The archive · Business Models · Strategic decision · 2020
Pret's £20-a-month coffee subscription: five barista drinks a day, first month free
During lockdown, Pret A Manger sold up to five barista-made drinks a day for £20 a month — a bet that drew 16,500 sign-ups on day one.
Pret A Manger
What it had to solve
Pret's business depended on city-centre commuters, and lockdown took them away: sales fell to levels last seen a decade earlier, thousands of jobs were cut, and the chain had to find a reason for customers to return to shops once they reopened. Coffee sales were recovering faster than food sales, so CEO Pano Christou bet on the drink itself.
How it works
Before 2020 Pret A Manger was a commuter business: grab a coffee and sandwich on the way to the office. When lockdown emptied city centres, that model collapsed — sales fell to levels last seen ten years earlier, branches closed, and thousands of jobs went. Reopened shops recovered coffee sales faster than food, which gave Pret's leadership a clue about where customer loyalty actually lived.
The answer was a subscription, launched nationwide on 8 September 2020. For £20 a month — with the first month free — YourPret Barista gave members up to five barista-made drinks a day, from flat whites to smoothies, roughly 150 drinks a month for the price of a few. Pret framed it as the first in-shop coffee subscription in the UK and as the first big launch of a new digitally-led, multichannel strategy.
The response dwarfed expectations. By 3 p.m. on launch day, 16,500 people had subscribed against a target of 2,000–3,000, and Pret's chief executive called it the start of a broader reinvention covering delivery, retail products and new formats. The scheme also exposed the strain of popularity: by December 2021 around 5,000 complaints had built up over drinks being unavailable despite the marketing, and Pret told the advertising watchdog it was aligning its ads with the scheme's real terms.
Why it lands
- The subscription monetised the habit, not the trip: even with no office to commute to, the fixed monthly fee kept the daily coffee ritual tied to Pret.
- Pricing beat rivals on arithmetic: £20 for up to 150 drinks a month made the headline impossible to ignore and turned the free first month into a trial.
- It converted Pret's biggest operational cost — unpredictable footfall — into a predictable daily visit from paying members.
- The digital platform it forced Pret to build became the launchpad for delivery, retail coffee sales and other new channels.
What it did
The subscription went live on 8 September 2020 and by 3 p.m. that day 16,500 people had signed up, far above the 2,000–3,000 Christou expected. Pret said the scheme was incredibly popular, called it a building block of its new model, and used the digital platform behind it to push delivery, retail coffee sales and suburban expansion.
What you can take
When a daily habit loses its venue, sell the habit itself: a flat subscription trades per-cup margin for guaranteed visits — but price it for the heaviest users, not the average one.
Since then
Pret's coffee subscription became one of the most talked-about pandemic pivots on the British high street: first-day sign-ups beat targets fivefold, and Pret's own figures showed complaints affected well under one per cent of subscribers even as the Advertising Standards Authority pressed the chain to market the scheme's exclusions accurately. The model changed how Pret saw itself — from sandwich shop to digitally-led, multichannel business — and other chains began copying the idea of paid drink subscriptions.
Sources
- Pret A Manger launches monthly subscription service after Covid sales slump
- Pret sees 16,500 coffee subscriptions on first day
- Pret a Manger launches coffee subscription to battle lockdown sales slump
- Pret A Manger receives thousands of complaints over subscription
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