Starbucks to sell three kinds of flavored coffees in grocery stores

Starbucks ground coffee in vanilla, caramel and cinnamon flavors will show up in stores starting in June. "You can imagine that for a lot of coffee snobs, the thought of flavored coffee was a little challenging," says Tom Jones, Starbucks' director of beverage research and development. || Read "Starbucks to launch flavored coffee at grocers" || Read the press release || Jump to the second page of comments.

Comments

[Joey]

Hi Everyone,

Joey again. Just wanted to let everyone know that our song "Tall Grande or Venti has surpassed 10,000 views today and if you like it we would appreciate it if you shared it with your friends.

We are truly starbucks addicts and do not work for SB in any way.

We are a bunch of creatives that got bored and made a rap video. :)

www.addicted2coffee.com

[black apron boy]

Sorry about the spelling. I posted from my IPHONE! haha. The post wasn't meant to be condescending, but it was meant to kick all those baristas in the butt who think that products, like VIA or these flavored coffee, make them any less of a barista or what not. We’re not in the coffee business serving people. We’re in the people business serving coffee." I care about the connections I make everyday that enrich our customers lives, not about the latte with 20 pumps of classic that we all grimace at. Without customers, we don't exist. Expanding peoples horizons by any means, is a good thing! What ever happened to being welcoming, caring, considerate, knowledgeable, and involved? Who cares if we start selling waffles or SIren sized beverages? People want flavored coffees and we should be there and recognize that profitability is essential to our success! HA for old guiding principles!

[SteezybaristaCO]

Its just coffee, you all need to get over yourselves and your principles and stuff. Its JUST coffee...a cup of dirty water. Its foolish to get so emotional over this stupid stuff. Its just a job, its just coffee. You get paid your wages to do your job. Do it, have a good time with your co-workers, go home and live your life.

Its JUST coffee. It doesn't effect you nearly as much as you seem to think.

[baristafail]

I do hope you find a new job there buddy

[black apron boy]

I second that.. During my whole rant,I just kept saying. " It's just coffee." Seriously!

[me, myself and I]

I wonder what was wrong with flavouring it afterwards with syrup. I don't mind flavoured coffee, but it was always nice to know to have a good coffee and you add some flavour. Now you'll never know what beans they put in there (kind of like Pike) before they kill their original taste with a flavour.
I agree, cheaper beans and eventually robusta beans can't be far. After all, Italians drink a lot of robusta. Here you have your reasoning for the marketing campaign.

[RTS]

I was on the dev team for the flavoured coffee and tasted all three kinds. its actually really good.

[Coffee Soldier]

Just got a text from a partner working at my store now the natrual infusion tasting kit just arrived! Can't wait until I get in at 2 to test them out! I did find it interesting that although ground for a paper filter we are to try it with a french press in stores (obviously they don't want vanilla going into the urns) but that seems to completely contradict the GRIND section of coffee training of brewing a quality pot....I'm going to bring my home brewer into work today test it instead so we can get a more accurate taste!

[Joe]

This sentence is the only thing that is keeping me from jumping on the "woe is Starbucks!" bandwagon:

"Unlike flavored coffee where scents are traditionally sprayed onto beans, Starbucks' roasters ground botanicals in with the arabica beans to create by subtle flavors that don't overwhelm the coffee taste."

Starbucks isn't just selling the usual flavored coffee here.

[RTS]

Exactly Joe, I have tasted them, they're great. There is nothing artificial in them, and even the packaging (at least the packaging proposed at the time) is worthy of the Starbucks name.

Starbucks is just taking the next step and expanding into already existing markets but making the product better. We expanded into instant coffee, and VIA is the best there is, and now, flavoured coffee is going to be taken by us.

[dcstateofmind]

OMFG...how embarrassing.

[Waltie]

So let me get this straight... a coffee company is going to try selling a different variety of coffee? Sounds like another non-story to me that is for whatever reason being passed off as another sign of the apocalypse.

It's a kind of coffee. We sell coffee. Any arguments against flavored coffee, in my opinion, is nothing more than snobbery. If you don't like it, don't buy it. But don't look down or assume you are superior to people who will buy it. It's not the end of the world or a sign that the company is failing in their ethics. It's just another kind of coffee.

[spence]

Aha. They've found a way to use all those Via beans. Excellent. Now stop making me sell them, please.

[Will]

I'm sorry, maybe I missed it, but is it going to be crappy PPR beans?

