case, he roasted the two coffees in 500gm batches for about 12 minutes and then post-blended.  He told us that he was happy to find the result to be a very rich and full-tasting espresso.   “The result is very sweet and earthy bodied coffee and low acidity. It was amazingly smooth.”

David Cooper said that although only 60 tins of 100gm have been produced for retail, he expects around £3,000 to be raised for Macmillan.

“I personally drank £350 worth of it at the launch event!” he told us.

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Coffee Nation, the company which made premium-quality espresso-based coffee a regular feature of motorway service stations, has completed its management buy-out.

Coffee Nation was founded in 1999, can be found in Welcome Break, Tesco, Esso, Moto and Somerfield, sells 15 millions cups a year, and has a turnover of  £20 million.

Scott Martin, the company’s CEO, told us: “We have already proven that Coffee Nation is a successful business model, and our ambition is to turn Coffee Nation into one of the leading coffee brands in Europe.”

He has a new self-serve machine due – full story in our next printed magazine.

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Starbucks has confirmed that it will open its first British drive-through coffee house some time in May.  Although the international chain said last year that it had chosen Cardiff as the site for its pilot, the site has only now been confirmed as Dunleavy Drive, which is a development area that includes a business park, retail park, and the Cardiff international Sports Village, a giant undertaking which the Welsh Development Agency has called ‘the UK’s most exciting regeneration project’.

Starbucks has made no comment in response to practical questions concerning the staffing and operational practicalities of drive-up coffee service – typically, the possibilities of serving a 20-oz vente through a car window.

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Alistair Blake of Prima Coffee has told us that one of his customers, Juri’s in Winchcombe, has won the Tea Guild’s award for Top Tea Place of the year.  We have been unable to find out any further details, other than that we know Juri’s is strongly Japanese-influenced. We are intrigued to see that they use the T-Sac, which will again be exhibited at Caffe Culture this year.

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Britain’s leading barista champion, three-time winner Simon Robertson, has made a local appeal for the owner of a wedding ring which turned up under the floorboards of his coffee house in Yorkshire.  As he renewed his flooring three years ago, he thinks the ring was lost before that, and is worried that the chances of finding the owner are now slim.

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We have been watching the international coverage of the results of the big Starbucks AGM last week, and are extremely pleased to see that several of the items which have begun to get coverage aren’t the obvious ones.

At his AGM, chairman Howard Schulz unveiled his five-point master plan for putting Starbucks back at the top of the credibility tree in the café sector.  He announced that Starbucks would introduce a ‘revolutionary’ new espresso coffee machine, and that he would also buy the maker of the ground-breaking Clover machine for filter coffee, which has drawn so much recent comment in the coffee trade.

At the same time, he promised to introduce a new rewards programme, launch the  MyStarbucksIdea.com project to create ‘an online community to take the Starbucks Experience outside the store’,  and an expanded relationship with Conservation International to demonstrate progress in ethical sourcing.

The new espresso machine is the Mastrena, made by Thermoplan of Switzerland, the company behind Black and White machines. Starbucks were unable to give us a picture of the machine, or indeed any practical data on it, but Thermoplan’s managing director Adrian Steiner has been in touch and told Coffee House that the Mastrena would feature ‘quality improvement through continuous shot monitoring’. 

From what little he tells us, the Mastrena appears to follow certain machines already on the market which have software that monitors and controls dosing, tamp pressure, and extraction time, making appropriate changes when necessary. That new machine is to reach Starbucks’ international stores this summer.

The acquisition of the Clover figured in a scripted question-and-answer session after the AGM, which included a query on whether other caterers would still be able to obtain the machine, or indeed if other distributors would get a look in. The answer was, at best, vague, saying that Starbucks now holds the exclusive rights to this technology and “will need to prioritize production capacity to meet the needs of the business”.  However, Matthew Algie, which has been working on distribution and promotion of the machine here, commented that when Starbucks purchased a tea brand some years ago, they did not cut off availability to other markets.

The data about MyStarbucksIdea.com. was extremely vague – it appears that the idea is for customers to tell Starbucks what they want from the stores, and that senior executives are tasked to respond on the website.  This week, an American news organisation has produced a survey of the first week’s activity on the site, and reports that the most popular suggestion is for a reward system which brings free drinks - 394 people commented on it. The second most popular suggestion was free wi-fi access.

