Latest news with #CaffèNero
Metro
12-05-2025
- Business
- Metro
Which high street coffee shop has the best value loyalty card scheme?
High street coffee shop loyalty schemes are 10 a penny, and you may find that you end up with an abundance of loyalty cards weighing down your purse. Each scheme offers you points every time you buy a coffee, with the reward of a free coffee – and more – when you fill up the card. Different coffee shops require you to buy a different amount of coffee before bagging a free one, and some offer points for other things as well. With increasing costs, choosing which café chain to visit based on value-for-money is more important than ever. Let's take a look at what each loyalty card scheme offers. We looked at loyalty schemes from Costa, Starbucks, Caffè Nero, McDonald's, Greggs, Grind, and Pret A Manger and have ranked them here in order of best to worst value. Greggs offers loyalty scheme customers freebies on coffees, pastries, and more. You just have to buy nine items in the same category (for example, nine coffees) and you get the tenth free. The cheapest coffee at Greggs is a Regular Americano, which costs £1.50, so you would have to spend £13.50 to get a free coffee. Being a fast food chain, McDonald's doesn't just serve coffee. Their MyMcDonald's Rewards scheme is a loyalty programme that allows customers to earn one point for every penny they spend at participating stores. But, say you are just after a coffee, their cheapest product is either a White Coffee or an Americano, at £1.39 each. According to the scheme, you need 1,500 points to redeem either a small portion of fries, a medium salad, a regular McCafé, a mini McFlurry, a hash brown, or a regular drink. To earn 1,500 points, you need to spend £15. So, that's 11 coffees, equating to £15.29. Caffe Nero's loyalty scheme requires you to get nine stamps (one nine coffees since one coffee = one stamp) before getting a coffee for free. However, it also gives you an extra point for using a reusable cup, meaning you only actually have to buy five coffees to get one free. You can also get a free coffee just by downloading the Caffè Nero loyalty scheme app using a referral link. Additionally, you can get free drinks for each friend you refer who also signs up and makes a purchase, meaning you can technically get multiple free coffees from Caffè Nero without spending a penny. The cheapest coffee at Caffè Nero is a regular Americano at £3.60, meaning that, if you used a reusable cup every time you bought a drink, you would have to spend £18 to be entitled to a free coffee. Pret's loyalty scheme – aka 'Pret Perks' – gives you a star every time you buy something in store and scan the code in your Pret app. If you get 10 stars, you get a perk (which could be anything from a free croissant to a coffee). You can also join The Half Price Coffee Club. For just £5 per month, take advantage of up to five hot or iced Barista-made drinks a day with 50% off. The cheapest coffee at Pret is a filter coffee at £1.90, meaning you would have to spend £19 in-store to get a freebie. Pret does offer a 50p discount to those who use a reusable cup in store though, so if you used one every time you bought a filter coffee, this would cut the price of a free treat down to just £14. Costa's loyalty scheme says customers need to get 10 'beans' to claim a free coffee (each coffee purchased = 1 bean). However, if you bring your reusable cup, you get an extra bean, so you could get a free drink by just buying five coffees. The cheapest coffee at Costa is an Americano at £3.80, meaning that if you brought in a reusable cup every time, you will have to spend at least £19 (five Americanos, each with reusable cups) to get a free coffee. At Starbucks, for every £1 you spend, you collect 10 stars. At 130 stars, you get a free drink – anything from filter coffee, hot teas or a signature Americano. More Trending Starbucks also charges 5p extra for customers who use a takeaway cup. Customers who bring their own reusable cup receive a 25p discount. An Americano costs £3.80 at Starbucks, so you would have to buy 5 of these before getting a freebie. This would cost £19. London-based coffee chain Grind gives loyalty scheme customers one point for every £1 spent in-store. You have to get 35 points to get a free coffee, meaning you have to spend £35 to bag a freebie. This could include a coffee, an Espresso Martini, ten of Grind's compostable coffee pods or a pouch of coffee. The cheapest coffee on the menu at Grind is an Americano at £2.40, so you would have to buy 15 of these before being entitled to a free coffee. This adds up to £36. View More » MORE: Map reveals the UK loan hotspots where people borrow the most money MORE: Brits could save £868,000,000 a year with these kitchen cupboard cleaning swaps MORE: When do you start paying National Insurance and how much is it?
