Every coffee in Britain, priced by the cup

Pack price divided by how many drinks the pack makes, at a fixed dose: 18g for whole bean and ground coffee, one capsule for pods, and 2g for instant. Declaring the dose matters, because halving it would halve every figure on the page.

Cheapest is a single number; value is that number against what you actually want to drink. Instant almost always wins on cost per cup because a 2g serving is far less coffee than an 18g espresso dose. The point of ranking by price is not to push you to the bottom of the market. It is to make sure that when you pay more, you know exactly what the premium is.

No. Figures are the product price as last fetched from the retailer, excluding delivery, which varies by basket size and address. On smaller packs, postage can easily exceed the difference between two coffees, so check it before you buy.

Every page renders from the latest stored price at the moment you load it, rather than a figure written into the page when it was published. Retail prices still move faster than any comparison site can follow, so the retailer's own page is the authority at the moment you buy.

Price per kilo only means something where there is a meaningful weight to divide by, so it is shown for beans, ground and instant. Pods are sold by capsule count rather than weight, which is why they are compared per cup instead.

On cost per cup, yes: that is the whole reason the unit exists. What it does not capture is the machine: a pod machine spreads £60 to £150 of hardware across its life, and a grinder does the same for beans. Where that changes the answer we say so in the guides rather than hiding it in the arithmetic.

No. The order is a plain sort on cost per cup, a figure we calculate ourselves. We earn affiliate commission when you buy through a link, and the cheapest coffee sorts to the top even when the cheapest retailer pays us nothing.