Highlands Coffee surpassed 700 stores across Vietnam and the Philippines during the period while The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf has nearly recovered to its pre-pandemic store count following steady outlet growth
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JFC opened 52 net new Highlands Coffee stores in the quarter | Photo credit: Phan Minh Tuấn CC BY-SA 4.0
Jollibee Foods Corporation (JFC) has posted strong third quarter outlet growth for Highlands Coffee and The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf (CBTL) despite mixed sales for each brand during the period.
Manila-based JFC opened 52 net new Highlands Coffee stores in the three months ended 30 September 2023 to reach 725 outlets, with 682 in Vietnam and 43 in the Philippines. Its current store footprint is now 29% higher than the same quarter in 2022.
JFC acquired a 50% share in Highlands Coffee in 2012 before taking a controlling interest in 2017.
The foodservice group also opened 15 net new CBTL stores in its third quarter to reach 1,132 outlets – 79 more than the same period last year.
Following successive years of net outlet closures, the California-based coffee chain returned to net outlet growth at the end of 2022. CBTL is steadily returning to the 1,189 stores it had globally when
JFC acquired the brand in July 2019.
JFC’s coffee and tea brands also includes 312-store bubble tea chain Milksha, alongside newly acquired Singaporean café brands Common Man Coffee Roasters and Tiong Bahru Bakery, which the group will launch in the Philippines before the end of 2023. The segment achieved 3% system-wide sales growth during the quarter.
However, Highlands Coffee’s like-for-like sales fell 12% which JFC attributed to a weak macro-trading environment in Vietnam. CBTL’s like-for-like sales fell 1.5%.
Highlands Coffee is the largest coffee chain in Vietnam, ahead of The Coffee House (155), Phuc Long Coffee & Tea (147), Trung Nguyen Legend (110) and Starbucks (102).
In October 2023, Highlands Coffee announced it will invest nearly VND 500bn ($20.5m) in a new 258,000sq ft coffee roasting facility in the province of Ba Ria - Vung Tau. Once fully operational, the facility will be the largest coffee roasting factory in Vietnam, capable of producing 75,000 tons of coffee annually.