Is the era of the supermarket café over? Earlier this year Sainsbury’s said goodbye to all of its cafés, then Morrisons did something similar, and now M&S has announced that 11 of its in-store coffee shops will be closing for good in the near future.
The affected cafés represent less than four percent of the brand’s supermarkets, and will all be inside smaller M&S food shops rather than in the larger department stores where they remain popular. According to the company, this is part of a wider scheme to ‘modernise’ its food business and ‘offer the best of M&S Food to more people’ as consumer habits shift.
The space once occupied by the cafés will be used to expand existing shops, so that customers can ‘widest possible product range’. M&S has stressed that minimal jobs will be lost, and café employees will be redeployed wherever possible.
A spokesperson for the company explained: ‘In some of our small Food stores, where customers want a greater range of M&S Food, our transformation involves repurposing cafe space across 11 small food stores, out of over 300 M&S cafes, coffee shops and coffee-to-go locations’.
M&S is putting £300 million into upgrading its food and drinks offering, which includes ‘opening brand-new coffee shops offering delicious food and barista-made fairtrade coffee’ at some new stores, including the soon to open Bristol flagship. Essentially, M&S is not swearing off its food halls, it’s just moving a few of them around and approaching them slightly differently.
The brand has said that it hopes to grow to 420 supermarkets by 2028, which is an increase of just over 100. It plans to achieve this through a mix of renovating existing spaces and moving into new locations.
M&S has not yet announced exactly which cafés will be shutting, or when their last days of operation will be. Watch this space for updates.
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