Some may wonder yet again whether Alison Brittain’s first action after arriving as chief executive of Whitbread last year should have been spinning off the Costa coffee business from the Premier Inns hotel chain and allied restaurants.
That horse has almost certainly got away. The first-quarter trading statement shows some improvement for both businesses from the fourth quarter, but it was minimal. Whitbread may have been one of the first British consumer-facing businesses to warn about the squeeze on spending from rising inflation and stalling wages, at the time of its results in April, but those pressures are still there. Added to that has been a rising tide of terrorist incidents.
Costa produced a 1.1 per cent rise in like-for-like sales in the first quarter,