It has been a few months since the great Pret reckoning of 2024 – when the billion-pound coffee chain, born out of a humble Hampstead shop inspired by the traiteurs of France, binned the arguable steal of the century.
For four years, Pret a Manger had been enticing people back after lockdown with what is now known as Club Pret, a lucrative coffee subscription that gave latte lovers (practically) limitless coffee for £1 a day.
It was a savvy marketing move hailed by its own bosses as ‘too good to be true’ – and eventually, it was. In July this year, Pret announced the end of the plan that had given caffeine fiends five coffees a day for £30 a month.
City slickers and Gen Z-ers alike went into a tailspin as the change loomed in September – at which point the subscription dropped to £5 a month and offered half-price coffees instead.
Since then, Pret a Manger has said little of the ‘new’ Club Pret, or even why it chose to drop the old plan.
But openly available data suggests the company made the decision amid stagnant trading this year – while experts warn it has risked its reputation by scrapping an offer that had become an almost ubiquitous part of Pret’s brand.
Our interactive graphic below shows how trade levelled off in Yorkshire and suburban London as well as the capital’s train stations, while dropping in the West End, London’s financial districts and in smaller UK towns.
However, the post-Covid travel boom is keeping’s Pret’s airport and train station shops healthy, and there are signs Pret’s radical decision to cut the price of filter coffee to 99p has boosted trade in some parts of the UK.
By looking at the market, and publicly available financial and performance data, MailOnline has attempted to build a comprehensive picture of how Club Pret fell from grace as Britain’s best coffee deal – and what comes next.
Pret a Manger invoked the wrath of thousands of coffee lovers when it scrapped its free coffee subscription plan earlier this year
It launched the plan in 2020 for £20 a month – later nudging the price up to £25 and later £30
Pret had been beloved by city slickers and hipsters alike before Covid – but found itself fighting for its life (pictured: a pandemic-era)
Emerging bleary eyed from the misery of lockdown, Pret a Manger was in trouble in the summer of 2020, its Canary Wharf go-getters working from home and coffee catch-ups taking place on Zoom.
Covid had burned the company like a just-made cup of filter coffee – particularly in London, home to more than half of Pret’s 400-plus stores.
Sales had taken a 74 per cent dent; 30 shops closed for good; employee numbers were slashed by 3,000 as the firm undertook a devastating restructure operation.
What was a beleaguered sandwich shop chain to do but try to completely upset the industry – by turning the daily coffee run into a Netflix plan?
It was called Your Pret Subscription and the offer was simple: five barista-made drinks – coffees, teas or smoothies – each day, for £20 a month.
No ifs, no buts – just a 30-minute gap between orders to stop people using their five coffees all at once for friends.
It was the closest thing could to an intravenous drip for caffeine fiends itching for their fix – and when it launched in September 2020, its effect was immediate and transformative.
Gavin Foley, founder of age-inclusive jobs board Flexi-Jobs.co.uk, told MailOnline he ‘lived off of the subscription’ as he worked between London and his home in Southampton.
‘Going into London, I’d get a coffee, get in, get a coffee, one at lunch, two on the way home,’ he told us from, naturally, a branch of Pret.
Mr Foley discovered the subscription in early 2021 from colleagues at the M&S store he managed on the coast, which had a Pret next door. His monthly spend dropped from several hundred pounds a month to £20.
‘If you really break it down, I was probably getting £400 of drinks a month, and I was getting food as well,’ he recalled.
‘I did think about what would happen if they ever stopped it, because it must have cost quite a bit of money.’
By the end of that year, over 150,000 people were Pret subscribers, according to Pret CEO Pano Christou – the son of a taxi driver who clawed his way up from the shop floor after getting his start in McDonalds.
That gave Pret a guaranteed £3million a month before those thousands of espresso-chasers even considered buying a sandwich to go with their cortado.
And the subscriber revenue saved ‘many jobs’, Pret’s Briony Raven told industry magazine MCA in 2020.
Pret subscriber Gavin Foley joined the plan in early 2021 – and snipped his coffee spending from hundreds of pounds a month to just £20
The Pret subscription proved lucrative – with 150,000 people signing up in the first few months, giving the firm £3million a month of guaranteed income
Customers could choose from any of the ‘barista-made’ drinks, from classic lattes (above) to iced juices
The Pret Index, a measure of transactions compared to typical pre-pandemic spending, shows the explosion in trade: March 2021 spending was just 40 per cent of pre-pandemic levels; by November it was 13 per cent more.
