Back in 2015, I was delighted to see new branches of Costa Coffee opening in Manila. Costa Coffee is the UK’s largest coffee chain with over 2,400 outlets there, and I love to drink their flat whites – so much more flavourful and bolder than Starbucks’ insipid lattes.

The new Philippines outlets were part of Costa Coffee’s expansion into Europe and Asia with over 450 branches opening in China, 150 in the UAE and 60 in India.  The coffee company’s 16 branches in the Philippines were part of that expansion, albeit under a franchise arrangement.

Then in August 2018 Coca-Cola bought Costa Coffee for $5.1 billion – its first move into the coffee market. Costa Coffee’s expanding international reach no doubt contributed to Coca-Cola’s decision to buy it.

I expected this to result in more branches being opened in the Philippines, but then last month when I went to one of the Costa Coffee branches nearest to me, I discovered it was closed. I went to another, and that was closed. And to a third, and that was also closed.

I checked their Philippines Facebook page, and that was gone. I checked their Philippines Twitter account and that was gone. Not only had all the branches closed down, but they had gone to great lengths to remove all traces of the name on the storefronts. It was as if they wanted to leave no trace of having been in the Philippines.

So what happened to Costa Coffee in the Philippines? I hadn’t heard anything in advance of the branch closures in the local media, and none of the baristas had said anything about an impending closure the last time I visited a Costa Coffee.

So I googled “What happened to Costa Coffee in the Philippines?” and it didn’t produce any immediate results. No news stories or any clues to what had happened.

I dug deeper and came across a Facebook Page that made a reference to Costa Coffee having closed down in the Philippines in August 2019 after closing branches in Singapore and Thailand as well, but nothing explaining why.

An employee of the Figaro Coffee chain (a local Philippines brand) told me that Costa Coffee was having financial problems, but that information probably came from stories about the heavy debt it was carrying prior to the acquisition by Coco-Cola. 

Digging deeper I came across a story in the Straits Times about the Costa Coffee outlets closing there on 16 September 2018 – after the announcement of the acquisition by Coca-Cola – but the story indicated that the decision had been made at the beginning of 2018.

So it is possible that at least the Singapore closures were due to efforts by the company to reduce its debt. But the company when contacted by the Straits Times declined to give any reasons for the closure.

I continued my online research without much success. Wikipedia still showed the Philippines with 16 outlets as at October 2019 and nothing about the closures in Asia.

I did find an article in a Singapore marketing magazine from 2018 in which a spokesman for Costa Coffee was quoted as saying that Singapore was the only market from which it was withdrawing, and that it would continue to expand in other Southeast Asian markets through franchise arrangements.

The magazine speculated that it was Singapore’s high rents that were driving Costa Coffee out of the island state, but Costa Coffee declined to confirm that.

But I could find nothing about the reasons for its withdrawal from the Philippines. Could it have been a dispute with Robinsons, the franchise holder here? 

I tried googling “Costa Coffee Robinsons Philippines” to see what news stories that might bring up, but there was nothing aside from stories from 2015 when Robinsons announced the opening of its first Costa Coffee outlets and its plans to open 70 more by 2020. 

So what happened to Costa Coffee in the Philippines? Does anyone know?