The important thing about this, it has been observed, is that it follows the trend for companies to use ‘social-networking’ as a means of customer research. It was three years ago that corporates clicked to how to use ‘blogging’ to interact with customers, but a survey last month said that 24 per cent of international corporates now recognise ways to use social networking sites, wikis, ‘folksonomy’ and blogs (although that is now decreasing in popularity) through the concept of Web 2.0, which itself is a theory based on a more interactive use of the internet.

Elsewhere in Starbucks plans were ideas for free refills on filter coffee (many privately-owned American cafes have always offered that) , and for filter coffee to be freshly brewed at new set intervals to avoid staleness, and that there will be two hours of free instore wi-fi for certain registered customers.

Meanwhile, Starbucks in America has been ordered to pay back more than $100 million in tips owed to staff across outlets in California. A lawyer successfully argued in court that supervisors were unfairly receiving a share of tips which should have gone to the serving staff. One American syndicated columnist, by coincidence named Schultz, has made the interesting comment that there is an unwritten contract with customers, which assumes that money in the tip jar goes to the person who gave the service.  That same writer was the whistle-blower in a notable case in America some time ago, in which a catering organisation had simply kept everything in the tip jar and put it into the corporate coffers.

*

Peros, the UK’s leading independent distributor of organic and ethical beverages to the foodservice sector, has doubled the size of its High Wycombe distribution centre, and is to build new capacity at Brigg, where it serves northern customers.  All the new facilities are to meet the company’s carbon-zero ambitions.

Managing director James Roberts says that he needs to add 25,000 square feet of warehouse capacity just to keep up with existing demand.

*

Following our report that Youri Vlag, former barista trainer with Coopers, has set up his own website on how to start a coffee shop, we now see that he has also started the company Absolute Coffee, which will offer training, consultancy, La Spaziale espresso machines, and coffee roasted, we’re told, by Pollards.

*

The Russian news agencies have reported that Costa Coffee has opened its first shop in Moscow. The company plans to open around 200 shops in Russia in the next five years, although the local press point out that their culture is not used to the coffee shop concept, which is a very recent habit for a small number of Russians.  It is reported that coffee-shop coffee is expensive by Moscow standards   -  a cappuccino can cost the equivalent of $5-$10 (£2.50 - £5)   

*

PG tips is to be served in all 1,200 McDonald’s restaurants across the UK.  The move follows an announcement that PG tips will now work with the Rainforest Alliance. At least 50 per cent of PG tips tea comes from the Rainforest Alliance-certified farms and the intention is for all supplying farms to be certified by 2010.   McDonald’s also switched to RFA-certified coffee from Kenco last year, and suggests that the move contributed to an increase in the number of cups of coffee sold every day.

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Twinings has been cleared by the Advertising Standards Authority of ‘playing on negative racial stereotypes’.  The ASA received a complaint from a woman viewer about recent television advertisements for Lady Grey and Earl Grey tea, from a woman viewer who complained that the adverts suggested that black men were sexually promiscuous and existed to provide sexual services for white women.

In the commercial, the black man writes a message on a notice board telling customers that Twinings tea "puts the zing in your ding-a-ling", a term  first heard here in a Chuck Berry record in 1972.  That year, moral campaigners unsuccessfully tried to get the record banned – this year, the makers of the commercial said they believed the innuendo to be no worse than in a Carry On film, and the ASA has now issued a polite ruling which makes it fairly clear that they think the complaint was nonsense.

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The latest in a series of rows between café owners and local authorities is reported from Yarmouth, where seafront traders have declined to pay for a licence for outside seating.

As we have reported several times recently, there is a problem with local authorities who seem to like the concept of ‘continental-style’ areas with outdoor tables and chairs, but want to charge for the right to use pavement space.  In Yarmouth, the local press reports that the council’s charge is ten times higher than the one levied in Blackpool, and even higher than Covent Garden in London.  As a result, not a single café has applied for a pavement licence, and the council officer for tourism is now reported to have warned that if existing cafes and restaurants do not take up the offer, the council would consider offering licences to independent traders to run street cafes from coffee trailers. He has suggested that one of the national chains is already interested in doing so.

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Leeds City Council is offering a disused toilet block for around £25,000, following the breakdown of plans to turn it into a café.  It has taken four years of negotiation between the council and some prospective tenants, who had intended to lease the building and invest £170,000 in creating the café – although the intended new owners obtained planning permission for the change of use, they are reported to have become exasperated waiting for the council to agree the terms of the lease.