Daily Mirror
30-04-2025
- Health
- Daily Mirror
'I tried Caffè Nero's trendy drink of the summer - my three-word text to pals says it all'
Matcha has been an Instagram favourite drink for quite some time. The green hues of the drink seem to have massively overtaken coffee pictures all over socials, because if you're not attending a pilates class followed by a matcha with the girlies, who even are you? And, it seems like it isn't going anywhere anytime soon. This could be because of its health benefits. Matcha is a kind of green tea which may be good for your heart, weight, and other aspects of health due to its antioxidant content, which may explain the obsession with it as more people are putting health and fitness at the forefront of their lives. But it's a trend I'd managed to avoid participating now. With people taking to X to write: "Why does matcha taste like fish and cod liver oil? Every time someone says 'No, you'll love it!' I end up gagging softly," I really wasn't sold on the hype. Yes, it looks cute in photos, but I was pretty certain I'd always choose to reach for a coconut milk iced latte when out with pals during the day. According to The Tea Makers of London, matcha has less caffeine than most cups of coffee. On average, a cup of matcha contains about 70mg of caffeine, in comparison to 100-140mg in a cup of coffee, which admittedly puts me off. However, they also point out that matcha has a much 'cleaner' caffeine high. The caffeine is released slowly, giving you a longer, smoother energy hit. This is down to the amino acid L-Theanine, which reduces how quickly the body absorbs caffeine. It can also keep you feeling alert for between three to six hours - almost a whole shift at work. So when I saw that Caffè Nero had launched vanilla and strawberry matcha flavours, and with some pressure from my matcha-loving pals, I decided to give it a whirl for the first time. Normally, I'd opt for vanilla-flavoured things, so I tried the vanilla flavour first. It didn't really do much for me, sadly, as the vanilla flavour wasn't super strong, and it just tasted a little bit weird to me overall. I thought my matcha fate was sealed as not being a lover. However, when I tried the strawberry one, I immediately texted my friends saying, "I'm so shocked," because I literally loved it. It was sweet but not too sickly like the vanilla one had tasted, and it gave me the perfect pre-workout caffeine boost. I'll admit, I thought I was going to hate it, and it was going to go straight in the sink and never be spoken of again, but could I be the next matcha-loving girly posting endless reams of green drinks? Quite possibly. I definitely think that having a sweet element to this drink makes it go down a lot easier than if I were to drink raw matcha. I think that's why some people report a 'fishy' taste - because they've not sweetened the drink with sugar, honey, or syrup. The further I got down the beverage, the more 'matcha-like' it tasted, but I was used to it by the time all the syrup had disappeared. But as far as this Caffè Nero version goes, it gets a big thumbs up from me, and I'd definitely order the strawberry one when I was out and about with friends - and I'd recommend you give it a try too.
The Guardian
17-04-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
It's the economic end times, so obviously I'm thinking about my takeaway coffee
Most of us, confronted with daily forecasts of recession and economic downturn, have an emotional response that expresses itself in a range of behaviours. Big purchases may be deferred or cancelled. Travel plans are revisited. We might review our childcare spend and wonder if we should go out less – all rational decisions in the face of the rising cost of living. Then there are the irrational gestures, those that have little meaning financially but offer us, via small acts of self-denial, an opportunity to feel we're doing something morally rigorous. It's these, in my case, that have lately been triggered. For me, the barometer has always been coffee, a small but ineradicable source of guilt that has only grown as the price of a single flat white creeps up towards £4. Forgoing this small pleasure neither damages my day, nor, on the other hand, does anything significant towards improving my finances. Assuming a one-coffee-a-week spend, the choice to wait until I get home to make coffee will save me about £200 a year. And yet, each time I pass Caffè Nero and keep walking, I'm so proud of myself you would think I'd donated a kidney. Some of this back-patting, I'm aware, is a long-range hangover from the time that Aussie real estate mogul accused millennials of not owning a home because they had spent all their money on avocado toast. Kevin O'Leary, a wealthy investor who appears on Shark Tank, the US version of Dragons' Den, also said that he never bought a coffee from a cafe, a boast he made to admonish feckless non-millionaires frittering away their tiny salaries. Both men were being obnoxious while grasping at a partial truth. The fact is you can scrape the deposit for a house in a major city on a teacher's salary – even, I'd suggest, in a downturn – but it's not coffee or brunch you'll have to give up: it's everything. I've seen this kind of person in action – the type of hyper-saver who can hit levels of self-deprivation most of us can't. My late aunt was one. She raised three children on her own, never had a cent of help from anyone, and wound up owning a modest house with a yard, the mortgage for which – I still boggle at this – she paid off in 10 years flat on a bookkeeper's salary. She did this by eating the proverbial beans, never going out, wearing clothes until they fell apart and espousing a hardline philosophy of self-denial. Long before the mortgage was paid off, it had stopped being about the money. Instead, the thrilling masochism of 'doing without' became a