Which Czech city is a café capital? A comparison of 36 cities

In Czechia you can often hear that Brno is the café capital of the country. But sayings like this are often misleading. That's why we decided to end this discussion once and for all and use data science to bring you a comparison of 36 cities and define exactly which Czech city is a mecca for coffee lovers.

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Core Consumer Proposition for precise labelling

But we didn't just use traditional labelling system. Rather we chose to test our new SharpGrid Outlet Census filter called Core Consumer Proposition which indicates what is the outlet in question famous for. This approach is more precise than relying simply on the label "café", as some outlets’ names might be misleading. For example, there might be an outlet called “bistro” which actually specializes in coffee, is renowned throughout the surrounding area for it and most people actually consider the place to be a café. This way, we can pinpoint all the on-trade outlets focused mainly on coffee and correctly determine the number of coffe-heavy outlets in a given area.

We are using the Core Consumer Proposition in most of our research as we have found out it is much more precise in terms of correct outlet labelling than the traditional method using just the name of the outlet as a guide for determining to which category of outlets it belongs.

Therefore, working with this logic, we put together a ranking of Czech cities by the number of places per capita whose main consumer proposition is coffee. In other words, we answered the question "Which Czech city is a café capital?" In order to avoid bias, we have picked only cities with 30 000+ residents. See the results below.

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Cafés per 1000 city residents

České Budějovice is actually the only Czech city with at least 1 café per 1000 residents. All the other cities ended up below this threshold.

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Facts rule over assumptions

Surprised? That’s OK. Most people in our Linkedin poll voted for Prague, followed by Brno. As you can clearly see, Brno is indeed not the café capital of Czechia, but it ranked very high nevertheless. Apologies to all Brno enthusiasts! 

In terms of the total number of cafes, the results more or less replicate the size of cities. Prague came up first, Brno second and Ostrava third. By the way, when working with just the “café” tag, Olomouc ended up first. Brno was in second place, followed by Karlovy Vary and Prague.‍

All of this is possible thanks to the vast amount of digital data in the on-trade channel that we collect, process and interpret in many different ways. Do you like our comparison of 36 cities? Follow our Linkedin channel to get more insights like this or read one of the many articles on our blog.

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SharpGrid is a data & tech company reinventing market research in the on-trade channel. The on-trade channel consists of POSs (point of sale) where food & beverage is bought and consumed, and is often also called HoReCa, on-premise, food service, out-of-home, gastro or immediate consumption (IC) channel, hospitality, on-licence.