*

The press in Georgia, USA, has reported the strange case of a barista fired from a certain coffee chain, who took imaginative and drastic action to highlight what he believed was unfair dismissal.  He staged an outdoor rock-protest concert right outside the establishment. Performers came from all over the state, and although it didn’t win him his job back, it certainly publicised his CV.   (The offence which led to his firing was, apparently,  complaining that his supervisor was making whipped cream to a standard below that dictated by company policy).

Ian Steel and his team at Atkinson, the roaster in Lancaster, are up for an award tonight – they are in the last four of the Independent Retailer section of the Bibas, which are north-western business prizes.    “To reach the last four of a possible 400 is still quite an achievement for such a small outfit, so fingers are crossed!”, Ian told us this morning.  Atkinson’s is also to receive a gold medal from the North West Fine Foods Awards next week. 

Bill Fishbein, founder of Coffee Kids, has resigned from the board of directors. Bill says that he is to pursue other opportunities to help coffee-farming families as well as offering consultancy services on companies with regard to their social responsibilities.  This is the 20^th year of Coffee Kids.

The latest row about tables outside cafes comes from Whitehaven.  The local paper reported yesterday that Cumbria County Council is considering licences to have tables and chairs on the pavement. The fee, likely to be about £50, will apply everywhere in Cumbria, except Carlisle, where the paper says that city council already levies a charge.

The authorities in Hawaii have decided not to ban genetically altered coffee, and there are reports from the island that this has not gone down well with some farmers. The legislators have shelved the proposal for a ban, and decided that they want a study into the science, benefits and dangers of genetically enhanced crops. Coffee farmers are reported to be worried that genetically modified coffee could contaminate their expensive Kona, which is exported worldwide – the sales manager for one plantation is reported as saying that the danger of contamination by GMO coffee would ruin their business in Japan at a stroke.

We can reveal that the Bev-e awards, in which the Beverage Service Association recognises cafes doing exceptional work, have been overhauled for this year.  As usual, there are awards for the best single-unit café, with four regional winners, one of whom becomes the national winner. This year, Rombouts is offering a trip to Antwerp as an additional prize.   There will be a separate award for the best chain of five outlets or more – three entries from any chain will be judged. There will also this year be a section for carts and mobile operations, with one national prize.  The judges’ guidelines have been revised, and 51 per cent of the scores are now directly beverage-related, as opposed to marks for ambience and so on. This year, the judges are obliged to write reports on what they see and taste, and cannot simply award points without any explanation.  (For the first time, the BSA has also resolved to do something we have been preaching for years, and promote the contest and the winner around the regional press).

A Manchester cafe has become the first cafe to be successfully prosecuted for permitting smoking on its premises… but there’s more to it than meets the eye.  It’s the Shesha, and is one of several venues which claim that the shisha, also known as hookah or nargila pipes, should be exempt from the smoking ban on cultural grounds. There has been a request for a judicial review.

Starbucks has complained that different councils operate the A1 and A3 retail rules differently, following the rejection of its latest application by Harrow Council. Starbucks is reported to have run into difficulties with residents over its new branch in High Street, Pinner. Its signage was called ‘shoddy and out of character’, and its application to keep its new sign and shop front was rejected by the council; this followed a previous rejection for a certificate of existing use, when the chain was told it needed A3 permission to operate from what was previously a bookshop. The council has said it will enforce its decisions and could close the coffee shop if it fails to get proper planning permission.

Coopers Coffee has confirmed that barista trainer and web manager Youri Vlag has this week left the company ‘to pursue other interests in the coffee industry’.   As we have already reported, those interests include his new website, www.howtostartacoffeeshop.co.uk  . Coopers is now seeking a replacement barista trainer.   Youri, meanwhile, says he leaves with no hard feelings, that it’s time to move on, and he will be setting up an independent consultancy.

The international press has been lining up to take pot-shots at Starbucks following the decision by top man Howard Schulz to close the entire American operation down for a few hours while he gave his staff a pep-talk.  We aren’t going to add to that, but were intrigued by some of the resulting entries which cropped up on the forums of various American newspapers’ websites.  One included these comments from a Starbucks employee: “Our orders are to remake a drink as many times as it takes until the customer is satisfied, so technically, as long as you keep saying nay, we should remake your drink until it is, indeed, perfect,” and “there are new ways we are being forced to make the drinks, including pouring shots into shot glasses and then into the cups instead of directly into the cups, which is extremely hard on your fingers because the shot glasses are scalding hot and this new system poses an imminent burn hazard.”.