kind of addiction, and her fanaticism was admirable and horrifying. It raised questions about what we're here for, if not at least to allow ourselves a little enjoyment. O, reason not the need. For most of us with more regular spending habits, the difficulty is in accurately assessing the gravity of a turndown, and therefore what scale of sacrifice to meet it with. Markets have rallied before and, unless we're going to take our money out of the bank and invest it under the bed, we must assume they will rally again. Between 1929 and 1932, 90% was wiped off the value of Wall Street. Stocks in the US plunged 37% during the pandemic. By far the biggest crash in most of our lifetimes was in 2008, when the sub-prime mortgage collapse took 57% off the S&P 500 index – the main takeaway from which, apart from the obvious one about borrowing more than a certain multiple of our salaries, was that we should all have bought Microsoft then. As the economic climate worsens and recession starts to take hold, it may be that at least some of our resolve to cut back is helped by the kind of vibe shift that disguises cost-cutting as aesthetic choice. The imposition of tariffs by the US on Europe and China is likely to send the cost of luxury brands in the US soaring, so that, as with the 2008 recession, logos and other examples of conspicuous spending will quietly fall out of fashion. Anyway, I've done the maths – moral, emotional and actual – and on balance have decided that £200 a year is worth it for the small ping of happiness I get from buying a coffee. With a bit of reaching, I can even convince myself that it's a shrewd investment relative to the potential cost of not buying coffee. We all have our version of this: you take the emotional capital from denying yourself something that costs £5 and use it to justify dropping £500. Let's not be miserable. Buy the coffee. Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Inside the 'Kyiv Express,' the loud, bumpy, yet surprisingly cozy overnight train I rode 16 hours to Ukraine
I recently took the 16-hour overnight train from Warsaw to Kyiv for a reporting trip. The 'Kyiv Express' was loud and bumpy but surprisingly cozy. This is what the long journey was like. WARSAW, Poland — When I boarded the big blue train that took me on a 16-hour journey into Ukraine, I was certain I wasn't going to be getting any sleep. The makeshift beds rattled throughout the night as we barreled across the Polish and, eventually, Ukrainian countryside. The train stopped frequently, and passport checks interrupted hopes of grabbing some proper shut-eye. Last month, I spent about a week in Kyiv reporting on Russia's ongoing invasion. I felt that as a journalist covering the war, I needed to be there, to see things myself, and to learn what the people of Ukraine are facing. It was eye-opening. I experienced the uncertainty of waiting out a Russian barrage in an air-raid shelter in the middle of the night. Many Ukrainians in the capital are desensitized to the near-daily one-way attack drones and won't even get out of bed for those, but the missiles still cause alarm. I met air defenders shooting threats with a machine gun out of a pickup truck. And I saw firsthand the efforts to produce new types of drones for front-line combat. Getting to Ukraine, though, from neighboring Poland meant an overnight train ride, one unlike anything I had experienced before in the US or in Europe. At the busy train station in Warsaw, a platform sign identified my ride as the "Kyiv Express." Waiting in warsaw I arrived at the Warsaw Wschodnia station an hour before my scheduled departure, giving me time to relax and grab a bite to eat. After hanging out and watching people flood in and out of the station, I devoured a small sandwich from Caffè Nero. It was evening, just a bit before 6 p.m. I got to the platform a few minutes early and walked to my assigned train car, showing my ticket to an employee of Ukrzaliznytsia, Ukraine's state-owned rail company. Boarding the "Kyiv Express" I boarded the train and walked to my sleeper cabin at the end of the car, right next to one of the two bathrooms. The blue train was dimly lit, dated, and had a stale odor. My room was the size of a large closet, but I had it all to myself, and it felt surprisingly cozy. I hung my coat and took a few minutes to get settled and organize my things. The room had a three-bed bunk, with the middle bed swung down to act as a backrest for the bottom bed, where one would sit (eventually, I raised the middle bed to sleep on). Besides the only window, there were some hangers, a small fold-down chair, a ladder, a storage rack, and a small desk with a mirror that opened and hosted an electrical outlet. It was a spartan space, certainly not the luxury train Western leaders have used to travel into Ukraine in the past, but it was sufficient for what I needed it to do. Sleeper cars My train cabin The cabin was equipped with three plastic packets containing sheets, a pillowcase, and a towel. What looked like sleeping pads and pillows were on the top bunk, and blankets were on a storage rack. (I didn't end up using any of them.) The cabin also came stocked with two bottles of water, but I'd packed my own, along with some Pringles, biscuits, and Mentos to hold me over until I got to Kyiv. I figured there was a good chance I'd be up all night and get hungry. Just me and my bags Everything I needed The train pulled away from the station shortly after its scheduled departure time. By this point, it was dark outside. Around 15 minutes later, someone came by to check my tickets. I used Google Translate to communicate with him, and he tried to speak English at one point. The only word I could really make out from the exchange was "Trump." My reporting trip came right after a contentious White House meeting between the US president and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and