Costa, KFC and Taco Bell: drive-thru and restaurant builds

The brief

Brand specification, and a date the doors have to open

National food and coffee brands do not commission buildings the way a developer does. The elevation, the materials, the colours and the drive-thru layout are all set by a brand design manual that the contractor is expected to hit exactly, and behind it sits an opening date that has already been advertised, staffed and stocked for. There is very little room to negotiate on either.

AJB Group has been building into that model since 2022 for a repeat private client, across Costa Coffee, KFC, Taco Bell and Starbucks units in Hemsworth, Northampton, Leeds, Tottenham and Wales. Two of them, Northampton and Wales, were not new buildings at all but conversions of buildings that had been sitting empty, which is a different problem again: you are working to a brand standard inside a shell that was never designed for it.

The work spans the whole carpentry side of these builds. External cladding to brand design, flat and warm roofs to get the shell watertight, first fix, shopfront rebuilds, hoarding and the drive-thru window openings themselves.

What we did

Hemsworth retail park: Costa and KFC

The first of these builds started on a bright and early February morning in 2022, bringing a brand new Costa and KFC to a retail park at Hemsworth. AJB Group was entrusted to clad the exterior of the building in Costa's new 2022 design.

The cladding was British red cedar, and the drive-thru section was the fiddly part. A drive-thru elevation is not a flat wall: it steps, returns and wraps around the service window and the canopy, and every one of those changes of plane is a place where the board coursing can go out. Cedar also has to be handled properly. It is a soft, resinous timber that marks easily, so it is fixed with the right fixings and set out so the visible face stays clean. It is worth the effort, because on a Costa the cedar cladding is the brand.

The renderers followed the cladding, and the team then moved on to the bulk of the building and the drive-thru window. The Costa drive-thru completed in April 2022 and the finished unit is the one on the retail park today.

Northampton: a nightclub turned into a KFC and Taco Bell

In June 2022 the team started an industrial project in Northampton town centre, turning a disused nightclub into a new KFC and Taco Bell restaurant.

The first task was making the building watertight: a GRP flat roof across the back, which is what allowed first fix to begin inside. A second warm roof followed at the end of that month, boarded in Celotex and finished in GRP. A warm roof puts the insulation above the deck rather than between the joists, which keeps the structure on the warm side of the insulation and is now the standard build-up for a commercial flat roof of this type. Getting both roofs in early is what turns a derelict shell into a workable site.

The frontage came later that year. In November the team was back in Northampton for a rip out and refit of the old nightclub doorway into the new front for Taco Bell and KFC in the centre of town. The existing windows, doors and signage display were taken out and temporary hoarding was put up in their place, so the elevation could be rebuilt to plan behind a secure line on a town centre street. The rebuild included false pillars and an entirely new stud and ply front, ready for opening the following week.

Wales: a Little Chef becomes a Starbucks drive-thru

In May 2025 the same client secured a Starbucks, and work began on a disused Little Chef with remedial roof works and a new flat roof section to form the drive-thru window. Converting a roadside restaurant into a drive-thru is mostly a question of what the existing structure can take: the remedial work comes first, then the new opening and the flat roof section over it.

Leeds and Tottenham

The same client relationship has also produced a Costa Coffee in Leeds and a Taco Bell in Tottenham, alongside a six storey apartment block in Tottenham where AJB Group hand cut the mansard roof and joist sets. Repeat work across a list like that is the reference that matters in this sector.