Cliff Burrows, formerly head of Starbucks in the UK and then in Europe and the Middle East, is now to take up a senior position in the company’s US operations.

Urnex, the American maker of innovative coffee-machine cleansing products, has set up a new distribution centre in the Netherlands.  The brand already has distribution in the UK.

Feb 15th

We have to acknowledge two sad departures in the last few weeks. One was world-famous, and the other comes under the heading of ‘unsung hero’.

Edward Bramah, founder of the Museum of Tea and Coffee in Southwark, London, has died  at the age of 76.  He became a tea planter in 1950, trained as a tea taster with Lyons, was a coffee broker in Africa, and worked with the Chinese authorities to promote their teas in Britain. He came from a family of inventors, and himself devised the Bramah Filter. He was one of the most entertaining speakers in the trade, and his talks on tea were always spiced with an almost-uncontrolled enthusiasm. He wrote several important books - his first, Tea and Coffee: a Modern View of Three Hundred Years of Tradition, was published in 1972 and was even translated into Japanese. His Coffee-Makers: 300 Years of Art and Design and Novelty Teapots are both accepted as definitive works, and The Bramah Tea and Coffee Walk Around London was published last year and shows places of significance to tea and coffee trading in the City of London and docklands.  He died in Christchurch last month, and at the time was working on another book, to be called Britain's Tea Heritage.

Meanwhile, in Trieste, the death was reported of Illy’s honorary president Ernesto Illy, at the age of 82.  Dr. Illy was not just the head of a world-famous brand, but a great researcher of the subject, with a technical expertise that benefited from a degree in chemistry. In 1956, he took over the family company, and started a research laboratory that soon became the source of numerous new inventions and patents. Among his many distinctions were the title of Cavaliere del Lavoro (Knight of Industry), a title bestowed by the Italian president in 1994, and honorary citizenship of a coffee-growing region in Brazil.

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A team from Nestle has developed a machine that is claimed to correctly predict the judgements of trained human coffee tasters.  To establish a connection between the verbal description given by human tasters and the chemical analysis performed by machines, company scientists and tasters compiled sensory profiles for 11 different espresso coffees. They then fed the results of ‘proton transfer reaction mass spectrometry of the gas phase above each coffee’ (no, we don’t know, either, but we think its to do with the technical make-up of the aroma) into a computer program which related the known spectrometry results to the profiles, or descriptions, given by the human tasters.  They then asked the machine to ‘taste’ other coffees, and compared its findings to those of human tasters – and what the machine said matched what the humans said.

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The Bloomberg agency reported yesterday, under an ‘exclusive’ tag, another apparent turnround in strategy by Starbucks in America.  Having first gone downmarket with an offer of filter coffee at a dollar a cup with free refill, Starbucks is now reported to be going in exactly the opposite direction (at the same time!)  by offering coffee made from the new Clover machine.  This is the $11,000 super-filter machine which is programmable to give, it is said, the very best result from any filter coffee.  (The machine can be seen at the Hotelympia show next week – it’s on the Matthew Algie stand)

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City College Plymouth is the latest college to start the City & Guilds barista courses, after suggestions from the college's employer-led steering group. "It is here because there is a demand," said a spokesman.

The course is Barista Skills, a three-day pilot course co-written by Ben Townsend, who appears in next week’s UKBC finals. The college will follow up with the VRQ course which was initially inspired by the Beverage Service Association. An interesting aspect of the Plymouth course is that while normal costs are £100 per delegate, the city’s Tourism and Creative Skills for Success project is to fund the 16 places on the first two courses.

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In a most unusual café closure, the venue has been towed away. The Green Bus cafe in Whatstandwell was a 1969 Leyland Panther, which was turned into a cafe and parked in a layby on the A6 in the early 1980s. The owner closed down after a spate of vandalism and theft. She sold the bus for £300 after buying it for £8,500 just over a year ago; it now has a home on a Liverpool transport museum.