as the Trump administration was pressuring Ukraine to make unfavorable deals. The train felt like it was traveling fast, though I had no idea what our speed was. They may have said something, but I don't speak Ukrainian. The journey across Poland was bumpy and loud. During the first three hours of my ride, I prepped for interviews in Kyiv, caught up on the news, ate some snacks, and watched a little TV on my phone. The cell coverage was surprisingly good at this point (it got worse). Bathroom controls Bigger than an airplane bathroom It was dark outside, so I couldn't see much of Poland beyond some scattered homes, buildings, and streetlights. Every so often, the train stopped briefly at a station as we inched closer to Ukraine. Polish customs began a little after 9:30 p.m., nearly four hours into the journey. A customs officer walked down the hall to check passports and clock us out of the European Union. The train didn't move for over an hour, but eventually, it started rolling again. Ten minutes later, I received a knock from an employee saying that we had reached Ukrainian customs. The couch functions as a bed More than one place to sleep Narrow hallways I handed over my passport to a Ukrainian soldier and got it back 30 minutes later with my long-awaited Ukrainian stamp. By this point, with the time change (Ukraine is one hour ahead of Poland), it was nearly 1 a.m., and I was super tired. Twenty minutes later, we entered a massive warehouse, where the train underwent preparation to switch from European tracks to the wider Ukrainian tracks built during the Soviet Union. Though Russia's army has struck train tracks and rail centers, Ukraine's rail lines have been surprisingly well maintained, with most trains running on schedule. The next hour was filled with the unenjoyable, piercing sounds of machinery and the coughing and snoring that penetrated the thin walls separating my room and the one next door. Closing in on Kyiv First sights of the Ukrainian capital city Stepping off at my stop For the next few hours after we finally got on our way again, our train zipped across the Ukrainian countryside. I was in and out of sleep, but when the sun rose, I gave up entirely and took my first view of the eastern European country out the window. As we approached the Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi station, the landscape slowly shifted from rural to urban, and we arrived in the Ukrainian capital just before 11 a.m. It was chilly and busy outside as I waited for a ride to my hotel. Stepping out onto the ordinary-looking concrete station, I reveled in the fresh air before it dawned on me that I still had the same 16-hour journey back to Warsaw to look forward to. Read the original article on Business Insider
The Independent
11-03-2025
- Business
- The Independent
The Waitrose offers to know, including an exclusive Caffè Nero discount
Waitrose's innovative food and drink (most recently, its croissant-shaped Easter egg has been making waves) and its everyday own-brand buys make it a go-to shopping destination for high-quality groceries and household essentials, and, there are usually a host of offers up for grabs. Whether you're ticking off your weekly shopping list or looking for some seasonal buys to celebrate spring, and the occasions that come with it (don't forget Mother's Day is on 30 March) there's often cash to be saved on your basket. Indeed, right now, you can get selected products for half price, from Olay skincare to Lindt chocolate bunnies. The supermarket has us covered when it comes to affordable Mother's Day gifting inspiration, as it's rounded up some low-cost presents such as long-stem roses, prosecco, candles and a variety of goodies that'll go down a treat if she has a sweet tooth, with prices starting from as little as £1. For all this and more, keep scrolling for the best Waitrose offers to know. One of our favourite deals right now is the fact you can refresh your wine rack ahead and save 25 per cent on six bottles or more when they're over £6. If it's in celebration of your mother figure and she's a fan of red, consider stocking up on Campo Viejo rioja tempranillo. If she's more of a cocktail connoisseur, sip on mojitos made with a selection of reduced spirits, including Johnnie Walker whisky and Roku Japanese gin. Meanwhile, bathroom essentials are seeing some of the best discounts. Colgate mouthwash (was £4.50, now £2.25), Oral-B whitening toothpaste (was £6, now £3), Lanolips hand cream and Nivea night cream are all half price. Shopping for kitchen essentials too? From toast toppings to chocolate, there's plenty to browse. There are also exclusive rewards to take advantage of. Fancy a coffee and a sandwich? You can get 25 per cent off a selection of Caffè Nero food and drink when you link your My Waitrose card in the Caffè Nero app, including the coffee chain's honey oat latte, honey, date and pecan porridge and mortadella ham and stracciatella flatbread. How we choose the best discount codes To bring you the best discount codes across our carefully selected line-up of shops, we have a crack team of bargain hunters on high alert. Where Waitrose and other supermarkets are concerned, we're constantly checking the website to find the best money-saving discount codes. We only ever highlight offers from our tried and tested favourite retailers and brands. The Independent has been a trusted consumer champion since 1986, reporting on behalf of our readers to find the best deals and discounts. Whether it's supermarket coverage, regular deals coverage or helping you source the top offers during some of the biggest annual shopping events (think Amazon Prime Day, Black Friday and the Boxing Day sales), our team are always looking out for the best ways to save you money on the products worth buying. We only ever select offers on the brands and retailers that we trust.