The subscription burgeoned: 34.7 million redemptions were made in 2021, then 54.4 million in 2022, a 75 per cent explosion in use, even after the price was hiked to £25.
Revenues shot up towards the heady heights of pre-pandemic spending. At the end of the 2022 financial year, Pret’s global operation announced a return to profit for the first time in four years – shifting from a £168m loss in 2021 to £50.6m in the black.
It also opened new shops outside of London, targeting small towns across the UK as it eyed up global expansion. Pret’s first Indian cafes opened in the spring of 2023.
Seemingly bolstered by the subscription’s success in Britain, Pret expanded the deal to include 10 per cent off food, and rebranded it Club Pret.
Pre-Covid, it had 410 stores. At the end of 2022, it had another 429, including franchises.
Club Pret’s introduction came with a price hike to £30 – still a reasonable £1 a day, that Pret reckoned, with food on top, would cover staff, energy and other overheads associated with running hundreds of coffee shops across the UK.
The company was, in effect, unstoppable.
‘Pret knew they were guaranteed the footfall, and it was a footfall driver,’ retail expert Catherine Shuttleworth told MailOnline.
‘They were facing some big challenges after Covid, there’s no questions about it, and I think they knew it would be eye-catching, headline-grabbing, and good value.’
But trouble lurked in the wings: redemptions tailed off in 2023 – rising only eight per cent from 2022 after almost doubling the year before.
There were rumblings of people sharing screenshots of QR codes used to redeem free coffees with their friends.
It then emerged shortly after Pret began discounting food for subscribers that it had been quietly hiking sandwich prices for years, offsetting the markdown.
Between August 2020 and September 2023, the firm had jacked the price of its ham and greve baguette from £2.95 to £4.75 (a 38 per cent hike) while the cost of a humble egg mayo sandwich rose 72 per cent to £3.25.
At train stations, where prices are even higher, non-subscribers wanting to sit in with a ‘posh cheddar and pickle baguette’ had to pay £7.15 for the sandwich alone in September last year – before they had even considered a drink.
Prices at Pret came under scrutiny as it emerged baguettes at train station shops cost as much as £7.15 to eat in after a discount was introduced for subscribers
Similarly, bottles of orange juice were being sold for almost £3 at this train station shop
‘Your favourite coffees, now endless,’ boasts a Pret subscription advert outside a shop in Kent in September 2020
The company pointed to increasing food costs as it tried to defend the hikes, but eventually reduced some prices and doubled the discount for subscribers to 20 per cent, prompting a small uptick in trade.
But it also turned elsewhere to protect its rising revenues, cracking down on Netflix-style account sharing by banning the use of Apple Wallet passes and screenshots of QR codes to redeem coffee.
Its annual statements hailed Pret as a ‘truly global, multi-channel brand’, and the firm told MailOnline UK business grew 18 per cent in 2023.
But the Pret Index – data surrendered to the Office for National Statistics as a measure of post-Covid recovery – suggests 2024 has seen trade suffer as it dawned on bosses the coffee offer was too expensive to keep.
And with two Club Pret coffees being redeemed every second on average across Britain, exhausted staff couldn’t keep up.
‘It has put the members of staff under almost unbelievable pressure,’ one former Pret employee told the Telegraph.
‘They suddenly threw thousands of extra people at the staff without the right equipment to cope with the demand.’
Eventually the penny dropped at Pret HQ, and in July, subscribers woke up to a message telling them the free coffee dream was dead.
Catherine Shuttleworth adds: ‘It was about making you go into Pret. It’s not about the coffee. It’s the fact you’ll buy a pastry or a sandwich or a bottle of water.
‘When you buy a coffee, it’s not really about the coffee, is it?
‘What you’re paying for when you pay £3.70 or whatever for your latte is for staff overheads, for energy costs, for everything that enables them to make you that cup of coffee in the first place.
‘I couldn’t say for sure whether it was going to be short term or long term.
‘What they probably didn’t anticipate was that those have significantly increased ahead of their budgets. They couldn’t afford to do it anymore.’
Managing director Claire Clough said: ‘It was an innovative way to reconnect with our loyal customers and introduce Pret to tens of thousands of new ones… with an offer that almost seemed “too good to be true”.
‘Four years and over a quarter of a billion coffees later, we have decided that it’s time to rethink how it works.’
Goodbye £30 a month for five free coffees – hello £5 a month for five coffees a day at half-price. So long to the food discount too.