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The World of Coffee seminar programme at Hotelympia (next week, 17-21 Feb) has now been finalised and can be viewed at www.hotelympia.com/worldofcoffee.  A typically tempting item is presented on 10.30-12.30 on the Tuesday and Wednesday when Gary McGann (Espresso Warehouse), Mike Bell (Atlantic Creative) and Paul Meikle-Janney (Coffee Community) investigate Coffee Bar Design and Layout.  The two-hour seminar will break the market down and will investigate how a grab ‘n’ go operation with a five-minute dwell time should have a different back bar design, menu and merchandising programme than a high street coffee bar with a 15-minute dwell time.  It will then compare these with a deli bar that can get up to 30 minutes’ dwell time. 

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An anthropologist is importing coffee beans into Wales to help an ancient tribe protect its Amazonian rainforest from loggers and smugglers.  He is Dilwyn Jenkins, who has been in close contact with the Ashaninka tribe of Peru for 30 years. The remote tribe is under threat as the commercial world comes nearer, typically with mahogany loggers offering the tribesmen money to cut down their own forest. The explorer, who is writing The Rough Guide to Peru and recently appeared on Channel 4 with a programme about the area, is encouraging the tribal people to develop their coffee growing, and has already begun to distribute it to shops and cafes in the Machynlleth area.

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A report from the Ugandan meteorological office says that the country’s coffee trade, which amounts to half of the country’s export revenue, is now in danger from climate change. The weathermen have said that a rise of just two degrees in temperature will finish the country’s coffee business, and the Eastern Africa Fine Coffees Association has said that rainfall has already become erratic, with an adverse effect on flowering and plant maturity. At exactly the same time (yesterday) the association also reported greater interest in green-coffee buyers from other countries wanting to deal directly with Ugandan farmers.

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The JD Wetherspoon pub chain, which already serves Lavazza coffee in 685 pubs, has switched to the brand’s Tierra coffee, a 100 per cent Arabica coffee which is certified by the Rainforest Alliance.

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Mars and Nestle are among those who have joined the Utz Certified project, which is to work towards sustainability in mainstream cocoa production. The Good Inside Cocoa Programme  will aim for a credible certification system for cocoa. A code of conduct is to be put into effect later this year.

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Thursday 17^th January

Andy Orchard, the marketing manager of Miko Coffee, which in turn produces the Puro brand of ethically-traded coffee, will this evening announce a ground-breaking conservation partnership with the World Land Trust and Sir David Attenborough.  

The project involves Webcam in the Forest, a project which seeks to give people a “window to the wonders of the rainforest”. The webcam project will enable live video and virtual tours of the rainforest to be transmitted via the Internet to cafés, bars, and restaurants.

“We will also be announcing that actually we have just funded the purchase of a 4,500-acre reserve in Ecuador,” Andy has told Coffee House.  “We have found many new species there and we will also announce the name to one of the new orchids we found.”  (That name, we suspect, may bear some similarity to his coffee brand!)

Puro believes that the webcam project will be provide a fascinating feature in cafes, and help consumers to further identify with the cause they are supporting.

”We do not want to be a company simply signing cheques for a cause,” Andy told us. “It was always our vision that if we used the strapline ‘helping to protect rainforests’, then we would actively work with the cause we supported.

“I visited the reserve to experience it first hand. I was captivated by the waterfalls, lush vegetation and animal life but I also witnessed the worrying level of deforestation, and the impact this has on communities and the environment were readily apparent. This experience has made us more determined as a company to do all we can to further raise awareness of the World Land Trust and its important work.

“And we need to do as much as we can to demonstrate this to the end consumer, the person drinking our coffee. Posters only go so far in achieving this.

“With the webcam project initial phase complete, we plan to make our ‘live hummingbird feed’ a feature in cafés and restaurants via wifi and plasma screens mounted on the wall.

“How incredible to show consumers, at that exact moment in time, what positive effects Puro and our trade customers are having on the rainforests in South America.”

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There was a remarkable evidence of talent and quality in the Bristol regional event of the UK Barista Championships yesterday – several of the judges and competitors commented to us that the standard of entries was unusually high.  We have to wait, of course, to see how many entrants go through to the finals next month, because this year’s system is based on the top scores of all contestants, not simply those who achieve top positions in the regions.