[MidnightBlend]

Wow! I ususally get a chuckle from listening to all of you whining about Starbucks for one reason or another. Listen, if you don't like Starbucks: QUIT! No one is forcing you to stick around, and frankly I think the company would be better off without you. Furthermore, how would you be running the company in Howard's shoes? I'll give you the answer: you wouldn't be running the company because it would have gone out of business a long time ago. The man turned it around in a changing economy and I say "bravo!" Go ahead, keep on crying about how Howard said we'd never do this or that. YOU'VE never sworn that you wouldn't do something and ultimately turned around and done it, right? Especially when the future of your company was on the line. Howard made decisions that affected us all, including myself. My store closed and I was given an opportunity to rejoin after a year. I've never been happier. Is Starbucks a perfect company? No, of course not. Leadership makes mistakes (just like all of us) and will continue to do so. It's how we learn. You all realize that every company in the world does things that they swore they wouldn't and change when the economy requires it, right? People, seriously, you have to know that what we were doing may have been awesome, fun, pure or whatever, but it wasn't realistic in terms of long-term sustainability of the company. You all fail to recognize that Starbucks does a great deal of good in the world. If you like the "home grown" coffee shops so much, why don't you work there instead? Oh, that's right! They're not around anymore because they refused to change! So sad. When it comes down to hurting the brand, it isn't VIA or flavored coffee that's doing it... it's people like you. So please, get out and stop ruining it for those of us that still love the company.

[spence]

Midnight Blend is right.

[javagirl666]

We are to sample and discribe these to customers?? Using labor so that they can purchase a pound at the market? Brilliant!

[MidnightBlend]

@Javagirl666: The samples aren't for customers. They're just for partners who want to try the coffee. Get all your information before you decide to call something "brilliant."

[javagirl666]

Oh, im sorry..I thought I read that the samples were so partners could speak to it when customers had questions. My bad! When did everyone on here become so nasty?

[usorthem3]

When Howard returned and the Mission Statement put beans above all else, it became about the commodity of coffee or money before partners, customers, integrity. I said that whole beams would not be in the corporate stores by 2015, I'd like to change that to 2013 if I could, time keeps on slipping, slipping, into the future and your looking at it folks.

On a totally different selfish note, Any input would be processed. On a 3 person deployment according to the new OVEN instructions that we received. I, me, 1 person am supposed to from 7am till 830am be the Shift/floater/WARM/R2/B2/CB1 all of that from one person doing 55 trans actions @1/2 hour? Does the math work out for anyone, because that IMO is some pretty JACKED up stuff(see I didn't swear). I mean what kind of attention other than moving like a mad man trying to think of the 10 different things per second are the customers recieving after standing in line for five minutes? Do you think this "WONDERFUL" new STARBUCKS flavored coffee is going to get the labor back in the stores??????????? F to the U to K to the C NO, it won't. The loyal CORE customers are going the way of the core Coffees that used to be listed on a wonderful hand painted board and lined the walls of the stores. Maybe that explains the caliper of customers we see daily that are defintely not there because of a "PREMIUM COFFEE". Howard, your book can wait, WAKE UP! Pay attention and you can get this right. If not then what you built as an EMPIRE will be seen as a joke, oh yea, they did that joke in "Idiocracy". Remember?

[yeano]

midnightblend, do you think anyone will actually read your rant?

[MidnightBlend]

@yeano: You did. The sad thing is that it wasn't a rant. You all have the right to feel the way you want to about anything. Free country and all. It's simply a question: if you hate the company and all it stands for these days, why are you sticking around? Whether you're a customer or a partner, the question remains the same.

@Javagirl666: I'm sincerely not a nasty guy, but you've got to agree with me in some sense here. All this complaining. What is it really doing? I don't know about you, but if I don't like something I find a way to get out of it. I don't like McDonalds so I don't eat or work there. However, I don't jump on a gossip board and flame them for their business model. I simply avoid the business.

[Sheik]

@ Helena Handbasket "Sheik, you MUST be kidding. "

LOL, No. Sheik was DRUNK when he posted that

!!! :)

[SBsmooth]

Oh my god, people get over yourselves. Starbucks is a corporation whose sole interest is to increase the bottom line. If they did anything wrong, it is that they created a narrative that they weren't. well that's all it was, a narrative. this is reality. remember when howard said in Pour Your Heart Into It that we'd never franchise? well look what happened, licensed stores are highly profitable and therefore irresistible. You work for a corporation in a capitalist system, is that so surprising? Stop drinking the koolaid and you'll stop being disappointed!

[Is it so hard to be civil]

I didn't think starbucks could find a new way to get away from the core values. WOW. This is a new low.

[Seattle_Pete]

I don't understand why so many are surprised that Starbucks is going away from its core values. As a publicly traded company Starbucks' legal responsibility is to making a profit for their shareholders. Unfortunately that means that Starbucks is doing things it said it would never do, but is anyone surprised? Someone would have to be pretty foolish to believe a promise from a corporation.

BTW, here is the ingredient lists for the caramel and vanilla flavor respectively.

Ground coffee, Natural Flavor (with Corn Maltodextrin, Butter [Milk]), Licorice Root, Dehydrated Orange Peel, Ground Cinnamon, Ground Nutmeg

Ground coffee, Natural Flavor (with Corn Maltodextrin, Vegetable Glycerin), Ground Vanilla Beans, Indian Sarsaparilla root

[Manny]

Tom Would never work for this company again. Do you guys remember Tom from the starbucks experience video.