Pret MD Clare Clough’s message to Pret subscribers as the free coffee deal came to an end
Experts have questioned whether the Pret subscription was intended to be a permanent measure – or just a way of winning back trade after Covid
Pret chief executive Pano Christou with the Prince of Wales during a visit to a store in September 2023
Cue instant reaction online: TikTok packed with Gen Z-ers pouting into their matcha lattes and staging mock funeral processions as they walked out of stores; X posts showed screenshots of cancelled subscriptions.
‘Committing to a subscription scheme is quite a big deal – so when (Pret) takes it away, you would be rightly annoyed, to be honest,’ Catherine Shuttleworth says.
Jobs board boss Gavin Foley knew the day would eventually come.
‘Being someone who used it quite a lot I was well aware of how financially unviable it was – I was disappointed when it changed,’ he admits.
The new offer initially sounds comparable to the existing one – until it is pointed out that having one £4 latte a day at half price will outstrip the cost of the old subscription in two weeks.
And that’s before you consider the price of the subscription doubling to £10 a month in March with no additional perks. The food discount has gone too.
Pret tried to soften the blow by cutting the price of a croissant to £1.99, and halving the cost of a filter coffee to just 99p.
It brought with it a short term boom, as recorded by the Pret Index – but average trading remains below pre-pandemic levels.
MailOnline understands some shops have seen subscriber counts fall by more than half since the free coffee plan was scrapped. Pret says sales are up 22 per cent.
Linda Ellett, UK Head of Consumer, Retail and Leisure for KPMG, told MailOnline any change to a subscription plan like Pret’s comes with inherent risk.
She said: ‘Any business making changes to their loyalty offering, especially suddenly, need to have thoroughly done their research about their customers, their locality and competitors – as well as getting the tone and transparency of their communications right.’
There are big hints the company is now looking beyond the UK for better news.
Its most recent annual statement celebrates the fact that £1 in every four is spent at shops outside the UK – in France, India, the US, Italy, another 17 countries in all.
TikTok users staged mock funeral processions for their Pret subscriptions after the plan came to an end in September
Others aired their grievances online after the £30 plan was dropped in favour of a £5 half-price coffee subscription
Pret a Manger continues to offer a free coffee subscription in other markets, including the US (pictured, a Pret in New York)
Still want to sip a subscription latte with Pret? You can – if you move to France and shell out €25
‘Growth was driven by Pret’s continued expansion into new markets,’ a statement issued in September read.
Catherine Shuttleworth added: ‘There is huge risk in making a significant change. I think you will always see a short term impact. They’ll be hoping to ride it out in the longer term.’
But that hope comes with what she warned of ‘potential risk’ from rivals – and that some may decide they don’t want to give Pret £5 or £10 a month to pay what they could pay at Greggs or McDonalds with no extra subscription.
She continued: ‘This is a hyper-competitive market – so if I was one of Pret’s competitors, they’ve opened up a potential weakness, haven’t they?’
For Pret-lovers like Gavin Foley, there’s little choice but to keep on subscribing. His old Pret in Southampton has closed, but he keeps the £5/month plan for the days he commutes into the capital.
‘My coffee spending has gone back up but at the same time it’s still lower because it’s half price, especially in London where they’re everywhere,’ he says.
‘I’d rather get coffee for half price at Pret than go to Starbucks and pay £6. I’m still getting my money’s worth.’
A Pret a Manger spokesperson said: ‘We decided to change our Club Pret subscription to offer a better Pret experience for all our customers, not just those who already subscribe.
‘Since making the changes in September, we’ve seen a 22 per cent rise in new product sales, increased demand for our lower-priced filter coffee, and positive feedback from customers about the whole Pret experience.’
Pret had provided transaction data to the ONS at least once a month throughout 2024 but it will no longer had over transaction data because of the ‘cessation of our data sharing agreement’. We have asked the ONS for comment.
Club Pret in it’s old form isn’t quite dead. You just have to go elsewhere in the world to find it.
It continues to offer five drinks a day, no questions asked in the US, where a subscription costs $40 (£32) a month, and in France, where it is just €25 (£20).
Club Pret probably makes more business sense in countries with smaller operations. There there are just 52 Prets across France and 66 in the US, with most concentrated in Paris and New York, meaning fewer overheads.
One US TikTok user, posting a video of herself with an oversized cup of Pret-branded coffee, wrote: ‘Will someone explain how the Pret coffee subscription is profitable? I paid $44 w/tax and I’ve gotten $42 worth of coffee in just one week.’
Pret insists it is still ‘proudly British-based and British-built’ – but its British customers, it seems, could not be trusted with a subscription any longer. Can the rest?
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