At Bristol, the results were intriguing.  First was Sindy Kamcheong of SSP, which is the Ritazza brand, who achieved first place in spite of having left a vital ingredient behind in the preparation room (full story in our next issue!)   Sindy is already a world champ – she won SSP’s worldwide contest in Rome not so long ago.

Second was Ben Townsend, the well-known barista trainer and demonstrator who attempted a complicated performance last year, and didn’t reach his own expectations – yesterday he laid that ghost effectively.   Third was another experienced competitor and well-regarded barista, Maxine Beardsmore from the Bottle Kiln café in Derbyshire, which has of course picked up a recent café award from the BSA.

News, 2007

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This week’s major news items both concern coffee – the Fairtrade Foundation has announced a rise in its basic price to growers, and a new crop of British coffee has been harvested at the Eden Project here in Cornwall.

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From 1 June 2008, the Fairtrade minimum price for Arabica coffee will increase to at least US $1.25 per pound ($1.20 for unwashed Arabica) or the market price, if that is higher. Producers will receive a Fairtrade Premium of 10 cents per pound for investment in community and business improvements. For organic Fairtrade certified coffee, an additional minimum differential of 20 cents is applied. 

Fairtrade tell us that the minimum price which applied earlier this year was $1.26, made up of $1.21 a pound plus 5c premium. In June 2007 it went to $1.21 plus 10c premium, and in June 2008 it will change to $1.25 plus 10c premium, making $1.35.

The Fairtrade Labelling Organisation has caused some confusion by announcing an ‘average’ increase, say Fairtrade in the UK  – there have hitherto been two prices, one for central America and another for south America and the Caribbean. All areas are now standardised at the same price.

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The first of the latest crop of coffee from the Eden Project in Cornwall has been harvested this week, and has received some attention from the media.  Strictly speaking, it is not the first coffee harvested there for practical brewing use, reports Don Murray, curator of the Project’s tropical section – two or three years ago, one individual trader did work with them on a previous batch.  The interesting thing about this week’s crop, however, is that it is quite likely to find its way into the finals of the 2008 barista championships.

This is because those who were involved with it were baristas Tristan Stephenson from Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen restaurant and Hugo Hercod from Relish in Wadebridge, who took the top two places in the south-western final of the championships, together with Tom Sobey of Origin Coffee, who generally hosts the regional finals.

Tristan has estimated that two kilos were picked, and roasted in a Hot-Top which Tom took to Fifteen. Although the participants were a bit worried that roasting was going slowly, and didn’t expect much result from the cupping as both the baristas had colds, they do report having achieved a pretty good medium-roast. 

“At this stage I was just glad that it actually looked like coffee when we added water,” reported Tristan, adding that he expected no decent results from it at all when used as espresso – but that it actually produced good body and good hazelnut crema.  “It had a good grip to it from the acidity, the vegetal character that I picked up in cupping was there and it was even clean on the finish leaving no nasty after-tastes!”

The Eden Project has recently been growing both Arabica and robusta.

(We will be visiting the growers shortly and a report will be in our Jan/Feb magazine)

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The financial press reports a slight improvement in Coffee Republic’s fortunes - its first half operating loss before exceptional items narrowed to £811,000 from £886,000 the previous year. Revenues declined to £2.8 million from £5.3 million, largely because of the conversion of units to franchises.  Meanwhile, a new deal will see Coffee Republic sites appear in all 73 Cineworld UK cinemas during 2008.  Coffee Republic has already said that it will open 25 deli-style stores across Scotland.

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The financial media also reports that the Campbell Bewley group showed an operating profit of 3.8 million Euros last year, following a loss the previous year.  The performance is largely credited to the decision to sell off property holding and concentrate on expanding the  beverage business. The flagship Grafton Street store in Dublin is reported to be loss-making, but the chief executive said that the group is now actively seeking takeover opportunities in the US and Britain.   

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Also in the Dublin financial news, we regret that a printer’s devil got into the works in our recent report about Java Republic creating the world's first carbon-neutral roastery and café, due for completion in Dublin in July next year.  Our printers had a problem with the Euro symbol (!)  and some of the figures didn’t come out clearly – the details are that the company has raised one million Euros from an enterprise-support scheme, backed with a further six  million from the Bank of Ireland.  Java Republic began trading in September 1999 with nine people and will employ 60 by the time the new site is ready.  Today they have a turnover of seven million Euros, and nett profit this year is expected to be in the region of 450, 000 Euros.