[Formerista]

The thing that gets me most upset is that Howard can sit up in his office claiming to be taking the company 'back to basics' while allowing for crap like this to show its face. NEVER would the Starbucks I used to work for have even THOUGHT about putting out a flavored coffee. It seems that this company is daily sacrificing its ideals and acting in ways that directly oppose what made the company such a great success in the first place. So much for the days of caring about the product (not to mention the employees... but that was thrown out the window long ago). Needless to say, I am very disappointed.

[SM Since 2000]

I tried the flavored coffees today. Maybe it was the fact the samples are ground for drip (?), and we are instructed to press them (??), but I really thought they weren't very good. I'll chalk it up to improper brewing for now, and reserve judgement for later.

It's the nuances and details that make/have made this job great for the last ten years. Communicating and explaining the differences in our coffees to customers should be a key fundemental of our job. Coming out with grocer specific products makes that part of our job just a bit more tedious. I still have regular customers that believe our core WB coffees are flavored- now we really do have flavored offerings. I'm ok with that. But I can no longer flat out say, "We don't offer flavored coffees." And everytime I have to reverse a course I've taken consistently over ten years, (skinny, no brew machines) it's irritating.
Understand that I value my stock options, understand the potential in the instant and flavored coffee market segments, and see the value added through some of the changes made in the last few years.
Some partners really cling to certain details of this job, and they're passionate almost to a fault, but their passion is part of what makes them great partners, who go above and beyond for a low income hourly job. When their faith is shaken, even by the most inane change- they're potentially disengaged. And it's the partners that create the experience. The difference between some of my best and worst partners over the years is staggering. Anytime I have to rein my great partners back in because of a sudden shift or dramatic mothership directed change, is time I would rather (and should) be doing anything else. I think upper management doesn't always consider how hard we have to work to retain talent. A brief memo or letter from Howard isn't always enough to ease the shock.

End of the world? No.

[inkedmuse]

we got our kit today. i havn't tried it, and im not looking forward to it. lately, my job has left me very worn out and im not sure just yet that i'm ready to handle another kick from behing.

@northwest
you think via actually effected your stock? it could've been poop in a packet, and it would have been the same outcome. if your manager tells you to sell poop in a packet or your getting written up, you find a way to make packet poop the greatest thing in the world. we all know the details, and im not getting into them here. but if you think the "numbers" on via represent anything other than the transfer of corporate fraud to a "transparent" company with barista accountability, you are horribly mistaken.

[SBsmooth]

@sm since 2000,
you sound like a very thoughtful SM, who has stuck it out for a long time. But the talent that has up and quit, as you well know, has also been retail salaried folks who are supposed to set the tone for the whole store. So managers are leaving in droves and there's a real leadership vacuum. It used to be that barista turnover was monitored, now barista turn is more stable than SM, DM and RD turn in my immediate experience. We have new leaders without the wisdom of their predecessors and the partner experience has been damaged more than the customer experience. But now that the emperor has no clothes, here we are. It takes all the talent of those that just care about keeping their store running smoothly to keep the machine going and keep the customers from understanding just how freaky things are on the other side of their cup.

[is it so hard to be civil]

10 of the 24 partners have left my store in the last month and a half. All 3 shifts have just stepped down. Our ASM is trying to get or SM fired. Our SM has done a terrible job with the new hires. It is hell. I'm applying for a new job today.

[Cig Butts In Cracks]

This is the death knell.

[javagirl666]

Tried it today..maybe it was the brew method, but, yeah..not great.

[BAYAREABUX]

Has anyone tried it with Pour Over? I would think that would be closer to the true taste than a press.... and the idea of putting flavored coffee in a french press makes me want to barf...

SM Since 2000, quite an usually thoughtful comment for this site. Well said.

[anonymousie]

Starbucks main problem these days is connection or a disconnection with partners, not the flavoring their coffee. Starting with the cutting of labor 2 weeks before Christmas in 2008, all loyalty was lost. What started to actually sink the ship was Hours Optimization and then, the final blow to the bow was VIA and how SBC began pounding partners over the head with expectation, fear of corrective action for not selling the product, and an ungodly focus on everything but the partner experience.

This business about Starbucks selling flavored coffee doesn't really bother me, what bothers me is Starbucks continued ignoring of their partners and how over worked every district is, no room to breath, more platforms, less people, no room to expand diversity...profit, profit, profit.

Until SBC can begin addressing the great divide between corporate and store partner, this ship will remain at the bottom of the ocean, no matter how profitable the company as a whole is.

[jabanga]

anything for a buck. anyone remember the mission statement? oh, that's right, they changed it...

[JULIO 11]

Hey guys
I dont agree with the natural flavor coffees but can you think how much money the comapany would make if become a hit.
I just dont want to brew at the store
Also we shold be the leaders on coffee and we are reacting to the other coffee company who buy robusta beans and hide the poor quality with flavor
I tryed it yestarday its weak coffee flavor but the cinnamon was really strong
I REALLY dont like flavor coffees but I know lots of customers the would really enjoy it
Also how much this will affect our bean sale at the stores
any idea?

[Sophie]

God i love starbucks!!!!