LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 7, 2026--
Blank Street UK Limited reported turnover of £58.9 million for the year ended 31 December 2025, up 70.7% on the prior year, with operating profit increasing almost threefold to £4.6 million (2024: £1.6 million).
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Growth was led by stronger demand at existing stores, driven by new signature and seasonal drinks across the matcha and coffee menus, with matcha continuing to lift afternoon sales. Blank Street built on that momentum with 12 new stores across London, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Leeds, each designed around a more elevated in-store experience, doubling the number of UK cities it trades in from three to six, and bringing it to 50 stores in the UK.
Looking ahead, Blank Street will keep investing in what has worked: product quality and innovation, a carefully curated brand, and thoughtfully chosen new stores and cities, each built around a premium, elevated in-store experience.
About Blank Street
For many people, getting a coffee or matcha is the most important part of the day. It's a moment of respite, a tonesetter, a break with friends. Blank Street believes that this moment, however brief it may be, should feel extraordinary.
The brand continuously seeks to raise the bar on quality, design, and experience. Every choice Blank Street makes, from each individual store's design, to ingredient sourcing, to beverage presentation, and the Insiders program, is in service of creating an experience for its customers that is worth traveling for day after day.
In August 2020, Blank Street launched its first store, a tiny coffee cart nestled in the garden of the Wythe Diner in Williamsburg. Since then, Blank Street has opened over 100 shops across the US and UK, serving specialty classics and signature drinks to its guests worldwide.
Blank Street, Gracechurch Street, London
STOCKHOLM (AP) — Scientists Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai won the Nobel Prize in chemistry Wednesday for untangling mysterious mirror images in molecules, a discovery that has been used to develop countless drugs and transformed modern medicine.
Many molecules come in versions that look alike but are not exactly identical, like right and left hands. One mirror image of the chemical carvone smells like mint, for example, while the other has a whiff of caraway, a spice often used in rye bread.
Even life itself prefers one mirror image over the other. DNA twists to the right, and the proteins in human bodies are made of mostly left-handed building blocks.
Versions of the same molecule can behave differently when interacting with other chemicals. When designing drugs to treat diseases, scientists want to be choosy about which mirror image they get. They want the version of a molecule to treat a cold, not one that will make the sniffles worse.
Kagan, who is from France, and Soai, from Japan, found ways to make chemistry pick a side, designing and manipulating reactions to produce the desired mirror image.
“This is probably the coolest experiment in organic chemistry,” said Peter Somfai, a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry. “Taken together, the groundbreaking discoveries by Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have reshaped our understanding of molecular chirality,” a term that comes from the Greek word for “hand.”
Scientists paid tribute to Kagan and Soai's work, which the Nobel committee described as a feat never previously achieved by anyone “other than life itself.”
“It might be difficult to say that this drug, or that drug, was developed using this,” Somfai said. “I would say all of them, because we use this as a tool, we use this as an understanding, how to develop catalysts, how they function.”
In the 1980s, Kagan’s work showed there might be a way to design reactions to produce one form of a molecule over the other. Years later, Soai perfected the process. He created the first-ever chemical reaction to efficiently produce only one of a molecule’s mirror images, in what’s now known as the Soai reaction.
“The medicines we have today would not be possible without this chemistry,” said Rigoberto Hernandez, president of the American Chemical Society.
Kagan, 95, is affiliated with the Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France. Soai, 76, is affiliated with the Tokyo University of Science.
The French Academy of Sciences, of which Kagan is a member, congratulated the two scientists and expressed its pride in the prize.
Neither the Université Paris-Sud nor the Tokyo University of Science immediately responded to requests for comment from The Associated Press.
“I’m very excited to receive the very nice news,” Soai told the committee and journalists by phone. “Of course this is one of the most exciting days in my life.”
He said he was shopping near his home when he was reached by the Nobel committee.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winner in Stockholm.
Last year, three scientists won the chemistry Nobel for their development of new molecular structures that can trap vast quantities of gas inside, laying the groundwork to potentially suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere or harvest moisture from desert environments.
This year's prizes began with the Nobel for medicine, awarded Monday to three scientists whose work led to a tool that uses light to help unravel how the brain works. The physics award Tuesday recognized a scientist's efforts to demystify a rare group of neutrinos.
The literature prize is set to be awarded Thursday. After Friday’s peace prize is awarded, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced Monday.
The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), whether for an individual, a small group of laureates or an organization.
This story has been corrected to clarify that Kagan, not Soai, is 95.
Ramakrishnan reported from New York. Dazio reported from Berlin. Associated Press journalists Alexa St. John in Detroit, Catherine Gaschka in Paris and Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo contributed to this report.
AP Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes
Japanese chemist Kenso Soai, who won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, leaves home for a press conference, in Shiki, Saitama prefecture, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (Kyodo News via AP)
Japanese scientist Kenso Soai, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, leaves home for a press conference, in Shiki, Saitama prefecture, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026. (Kyodo News via AP)
Portraits of Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai are shown on the screen as they are awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 7, 2026. Photo: (Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency via AP)
Portraits of Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai are shown on the screen as they are awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, on Oct. 7, 2026. Photo: (Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency via AP)
FILE - A close-up view of a Nobel Prize medal at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Md., Dec. 8, 2020. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
