Whitbread

Encyclopedia : W : WH : WHI : Whitbread

This article is about the Whitbread company. For the sailing race see Volvo Ocean Race. For the book awards, see Whitbread Book Awards

Whitbread & Co Ltd was the name of a brewery company founded in London by Samuel Whitbread. The business was originally a partnership established by Whitbread and Thomas Shewell in 1742; it did not take on the Whitbread & Co name until 1799.

Its beer brands are now owned by Inbev. Today, the streamlined business, now Whitbread Group plc, has no brewing interests. It is a leading restaurants and leisure company, whose brands include:

Premier Travel Inn, a budget hotel chain with over 400 locations throughout the UK
Brewers Fayre (formerly Brewsters) and Beefeater, two distinct restaurant brands serving traditional foods.
Costa Coffee, a coffee-house chain in a similar style to Starbucks
David Lloyd Leisure, a chain of gymnasiums and fitness centres.

Whitbread also holds the UK franchise for American restaurant chain T.G.I. Friday's and a strategic investment in Pizza Hut UK, which it shares with Yum!, a company which also owns KFC, A&W All American Food, Long John Silvers and Taco Bell, and put together is the largest fast food group, twice as big as McDonalds.

It recently offloaded some of its brands in an effort to streamline the business: Brewsters (a more family orientated version of Brewers Fayre), Britvic (a large UK soft drinks manufacturer), Whitbread Inns (standalone pubs with no restaurant attached) and the UK franchise of Marriott hotels.

Echoing this shift, the Whitbread & Co brewery building at 52 Chiswell Street, London still survives, but is now used as a conference and events venue. Beer was last brewed at the site in April 1976. The site itself was only recently sold by Whitbread Group plc to an investment firm as the company looks to return value to its shareholders.

However, Whitbread has recently been hit hard by the global economic slowdown, and has looked to cut costs. It recently moved its core operations from central London to Luton in a bid to save money and has announced a major restructuring of the company and its management in a bid to stem the decline in sales. On December 16th, 2005, the company was ejected from the FTSE 100, as its value had dropped below the threshold for entry into this prestigious club.

In 1971, the company launched the Whitbread Literary Awards, but in 2005 it announced that it was seeking an alternate sponsor.

External links

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.