Costa Coffee: 60 stores, zero accidents

The challenge

A single good clean is a job well done. Around sixty of them, to the same standard, on rolling deadlines, across three years, is a system. Working as the trusted cleaning partner to Barnwood Group, AOG has delivered the final builders and sparkle clean on around sixty Costa Coffee stores, taking each one from the end of fit-out to ready-to-trade. The value to a rollout client is not any one visit. It is knowing the last stage will be handled the same way every time.

Retail rollouts run to tight, immovable dates. A store has a trading launch, and the clean is the very last thing standing between a finished fit-out and a paying customer, which means it carries all the accumulated pressure of the programme. Each Costa store also has to reach the same brand-consistent finish, from glazing and counters to floors and washrooms, regardless of which team is on site or where the store is. And doing this around sixty times over three years raises the stake that matters most on any live site: consistency, and above all safety. One accident undoes a lot of goodwill.

Our approach

We treated the relationship as a programme rather than a series of one-off bookings. That meant a repeatable method for every store, with the same standard for glazing, joinery, counters, floors, and washrooms, so Barnwood always knew what a handover would look like. It meant supervised teams working to a written scope and a documented safety method on each site, with risk assessments matched to the store rather than copied blindly. And it meant clear coordination with the Barnwood site manager on every job, so our clean slotted into the closing days of each fit-out without clashing with other trades.

• A repeatable builders and sparkle clean method applied to every store for a consistent brand finish.
• Supervised teams working to documented scopes and site-specific risk assessments.
• Direct coordination with Barnwood site managers to hit each trading launch date.
• A single, accountable cleaning partner across the whole rollout.

The result

Around sixty Costa Coffee stores have been handed over ready to trade, each to the same standard, across three years, with zero accidents recorded over the entire programme. For Barnwood that record is the point. A cleaning partner who delivers the last stage reliably, on date, without incident, removes one of the recurring risks in a retail rollout and lets the site team focus on the build. The number of stores shows scale. The clean safety record shows something harder to build: a partnership that holds up under repetition.