The struggling coffee chain has tapped Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol to be its new chairman and CEO, effective September 9. Starbucks’ stock soared more than 13% in premarket trading, while Chipotle’s dipped 8%.
Niccol has been leading the Mexican-inspired food chain since 2018, with Starbucks saying he has set “new standards in the industry and driven significant growth and value creation,” pointing to its revenue growing nearly 800% during his tenure.
Yes, true of most any national/international chain.
It’s because they value large volume, year round availability, and high consistency from their beans and roasts, so that no matter what location you go to it tastes exactly the same.
To do that, they select and blend several bland varieties of coffee bean, put them through an aggressive industrial cleaning and drying (which reduces the natural fruity and funky flavors but minimizes costs) then roast them in huge batches to several steps past where a normal roaster would stop for a given roast (a darker roast gets rid of more of the unique flavors of the coffee cherry and brings out more uniform roast flavors instead).
Again, not something exclusive to Starbucks at all, and plenty of small coffee shops don’t bother with the hassle and just buy cheap bulk coffee pre-roasted by large scale operations and will have similar results.
But man, when you get coffee made in small batches, with natural processing or even fermentation and gently roasted… It’s an entirely different experience.
It’s just weird that any chain would opt for consistently awful instead of just settling for slight variations. It’s also weird that people still buy it despite the fact it is objectively and consistently bad.
People who are going to Starbucks often aren’t drinking black coffee. They get some sugar, cream, and flavor combo such that the coffee is barely noticeable. It is coffee for people who don’t like coffee.
Any time you blend beans from different places together, you get a bland coffee. I don’t think any mega size coffee shop can ever beat locals just because scale demands won’t allow non-blended beans in the supply chain.